To NTs/ASDs with ASD/NT siblings:

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Hi, I'm NT, I just joined today.

I want to start this out by saying that I don't intend to be rude or insensitive, and I'm incredibly sorry if I come off as either.

I've noticed a lot of resources for parents of children with autism, but I've seen a lot less for the NT siblings of people diagnosed with ASD. As my signature lays out, I have two siblings who fall on the spectrum, on opposite ends. I also have three other sisters-- one older and two who are the same generation as the girl with Asperger's.

Now, this is relevant because I'm trying to write a book about the ways that growing up with a severely autistic brother has affected me, and how the little sister seems to affect my other younger sisters. I've tried doing some research here and there (between my "real" job and sleeping), but I haven't found much. So far, it appears that NT siblings of ASD kids are more prone to depression and stress and mature much more quickly, and also have some trouble connecting with peers, all of which I believe describe me.

So, moving on, the reason I'm posting here is because I'm curious about how others may feel affected. So let me put this together, I suppose.

For ASDs with NT siblings
- Are you diagnosed? What's your diagnosis?
- What is your relationship with your NT siblings like?
- In what ways do you think a NT sibling may have influenced you?
- Have you ever had feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc.?
- In what ways do you think your relationship may be different from a relationship between two NT siblings?
- Do you feel closer to your NT siblings than to most NT people in your family?

For NTs with ASD siblings
- Have you been checked for ASD? Do you feel that you exhibit any of the symptoms, perhaps as a result of growing up with someone with ASD?
- What is your relationship with your ASD siblings like?
- In what ways do you think an ASD sibling may have influenced you?
- Have you ever had feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc.?
- In what ways do you think your relationship may be different from a relationship between two NT siblings?
- Do you feel that you understand your ASD sibling more than most NT members of your immediate family? (Better than parents, maybe?)

I think that's about it, but anything else that can be added would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Yes, I am diagnosed with moderate classic autism.

I have two older brothers. I have a good relationship with one, and am completely estranged from the other one.

I don't know how having an NT sibling influenced me.

I occasionally felt inferior to my oldest brother because he is so smart, and I can never amount to him. I have never felt inferior of my other brother because he is a jerk and always has been. I don't think I am superior per se, but I do look down on him because of things that he has done to me, as well as the endless poor decisions he has made and continues to make in his life.

I don't think there is any hope for me and the middle brother regardless of whether I am ASD. The strain in our relationship came because of things HE did not me. As for my other brother, I am really not sure. I do not find it easy to put myself in other situations. This was my lot, and this is all I know. I think if I was NT though, I would have had fewer meltdowns and fewer misunderstandings, so maybe we would be a bit closer. Probably not by much.

For ASDs with NT siblings
- Are you diagnosed? What's your diagnosis?
Well, I have Aspergers, and I'm diagnosed.
- What is your relationship with your NT siblings like?
I think it's pretty average, occasional bickering, etc.
- In what ways do you think a NT sibling may have influenced you?
We're both separate people, so we don't really influence each other.
- Have you ever had feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc.?
Not really. I'm sure my sister has, though.
- In what ways do you think your relationship may be different from a relationship between two NT siblings?
Well, my sister and I both think differently. There's a start.
- Do you feel closer to your NT siblings than to most NT people in your family?
Not really. All my family members are equally loved.

First off, I believe that there are probably fewer resources for NT siblings because I think parents are far more likely to want to research the condition. I think it is nice to see a sibling here.

Oh, first of all, I have one sister who is 1.5 years older than I am. I noticed that wasn't one of your questions.



No diagnosis. I have told my parents, and my mother might have discussed the issue with my sister, but I honestly don't know. My sister, amusingly, seems to have self-diagnosed ADHD-inattentive.



Weird. She was either fighting with me over the smallest things or extremely nice. She apparently got very involved in teaching me how to read when I was little (she also tried to teach me how to play the flute once, but I really wasn't open to it). She sometimes helped me during my school years. I think there were times she really couldn't stand me, especially when she was going through puberty (she was pretty difficult). She said some fairly mean things. Now, it seems to have finally matured into a normal relationship, though she is still quite jealous.



She was my big sister. She made me try out a number of things that I would not have done otherwise.



Towards my sister? I have always felt a bit inferior to her regarding her ability to get into a romantic relationship. For the rest, we are fairly competitive but our paths have diverged so much that there is little reason for those feelings anymore.



It does not seem to be particularly different. I know there are some very good sibling relationships and some very bad ones.



No, not really. My sister means a lot to me, but there are a number of direct family members beyond my parents with whom I have better relationships.

Oh, I can also add this thought:



Yes. And she is correct in this. This point was driven home when we were at her place and I wanted to play Guitar Hero (which I had never done before). Someone first tried to explain it to me in words, but I had a lot of trouble with the concept. So, with my parents protesting, my sister took the guitar and showed me how it was done. It was a weird realisation to see that my sister understood the way I learned better than my parents.

Also, of all the people in the world, my sister is the one I least understand. She sometimes seems to not get that my self-depreciating jokes are not serious. She can be nice. She can be an absolute pain. Her moods are as whimsical and ever-changing as the weather. Some people send confusing signals, but they are soft. My sister just sends either massively positive or massively negative signals.

- Are you diagnosed? What's your diagnosis?
Asperger's Syndrome

- What is your relationship with your NT siblings like?
With my younger brother: Bad. I don't like him much, even though he does nice things on occasion, because he often does nasty things I don't understand.
With my older brother: good. He's fairly patient with me, it probably helps that he is nine years older and doesn't live with us.

- In what ways do you think a NT sibling may have influenced you?
I don't know. My older brother is an inspiration, but my younger brother is a pest. I think living with him might have made me less trusting and shorter tempered.

- Have you ever had feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc.?
Yes, both of those.

- In what ways do you think your relationship may be different from a relationship between two NT siblings?
I have no idea. My younger brother often says that he doesn't understand what he's done to annoy me, but I think he is lying and just says that to get out of hot water. Maybe we'd get on better if we understood each other.

- Do you feel closer to your NT siblings than to most NT people in your family?
No, I feel further away from them. My younger brother is probably the person I am furthest from in my family up and down from grandparents, except maybe the adults on my mum's side.

On another note, when I had to have a visit from one of the mental health services recently, the worker in question gave us a leaflet for my brother to read (it was for "siblings of disabled children"). I read it, and most of it was about what to do with a terminally ill sibling.

For ASDs with NT siblings
- Are you diagnosed? What's your diagnosis? Yes; Asperger's Syndrome.
- What is your relationship with your NT siblings like? Great. Tied for closest relationship I've had and lifelong.
- In what ways do you think a NT sibling may have influenced you? Well she's not prone to depression so she bounces back from things and that's a positive influence to have around. Also she is more social and gets me out of the house when I'm being a hermit.
- Have you ever had feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc.? Inferiority cause she started dating at 12/13 and I (kind of) started dating this year at 25. So extreme jealousy that I kept hidden til this year. Also it's so easy and non-stressful for her to find and keep a job compared to me and I'm jealous of the money she makes.
- In what ways do you think your relationship may be different from a relationship between two NT siblings? I think we may be closer than average siblings cause in a way we're both the older sibling who takes care of the other. I'm chronologically older but she's social-maturity-wise older so it's a more equal, twin-like siblingship.
- Do you feel closer to your NT siblings than to most NT people in your family? I think everyone in my family qualifies as being on the BAP. My sister isn't technically NT since she has ADD but she functions extremely well so for the purposes of this survey I'm considering her NT. But everyone in the family has their quirks and generally tries to accept each other's.

Diagnosed with Asperger's after both my sister and I were out of the house.



Very indifferent. We rarely interact. When we were younger we'd bicker and such, but as we grew older it grew to just ignoring each other. She was really frustrated at me just ranting about things when I'd go back to visit from college until she left for college as well.

At this point most of our interactions is me helping her with homework if something comes up that I know more about than she does, as I'm better with homework help than my parents are.



People learned early that I excelled at logic puzzles, math, and facts, but had difficulties with interacting with other people. My 4th grade teacher realized this and started having me present how to solve the daily logic puzzles once a week knowing that that would make me learn more than what he was teaching the others in the puzzles.

The same thing applied with my sister. As I'm two years older than her, and was more interested in learning than anything social, I ended up with the raw knowledge she needed for school. Once she was willing to interact with me in such a setting, I ended up helping her with homework. This required me to work on how to explain things to people who think differently than me, even if only factually.

I've ended up, through that and other experiences, really strong at explaining academic things to people who think drastically different than me. It's definitely helped my ability as a tutor.



Not so much inferiority or superiority, but a lot of not understanding, and not actually wanting to be a friend of hers.



I've not watched a relationship between two NT siblings, however I know that my sister and I are one of the most distant sets of siblings I've known of.



Not at all. I feel farther away from her. She's all girly and weird. I feel closest to my mom, who's the one who's closest to the spectrum though she's still solidly only on the far edge of BAP.

I have no official diagnosis, but I strongly believe that I have AS. I have one NT sister who is four years younger than me (she's 13). When we were younger our relationship was almost too stereotypical to be believable. For the most part, we hated each other. There was a huge amount of sibling rivalry going on. Occasionally we did play together, but that was only because I was able to bring her into my world.

But things are different now. As we became older it was obvious that we're just too different. She's always either reading some trendy book like Twilight or whatever garbage it is, or she's going to the mall with a friend. She has at least 5 close friends right now, at times I could count as many as 20. I haven't made a friend since I was her age. I really only have one friend, my older cousin. Even then, most of our communication is through the internet.

I rarely ever talk to her anymore. The only time I see her is when we're eating, or if we're going somewhere. She's always trying to tell some stupid story or something, and I just tell her to shut up, and that nobody cares. Occasionally she'll try to make fun of me and my asocial personality, but I think she knows better than to do that. In some ways I really just don't care. I'm me, and she is whoever she wants to be. While we are worlds apart, I don't think that's totally because of AS. I mean, how much would a NT 17 year old male have in common with a NT 13 year old girl?

I would say that my aspieness really didn't affect our relationship. We're both considered to be smart kids in school. We both have things we could talk about for hours. The only real difference between us is that she's really social and extroverted, while I am not. I never really got any extra attention for being "special" as a kid. If anything, my sister is the kid that my parents wanted, not me.

In fact, I didn't even know about AS until a few months ago. I know my mom knows about it, but I'm not even sure about my dad and sister. I don't talk about it.

Oh, and there's one last thing I'll say. I'm glad I have AS. It's helped me be able to skip around a lot of social crap that I can't wait for my sister to try and deal with.

OK, first off, I'm 22 (still living at home) and my brother is 14. I'm not sure he's NT (he's very quirky and has significant skill scatter, but doesn't seem to meet criteria for anything) but he's certainly not autistic.

PDD NOS, diagnosed at the age of 15. I'm self-diagnosed with Newson Syndrome, which is only being diagnosed in England by a clinic that only serves kids under 16, so a self-diagnosis it will remain.



Very good. We're each other's best friends. We often are interested in the same video games or TV shows, but he usually moves on quicker than I do. He struggles with depression (he's extremely sensitive and just witnessing bullying upsets him) and I'm the best at talking to him and helping him feel better. When I'm having a meltdown, while my parents might show anger, my brother is always comforting.

We do have issues about sharing the computer, and sometimes I get overloaded by his noise (though less so than when he was younger) but we get along better than many NT sibling pairs I've seen.

Also, because of our large age difference, when he was younger I often acted like a 'third parent' to him. I do so less now that he's more mature than me in some ways.



I think he helped me build friendships for awhile because throughout my teens I found it easier to befriend kids his age than my age, so we'd often have the same friends. Now, though, he's gotten to the age that I find hard to relate to so I'm more shy around his friends. And I'm starting to learn how to befriend college students.

I keep seeing myself in him, but with differences, and a few years off. And I try to nudge him to do a bit better than I did. We both have artistic talents (me writing novels, him writing short stories, poetry and art) and I recently encouraged him to enter into a poetry contest. The first time I entered any kind of art contest was at 18 or so. When he was around 8-10 I had a rough time because he reminded me of myself at 10-12, and I'd been severely depressed then so I had a bunch of self-hatred for myself at that age. I remember getting mad any time he did something silly, or when he liked violent shows (at 10-12 I wanted to be a Jedi). But I recognized the issue and tried to deal with it, and he's aged past that anyway.



Nope. I don't feel better or worse than him. We're both wonderful in different ways. I do feel sometimes that my parents prefer him - I think they relate to him better because they were both youngest siblings. On the other hand when I have a meltdown they have to drop his issues to help me, so he probably feels the same way at times.

I think a big part of it is my excellent parents, who never suggested that they wanted either of us to be different people from who we are. The only thing they'd want to change about either of us is our struggles with depression, not our neurology.



Well, lately despite our large age difference we've been relating as equals, because he and I are at similar levels of emotional maturity. That wouldn't happen if we were two NTs. I probably could help him more with appealing to girls if I was NT, but then again I might have decided younger siblings were uncool. I don't think I'd value family relationships nearly as much if I hadn't had so much trouble making friends, so we wouldn't be as close.

Also, he helps me with some things and I help him with other things. If I was NT I'd be better at everything than him because I'm older, so he wouldn't feel as useful. He also hates competing with me so he gives up at anything I'm really good at, which means probably part of his successes depend on me being disabled. I could be good at art if I practiced more, but my brother would get discouraged if I did that and he's got more natural talent at it than me.



No, the person I'm closest to is my NT Mom. She makes me feel safe, and she's the best at calming me down during a meltdown. I think if he was my parent my brother would be better at it than her, but since he's my younger brother he can't make me feel safe the way she does.

Intellectually, I bond closest with my Dad, who's also an aspie. But between my mother and brother it'd probably be a tie, because my brother shares my TV and video game interests and my Mom shares my interest in anti-discrimination activism. (Mom and I presented a paper for a feminist mothering conference about the War on Autism and how that impacts mothers of autistic children. She did the speaking because she's the mother, but I did most of the research.)

I'm self-diagnosed, from reading personal accounts on WP.

Minimal. I see my much-older NT sister ten times a year at most, and we live in the same city. I talk to her a little bit more often, and even then, it's mostly conversations with a specific goal to accomplish (such as making sure we don't buy the same gift for our parents' birthdays).

She made me very bitter and wary of people with high social skills, and well as make me "understand" that no matter how hard I try, there will always be people who will outrank me with little or no effort of their part.

I felt sh*tloads of inferiority, due to my parents' favoritism toward her. During meals, they would tell her to "open the fridge, pick something you like", while I was told to "eat what you're served, and don't you dare complain!". And that's while we were in the same room.

A relationship between two NT siblings is largely equal, or at least semi-equal if the age difference is greater than 10 years. In my case, she was the favorite, and I was the pariah.

No. I don't feel very close to family in general. As a child, I've come to associate family with suppression of freedom and constant random punishments. My much-older sister was more like a second mother, and my parents always took her side, even when I clearly wasn't in the wrong. So to this day, I have no intentions to get married or have kids of my own.

Diagnosed; AS

We've always been pretty close. We were inseparable when we were both in elementary school, but we still spend a lot of time together.

I can't think of any ways he might have influenced me.

Sometimes I have feelings of inferiority. He's charismatic so I can get jealous when I see how well he socializes and sometimes we're competitive over other things.

I don't know. Sometimes he teases me about my autism, but he teases me about a lot of things. I don't think our relationship would be any different if I was NT.

Yes. I love everyone in my family, but I've always felt closest to my brother.

No official diagnosis; Asperger Syndrome. I've discussed it with my mom in the past and she seems to agree. My dad, grandma, and younger sister don't know.

My sister is NT and four years younger than I am. We've never gotten along, we're too different. We live in the same house, but we just kind of tolerate and try to ignore each other.

Watching her grow up, go to school, and make friends is part of what made me realize how different I've always been.

I've had both. Inferiority because she likes to pick on me for having been such a friendless loser for all of my life; it always makes me feel like less to see her succeed socially where I failed. Superiority because I'm older and smarter in some ways than she is (and that's simply a fact). She has the potential to be intelligent, but she wastes it.

Our relationship is different because I was never able to be the older sister for her that I should've been able to be. When she first started middle school she used to come to me for advice and answers to questions she had (how to deal with boys and friendships and things like that). Most of the time I was never able to answer any of her questions. So eventually, she just stopped asking. Now she doesn't believe that I can ever help her out or understand what she's going through. It sucks.

We aren't close. I feel closer to other NT family members (my mom and grandma) than I do to my sister.

Oh wow, so many responses! Thank you!

It seems like ASD doesn't affect the relationships all that much for you guys. I wonder if the difference is that my brother is very low-functioning, whereas I assume most of you are high-functioning. (You certainly seem like a smart bunch.)

I guess I'll try answering the questions, too, just for sake of having this rounded-out.
(Haha, though answering my own questions will feel weird. You all took the time to answer for me, though.)

For NTs with ASD siblings
- Have you been checked for ASD? Do you feel that you exhibit any of the symptoms, perhaps as a result of growing up with someone with ASD?

I've never been checked for it, but I think I do show some of the signs just for the fact that I grew up with my brother. For example, he can't talk and typically likes to be off doing his own thing, and I got used to entertaining myself without him as a kid. Even now, people are always asking me why I'm so quiet.

- What is your relationship with your ASD siblings like?

My brother and I don't really have much of a relationship. (See above.)

- In what ways do you think an ASD sibling may have influenced you?

There's the quietness thing and there are some various other things. He used to bend forks. I can't eat with bent forks now.

- Have you ever had feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc.?

Ehh, given how low-functioning he appears, it's kind of hard not to at least assume I'm the more intelligent of us, but I was taught from an early age that he's different and to be good to him.

- In what ways do you think your relationship may be different from a relationship between two NT siblings?

It would be incredibly different. In basically every possible way.

- Do you feel that you understand your ASD sibling more than most NT members of your immediate family? (Better than parents, maybe?)

I understand my autistic sister better than I understand my autistic brother. She can talk, so I suppose that makes it easier. But my brother seemed to have a certain level or respect/trust/something for me that he didn't have for Mom, because it was always easier for me to calm him down than for her.

No.

Just so you are aware an ASD sibling can feel the same amount of depression and stress when growing up with NT siblings. While you may be stressed out by your ASD siblings you don't have to go through the same issues they do, and I'm sorry but I cannot empathise with you.

That's basically what I'm trying to get from this. I don't mean to come off as whiny or something, because I realize it's a lot harder for ASDs, if only for the fact that NT is the majority.

Also, I can't ride a bike, either.

Pensieve, I don't think it's very fair on her. She sounds like a swell person, overall, and I don't think she blames her siblings for anything. An NT-ASD sibling pair is going to be put under more stress than two NTs, and both are going to feel it. I know I drove my sister insane when she was still living with us. I don't think you can really expect her to say "yay, it's been happy fun times for the past twenty years," because it probably hasn't been. It's an honesty I appreciate.