Monday, April 26, 2021

Reading the Research: Autistic Sociability in a Pandemic

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 has a bit of a skewed view on what likely happened, but presents some positive information I'd like to highlight.  This article comes to us from a university in Spain.  While that's certainly not the US, it is still a "Western" country with some of the same cultural values and similar home/work patterns.  

The TLDR (Too Long; Didn't Read) is: autistic kids, and their families, did much better than expected during the COVID 19 lockdown.  These families even improved their communication over the course of the lockdown.  I say "families" rather than focusing specifically on the autistic children, because communication is a two-way street.  Autistic people communicate.  We just don't always communicate in words.  

This article doesn't say the transition wasn't difficult on the families and the autistic children.  The pandemic destroyed or massively altered regular routines, which is very hard on people that rely on those routines for comfort and safety.  That's autistic people, and others that struggle with regular life.  Things were also more difficult because support services for the autistic children were not available, or were less available.  Educational options were minimal or nonexistent as well.  So initially, things became more difficult for families with autistic members. 

However, in the long term, as new routines were established, the autistic children and their families thrived more.  The parents, often unable to go to work, spent more time at home, interacting with their kids.  With the additional interaction and attention, the autistic children thrived.  Or put another way: with more social interaction with people they love and trust, autistic people thrived.  

The last thing I want to underline from this article is this: autistic people are often stereotyped as not being social, not caring about others, etc.  This study specifically states that these autistic children were calmer and happier when they were able to use the Internet to see their distanced grandparents, classmates, and other family members.  In other words, autistic people were also happier being social and seeing people they cared about.  

In other words, yes, we are just like you this way- diagnosis or no.  

(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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