5 Keys to Understanding Autism that the Autistic Community Wishes You Knew
In Honor of International Autism Awareness Month, according to search analysis on the internet, here are 5 keys to understanding autism that families would like you to know.
- How does autism affect daily life?
- Eye contact can be a problem and cause stress.
- Sometimes it can be hard to focus and work long hours. We need frequent breaks.
- Close relationships and friendships are important to us, but making a good first impression can be difficult. Please give us a second chance.
- A visual schedule can be very helpful to us.
- We often like to work cooperatively with others.
- How autism can affect communication
- Communicating with others can be very challenging.
- Sometimes we understand your words, sentence structure, and body language differently than others.
- We can be highly verbal to nonverbal, and everything in between.
- Sometimes we will continually repeat words or phrases we have just heard, or repeat something we’ve heard earlier on television or in a different conversation.
- We would love to share with you all we know about the things that we are especially interested in.
- How autism is misrepresented in the media
- Often, portrayals of autism in media don’t show the full spectrum.
- There is often too much emphasis put on “the mute” or “the savant” characteristics of autism.
- Autistic characters are often not relatable.
- People in the Autistic community feel the characters are often too stereotypical or stigmatizing.
- These misrepresentations are more harmful than you might think.
- The unique ways autism affects girls
- Scientific research since 2012 and beyond has shown that girls are not diagnosed as often as boys on the autism spectrum, often because their symptoms are less noticeable, especially in school settings where children spend a majority of their time.
- Girls will be more likely to mimic certain social skills and actions to try to fit in.
- Girls tend to be better at masking their symptoms at school.
- Girls tend to suffer more from irritability and lethargy than their male counterparts.
- Girls with milder forms of autism tend to be diagnosed later in life than boys.
- How autism affects development and learning
- Children on the autism spectrum tend to develop at a different rate than other children and can develop different skills in a different order than a typically developing child.
- Children on the autism spectrum often struggle with eye contact, making it harder to develop communication and language skills.
- Struggling with eye contact can also lead to struggles with attention, focus, and understanding.
- Most people with autism can be great at focusing on details, but may have trouble seeing the “Big Picture.”
- People on the autism spectrum may struggle with control and regulation of their behaviors and emotions.
Understanding Autism is Part of Our Mission
Ascent Cognitive Education Center is committed to helping support families living with an autism spectrum disorder. In the month of April, for International Autism Awareness Month we are inviting the Autistic community to share their stories and experience through a short story contest. Twenty-five of these stories will be chosen by two board members along with members of the Autistic community to appear in a published book. Entries will be accepted through April 30, 2021. The stories to be included in the book will be announced at our official virtual Grand Opening on May 15, 2021. If you would like to help us improve community understanding about autism by sharing your story, please join our contest.
For Contest Information and Registration visit us at: ascentcenter.us/autismwritescontest2021
