Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article does something I've never seen a research article do before: it accepts autistic friendships as valid and seeks to describe them, rather than pathologize or try to "improve" them by demanding they adhere to neurotypical norms.
I've never heard friendship described in quite the way this article does, with its talk about synchrony (or the sharing of emotions as well as experiences). In thinking about my friendships, I'd tend to agree in noting that as the falling down point. It can be hard to get to know me or even read my face. I feel like I do an adequate job of displaying my emotional state now, but the way I react to things and think about things can be so dizzyingly different than typical reactions that it serves as a significant barrier to syncing up emotionally.
I've never heard friendship described in quite the way this article does, with its talk about synchrony (or the sharing of emotions as well as experiences). In thinking about my friendships, I'd tend to agree in noting that as the falling down point. It can be hard to get to know me or even read my face. I feel like I do an adequate job of displaying my emotional state now, but the way I react to things and think about things can be so dizzyingly different than typical reactions that it serves as a significant barrier to syncing up emotionally.
That said... I can confirm, while growing up, that my autism was less a barrier to making friends than the expectations put upon me by neurotypical people. Making friends when I was little was hard because I was rarely given the chance to even try. Because I didn't act or react they way they expected, my peers avoided me (except for bullies). The environments of schools were never ever sensory-friendly. It was about all I could manage simply to survive the stated purpose of school: the academics.
On finding your tribe: at this point, I can safely say that at least two of the people I became friends with in high school later received autism diagnoses. Judging by my recollection of behavior patterns, I would say at least two more of those friends probably qualified as well. None of us, at the time, had those diagnoses as far as I know. So I did, in a manner of speaking, find my tribe... but without that knowledge of common diagnostic ground, we merely gravitated to each other on shared interests and common tolerance for less usual behavior.
I liked the experimental programs they listed here, and I hope more of them become available to autistic kids. Theater in particular seems promising: as it says in the article, theater can literally teach some of the hidden curriculum that autistic people don't innately learn. I somewhat regret never trying it when I was in school. The closest I got was being stage crew for a single production, and I wasn't even very good at that.
All in all, this was a promising article and I hope to see more thoughtfully written and fundamentally accepting pieces like it.
On finding your tribe: at this point, I can safely say that at least two of the people I became friends with in high school later received autism diagnoses. Judging by my recollection of behavior patterns, I would say at least two more of those friends probably qualified as well. None of us, at the time, had those diagnoses as far as I know. So I did, in a manner of speaking, find my tribe... but without that knowledge of common diagnostic ground, we merely gravitated to each other on shared interests and common tolerance for less usual behavior.
I liked the experimental programs they listed here, and I hope more of them become available to autistic kids. Theater in particular seems promising: as it says in the article, theater can literally teach some of the hidden curriculum that autistic people don't innately learn. I somewhat regret never trying it when I was in school. The closest I got was being stage crew for a single production, and I wasn't even very good at that.
All in all, this was a promising article and I hope to see more thoughtfully written and fundamentally accepting pieces like it.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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