Autistic Adults are Not Large Children

At the misguided career workshop (told you it gave me unfortunate fodder for many a post to come), the tendency of some to treat adults with disabilities as though they are children was particularly excruciating.

"Tell us about your employment situation," the speaker encouraged one of the other folks on the spectrum present.

The person talked about how annoyed he was that he was stuck in a menial manual labor job when he had just graduated with a degree in psychology.

While explaining his frustration at having his real skills ignored by a system that refused to see him as capable of more than stocking shelves, the audience was silent; when he mentioned his graduation, everyone clapped and whispered, such an inspiration!

Later, workshop organizers told me how amazed and inspired they were by my ability to have a professional writing job. Much clapping, oh yes, every time I said anything at all. The clapping was all for "wow look what that really impaired-looking person can do," not for the content of my communications, like the need to consider employment supports that aren't visual for some.

"The clapping is very demeaning," I tried to explain to blank stares. "You would not clap if an adult who didn't have a disability told you this same information." More blank stares.

The final blow came when I realized my name card said "Dora Raymaker Young Adult" on it. I am nearly 40.

Treating adults with developmental disabilities like small children is a big problem. Shapiro (No Pity p. 191) describes the difference at a self-advocacy conference between a self-advocate run session on flirting versus a session on rape run by the director of the local rape crisis center who wasn't used to interacting with people with intellectual or developmental disabilities,

Of the two seminars, the one on flirting succeeds precisely because it starts from an assumption that the people in the room are adults and, like others of their age, are interested in flirting, dating, and sex. The antirape session misfires because the moderator assumes, correctly, that the participants are vulnerable but incorrectly that their vulnerability and retardation make them children.

...Thirty adults have come to the antirape seminar because they desperately want to exorcise their own bad experiences and to learn how to protect themselves. But the moderator does not address the personal tragedies of real-life adults who have had horrible experiences, instead she keeps everything safely in the third person of role playing. She shows a video of elementary school children being approached by caricature-evil child abusers with arched eyebrows and smarmy smiles.

There is a balance to respect: Autistic adults may need support in some traditionally "adult" areas, but that does not mean that we are children who need others to wow over mundane accomplishments while ignoring our real skills, ignoring our ability to contribute in meaningful ways to adult discussions, or dismissing our adult experiences, perspective, and needs. It does not mean that materials and activities developed for educating small children are appropriate or useful to us. Or that we find being treated like a child any less offensive than any other adult would.