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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

It sounds to me like you could do a lot more to just educate the parents.

You don't get mad and shout at a young child who has decided to put the silverware away. You talk to them about the process of making and serving dinner. He could have been shown that one way to make the silverware more orderly is set the table for everyone while Mom cooks.

That was my response to my then five year old being impatient with dinner not being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself occupied and help me get dinner ready faster.

He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather than being a pain in the butt for me.

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The example is just one example. For some parents, it's this but all the time with different things.

ASD* kids don't learn like neurotypical kids and if you treat them the same you will quickly get exhausted. As someone who has had classes on this, you can't "educate" the kid out of being autistic, and many have tried. This technology is just an adaptive tool, and a great one if it works.

Yes. I'm aware. BTDT, got the t-shirt -- as noted in my two other comments in this very discussion.

You say that, but "somewhat confirmed" is not a diagnosis.

I'm telling you that, diagnosis or no diagnosis, I raised two extremely challenging children. I was chronically short of sleep the first seven years of my oldest child's life and I was a full-time homemaker. I didn't also have a paid job.

I'm quite familiar with how crazy making special-needs kids can be. I didn't need a formal diagnosis because I was homeschooling, so I didn't need to justify getting accommodation. I was their teacher. I could decide to just accommodate them, without an IEP.

Some things they did get formally identified:

Gifted

Dysgraphia (in the IEP when they were in school)

A serious medical condition

Eyesight issues

ADHD was ruled out for my oldest.

Probably other things I'm not recalling. It's been a lot of years.

Things I learned about because they seemed relevant to our needs, though I had no official diagnosis:

ASD

Dyscalculia

Face blindness

Sensory issues of various sorts

My younger son, the one I found easy to deal with, was one of the kids that qualified his small kindergarten class for additional part-time help. Another student had a formal diagnosis of ADHD or similar. Another was in a wheelchair, having lost both legs to a serious and life threatening infection when he was younger.

I would visit his class and it was obvious he wasn't like the other kids. He was the only child in the room who couldn't keep his butt in his desk chair.

I hadn't noticed what a hyper and aggravating mess he was until I saw him in a classroom of other five year olds because, at home, he was the (relatively) quiet child that didn't drive me batty.

I don't need a formal diagnosis to say "Yes, I dealt with a child doing things like that all day, every day, like you described."

I also took classes and what not. Dealing with my crazy making children was my full-time job for a lot of years. I took it seriously and did a lot of reading and took classes, etc.

Honestly seems like you just read the first two paragraphs and stopped. As a father of two autistic children, it's more than just how to speak, or even explaining things if you are lucky enough that your children are verbal. This isn't about wearing the glasses long term, it's about a tool used to teach the children social skills. About recognizing facial expressions, an issue many autistics have.

This isn't about educating parents on how to talk to their children. It's about educating autistics on how to interpret faces in different people.

> Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.

Situation is fictional to illustrate utility of device.

It's a lousy assumption then. Ick. Expect better of parents.

I yelled at my special-needs son for opening the oven door and using it as a stepping stool to see what I was cooking. I wasn't mad. I was scared he would climb on it while the oven was hot.

Because I wasn't mad and he heard me yell "no!!!" at full volume, he thought that's just how you pronounced the word and yelled it the first two weeks he began using it. I would look at him funny and he would look funny like "Did I pronounce it wrong?" After two weeks, he stopped yelling the word.

I wasn't mad. I was scared he would climb on it while the oven was hot.

The other fear here should be that it acts like a lever. The kid doesn't have to be that heavy to cause a free-standing stove to tip over.

This is not a hypothetical danger. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2010/11/one-year-ol... reports that over a thousand kids per year get injured this way and on average 1-2 of them die.

There is supposed to be something at the back of the stove to prevent it from tipping over. Ours had a little device that surrounded one of the feet to do this. The installer said it was now required by law.

That has been required by law for a long time now.

A lot of stoves don't have it actually installed even though they are supposed to.

Maybe I'm out of the loop but I think the issues was that it was never made for consumer use.

I had plenty of uses for simple hands off first person recording. Sports and school events would have benefitted from video recording.

Seeing their enterprise use, I'm thinking other people had a similar idea.

The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.

Most likely, both my sons qualify as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They were never formally diagnosed and I used to routinely give advice to parents whose children did have a formal diagnosis when I was involved with an educational organization.

Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.)

My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids.

I know quite a lot about autism and related issues.

My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with.

Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.

I think this is very true. I also had a lot of social communication issues growing up and still do. Not receiving special treatment and trying hard to conform with others improved my social skills a lot. Social skills can definitely be learned. You can learn to make eye contact even if it hurts a lot, you can learn to attentively listen and nod.

But I think the greatest help in my social skills was watching a lot of TV shows (especially sit-coms). Many make fun of socially awkard situations, word plays, misunderstandings taken to the extreme teaches you social interaction by example and it's fun :).

FWIW, pulling my sons from public school so they weren't forced to deal with a ton of really unpleasant social interaction daily helped them seem a lot more "normal." We've arranged our lives to be fairly quiet and so forth to accommodate sensory issues and also addressed underlying health issues to reduce sensory issues.

I often forget how difficult they can be and how impaired they are. Then we end up for some odd reason at a crowded restaurant and my oldest son is climbing the walls and I remember that this used to be a routine thing and the more he is subjected to it, the more difficult he is to deal with -- and understandably so because he's extremely stressed.

Anyone who knows anything about ASD usually asks me sooner or later if he is autistic. The fact that he's not normal isn't anything subtle at all. He still does not "blend" with normal society.

But he's a lot more functional than I ever expected him to be and he nursed me back to health after doctors basically wrote me off for dead, so I certainly don't see him as incompetent. He will probably never hold a "normal" job and there are lots of people who don't have "normal" jobs.

I don't see why we can't have more emphasis in this world on helping people find their niche instead of on trying to force fit square pegs to round holes and pretending there are no square holes out there. Square holes exist. We just have this very broken idea that because someone is ill suited to X they are simply bad and terrible and incompetent people who cannot be fixed.

This has not been my experience and I also think the world has changed a whole lot. My parents also like things quiet and like having control over their environment. No one has ever suggested there was something wrong with them because of it.

My dad grew up on a farm. My mother worked in the fields as a teen and got paid in kind in post-WW2 Germany where the economy was so very bad (meaning if she helped harvest cherries, she came home with a bushel of cherries to help feed the family). Historically, farms were much quieter than modern life and most people lived and/or worked on them.

The world changed in a way such that it's much noisier and busier and people have much less latitude for arranging their lives as they see fit, but instead of recognizing that, we just give all the children who don't like that a label and claim they are broken.

I'm very skeptical of that explanation -- that we just suddenly and mysteriously have tons and tons of bad apple children for no apparent reason. (Because if you suggest they are medically impaired from a toxic world full of chemicals that didn't exist a hundred years ago, now you are an illogical conspiracy theory nutter. So we don't have an official explanation for why these kids deserve to be called disabled.)

Yes, I think we shouldn’t label kids as autistic or something else. A theory of mine is that people on the spectrum always existed throughout the history. I think it’s also not true that an autistic person cannot hold normal jobs.

For example, I work as a lawyer in a law firm. There are a couple of associates who I suspect are in fact on the spectrum. People sometimes make fun of them, they generally like to work alone and in isolation, but they are brilliant attorneys and praised and respected for their work.

An internet friend had a child diagnosed with "selective mutism." It's basically medicalese for "The kid gets tongue tied and can't manage to talk in some social situations."

Telling other people "She has selective mutism" turned out to make the child's social problems so much worse that she stopped doing that and began telling people "She's just shy." like her own parents had said about her when she was growing up.

I think people seek diagnoses when they are too impaired to cope on their own and they are in social settings where having a label is the only way other people will accommodate them.

My sons don't have a formal diagnosis because I homeschooled, so I didn't need it to get them accommodation. My oldest is so obviously not normally that I still have people just assume he's aspie without me ever saying anything about him having special needs. And he's better and more normal seeming than he used to be, which sometimes causes problem when people assume he's being intentionally difficult instead of assuming he's impaired in some way.

I always told him he just has to find his niche in life.

His dad was career military. I think he probably qualifies as on the spectrum. He will probably never be officially diagnosed. Being in the military worked for him.

It's recommended that you buy multiple copies of the same outfit for your aspie kid to accommodate their sensory issues. Einstein dressed that way and there are other people who have dressed that way without having a diagnosis of ASD.

The military expects you to wear a uniform. So you are required to have multiple copies of the same outfit to wear to work and you can't wear anything else.

Many people complain bitterly about things like school uniforms. I knew more than one military member whose attitude was more like "One less thing for me to worry about!"

We are all a sum of a bunch of different things, including social climate around us. It's much easier to blame the individual and double down on expecting them to fit in than to tell the rest of the world to get over its crap.

Please notice that human rights issues like racism, sexism, etc. are battles to tell the rest of the world to quit its crap. We aren't there yet for various types of people we have decided are "disabled."

I am medically handicapped. I have a compromised immune system. My life has been easier in many ways since the pandemic started because suddenly the rest of the world cares about germ control. Normally, it's just my personal problem that other people's nasty habits literally make me sick.

I hope we outlaw blowing your nose at restaurant tables and stuff like that because of the pandemic. That would permanently improve my quality of life and ability to participate regularly in normal society instead of hiding out at home most of the time.

> The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind

Well, that claim is frequently made, but not everyone agrees that it has been sufficiently demonstrated. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/

After having interacted with a person with autism daily for a few years (and parts of their social groups which include others with autism) I wonder if there's any truth to that at all.

It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed.

If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?

Yes, it's accurate to a degree of being almost uncomputable. Most people instead have simplified, efficient, stereotype-based heuristic models of others.

Yeah, I think the problem (if you permit me to label it so) is often less with recognising emotions, and more with diagnosing why someone has that emotion.

In the given example, it may be apparent to the child that mum is angry/annoyed. But they are likely to be confused as to why.

(which is where DoreenMichele's point about educating the parents comes in - if they can clearly articulate how they feel and why in a given situation, then the autistic child is likely to be able to learn and remember this, even if it might take them a few repetitions of the situation for it sink it (like anyone learning anything that isn't intuitive to them))

I'm absolutely not aspie. I sometimes get accused of being such. It's always because I'm saying "The emperor has no clothes!" and people don't like it and want to shut me up and pretend I have no social skills whatsoever (to try to create plausible deniability for their crap).

I spent a lot of time in therapy. I've learned to keep more quiet about things that seem obvious to me because I do at times miss the fact that what is obvious to me is something someone else thinks they are very cleverly hiding or some crap. Like anyone, I have something of a tendency to assume that what is obvious to me is obvious to others.

An awful lot of so-called social skill appears to be knowing what polite lies you are supposed to collude with to make the people around you comfortable. This is actually the root cause of the persistence of a lot of social ills.

If you can't tell someone "Yeah, that's racist/classist/sexist baloney, give me a break" because that's too rude to tolerate, don't be all shocked when the world is overrun with racism, classism, sexism, etc.

Abusive people also count on normalizing their ugly behaviors and on people around them not saying "No, dude, that's not funny at all. Stop that." We have movie scenes where some child is hiding from a visiting aunt and her icky slobbery kisses and tendency to pinch his cheeks hard and the parents giggle about the behavior of the child rather than tell the aunt "Bitch, keep your hands to yourself. No, you don't have a right to do this to my child. They don't like it, so don't do it."

And then we are all mystified at how to stop child molesters. But you can't tell people "Um, yeah. You are actively colluding with child molesters when you do stuff like that."

Because that would be rude. Or something.

I don't believe this to be the case, I don't think autistic people as a rule lack theory of mind. I think autistic people lack the model to link desires to actions and so have a maladapted or vague theory of mind instead.

If I'm with people who's emotional responses I've learned, I can understand somewhat their desires and intentions are. I've found listening to their breathing gives me a big head start on understanding their current wellbeing and I go from there.

With strangers and in scenarios where the communication protocol changes then it becomes enough of a task to decode the emotional exchanges happening that I'm sure I'd fail a test for theory of mind. I can't read what strangers want, I know that they do have intentions and desires but I can't map them until I understand that person's emotional language.

There's a definite distinction between lacking a theory of mind entirely and not having the tools available to build a reliable one. I think a lot of autistic people have a rudimentary theory of mind but understand desires and intentions perfectly when told explicitly ahead of time.

If you put in 'some' or even 'most' you might be right. Not saying I agree but it's theoretically possible. But it's too deep a theory to fit all cases of such a broad category because it is not consistent with diagnostic criteria. I for example definitely have a theory of mind. But my diagnosis merely says that I do not have the same level of social success as others of my level of general development. And that's absolutely correct.

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