My parents are from India and and think AS is BS

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I somewhat agree with your mom with the over-labeling in US. My son is currently in US school and I feel emotional bullying from the system trying to change him and us trying to fit. Where I come from (Europe) kid can end up in special ed only if he has serious learning deficit or violence issues. In US, any child who looks like AS will get special ed or services at least. So they are trying to change him even that is highly unlikely and totally unnecessary. For me school needs to deal with academics and they have no right to change kids personalities.
It is a very deceiving system where they are claiming they only want to help him but instead pick on him try to change him even when he doesn't want to change. These people claim that a child can not be happy and successful if he doesn't learn to behave as NT which is absloute rubbish. The system here is plagued with the scare of AS diagnosis and out of the fear, children are not given time to develop and find their own way in society. I heard lots of stories from immigrant people where they transfer kids to private schools (immigrant ones) after having problems with public schools and after 3-4 years when kids grow up , they transfer back to public ones without problems.

We did try US system with US special ed and from our experience it only messed up things more. Of course, this depends on a child but we made a commitment to avoid them at all cost.

Regarding the beating and those things, that sounds terrible and we don't have any of those where I come from. However I don't think your mom would let you endure those things, I mean she didn't employ that at home. Probably she is just frustrated with the whole problem so she was just saying harsh things.

Show her a set of graphical comparisons between Indian and American literacy rates. By this, I mean you should put it on a big piece of posterboard, corporate style. Insist on having it displayed somewhere in the house. Don't pitch up an argument. Don't invite her to discuss it. Just let the numbers do the talking.

That said, I am not wholly against her either. I think that the American education system tends to go too far in cosseting students and doesn't do enough to drive them to do well. On the other hand, emotionally disturbed students often are the way they are because they come from abusive backgrounds, and they have never been taught ways of handling people other than being cruel, manipulative or mean. Unlike students who need to have more piss and vinegar thrashed into them, the troubled youth need help at being nice.

I can see how neither was likely to be appropriate in your case. I think that people with AS related problems need a unique type of handling, and it cannot be understood in terms of either "more gentle" or "more strict."

If I could go back in time and talk to all of my old teachers, I would tell them, "I am sorry. I know I can be bright with book stuff, but I really am absolutely and utterly dense and thick-headed in some ways. I wish there were a nicer way I could say it, but I truly am a total boob." If they had understood this simple point, it would have been effortless for them to deal with me. They wouldn't have liked me very much anyway, but they would have known how to handle me. And I would have gotten over being a boob eventually.

That's sad, and not limited to those from India. However I will say that India immigrants in the USA, value education as supreme. I know many Indian people here, who have worked hard to accomplish great things as young people. Especially in the medical field. The top surgeons and researchers all seem to be Indian.

I think your parents were afraid that AS had some bad consequences in your ability to advance in education, but in fact I believe it just causes us to require alternate forms of study. Many AS people, and High-Functioning Autistics are in the genius level in IQ, and are simply not afforded the right tools to use the brainpower correctly. You might cite to your parents such successful Americans as Thomas Edison, who clearly to me was autistic, and he dropped out of the 5th grade to pursue his interests and to begin to plant the seeds of his abilities, if I recall accurately what I read. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is AS, although a few people might debate that.

My wife has a nephew; age 2, who is somewhere on the Spectrum between high-functioning and medium-functioning. He does not speak much, and fails to make eye contact, and despises any kind of touching or approaching by others. His parents deny vehemently that anything is amiss, but that attitude will guarantee two things: The child will grow up thinking he is faulty for being unable to please his parents, and his parents will go insane before they admit their perfect bloodline might not be so perfect. It would equate to someone denying their child insulin therapy if the child is diabetic, because the parents don't want to believe that THEIR family could convey diabetes. Very short-sighted and selfish, and even criminal in my view.

Charles

Hi AllieKat. Other than ethnicity & age, we have some striking similarities. 1. I am a native Californian born in the early 60s. 2. My parents were really harsh to me growing up. I was burned with cigarettes, beaten, screamed at, my dad threatened to kill me, etc. All because I wasn't what they expected me to be. I think they thought they could literally beat my issues out of me. Did it work? No, but it sure left me with a lot of emotional scars & trust issues. 3. I suspect that I have Aspergers. I test very high on the online tests & it makes sense as I have had few friends over my lifetime. I also still have trouble socializing.

I was also bullied by my peers...sometimes large groups of them. I guess they thought they could also make me change through physical abuse. It made me leery of kids my age. I learned to live in my head & had quite the fantasy world that no one else was invited to.

I learned to prefer pets over people. At least they never judge or get angry about stuff I don't understand.


Tomboy

Totally different cultures.
In those sorts of places, the "conforming" your mother (and other parents) is speaking of is actually "forced repression."

I swear, some of these kids are really going to start snapping over there...

In the US, teachers have a strong union. They will literally do ANYTHING to prevent docking teachers for being incompetent. if not for that, many might punish students severely because, if they don't do their job, kids might not learn. That might lower the average, and cause them to be fired or have their pay lowered.

Thank you for all your responses. After reading your postings, I'm thinking it might be generational more than cultural. It seems that those Aspies who are older than me (who grew up in the 1960s or earlier) may have been treated as harshly as the kids with hidden disabilities in India. I also got a private message from a very nice gentleman who lives in India who has a son who was diagnosed with AS by a psychologist in Bangalore and attends a Montessori School that does NOT allow any kind of physical punishment whatsoever. So things in India are changing as well.

As for the link that I posted about those poor helpless children being beaten to death and serious injury, I don't think anything like this could have happened in the U.S. in my generation (1980s) but maybe it did here in back in the 1950- no, they wouldn't kill a child for not doing their homework but maybe an undiagnosed Aspie child got occasionally beaten to death for having a meltdown at school.

The bottom line is I'm going to stop dwelling on culture and focus on other AS issues.

Thanx for your insights again,

Allie Kat

I

tomboy4life--

I was subjected to the same harshness in my upbringing as you, minus the cigarette burns, but my mother had other unethical methods of punishment. I'm still trying to correct my mental issues, hatred, and confusion which stemmed from her (and my step-father)'s negligence, abuse, and favoritism towards "their" children. Sadly, they still refuse that there was an underlying problem which caused my misbehavior-- to them I was a bad child. My own mother to this day refuses to even contact me on holidays and my birthday, ignores my attempt to contact her even. It's hard. Today was my thirty-second birthday too, and the FIRST year I DIDN'T try to contact her. Her belief is ADHD is a fallacy (I was diagnosed at age twenty as she refused to have me evaluated for a condition she didn't believe was genuine even though my school and paternal family pressured her to have me evaluated).
Sometimes a parent is just incapable to accept the fact that they are capable of producing something so dramatically different than themselves.