EzraS wrote:
To be perfectly honest, I don't remember seeing a whole lot of hand flapping going on with all the autistic kids I went to school with for years. I don't get why it's talked about so much, considering how little I've seen of it irl.
It probably is a rare stim, as most people on here don't quite understand, and confuse ordinary gestures with hand-flapping.
But I think early videos of autistic children doing this has made a lasting impression on the consciousness of the general public. I do it, but I also realize that among people with autism it isn't common, as most don't seem to do it.
http://youtu.be/TQY2oB3Rqdg?t=2m48sAs you can see in the video above, he is doing it by himself. No external social stimuli, seemingly unmotivated. And his whole body is involved.
Anyway lol, yeah people shouldn't obsess over it, if they don't do it. It's not important. And Lorna Wing even wrote that it's mostly people with intellectual disabilities and autism that do it the most and to an extreme degree.
Why I do it to an extreme degree is a mystery. So even rarer for a HFA. If one were to do that in public, not intentionally (unless they thought it was funny themselves, done so intentionally - which wouldn't be a surprise knowing people), it would probably end up on YouTube - it happened to a mentally ill man in my hometown.
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Yeah, I know, the literature says that it's very rare for adults with HFA to have autistic stims like that to an extreme degree. It's supposedly absent or transitory (only a phase in childhood) in high functioning ASDers. As a child I flapped my hands, walked in circles talking to myself and twirled a string in front of my eyes. I still spend hours twirling in front of my eyes and I'm 29 years old. It looks really weird because I scrunch up my face like a bunny rabbit when I do it and hunch my back to focus in on the string. I only do it in private now but I did it all the time, at home, in public,during class, at doctors appointments etc. in elementary school. It was mentioned in all of my school reports. Odd....
22 Apr 2014, 4:11 pm
