February 08, 2024 | FEATURES | By Kole Petersen
Why is it that doctors believed for the longest time that I’d be a perpetual infant?
I mean, yeah, I’m autistic, but that does not mean I’m doomed to stay at the intellectual level of a toddler. It does not mean that I would forever be incapable of speaking. And, no, it does not mean that I like trains. Blame Sheldon Cooper for that one.
I think it’s crazy that doctors give parents predictions about their children based on preliminary diagnoses.
“I’m sorry, your son will never be able to talk. You will need to find some other way to communicate with him.”
What makes them confident enough to claim that? Even with diagnoses of serious illnesses, at least the doctor tells the patient the chances they have of pulling through. When a psychologist told my mom that my brother and I would never be able to talk, they did not seem confident whatsoever that we would ever prove this prediction wrong.
An autistic child is not a template to color signs and symptoms into. Every person on the autism spectrum is different, some with savant syndrome, some with lessened social intelligence, some with lessened emotional intelligence and many more in between. If my psychologist had read the DSM-5, they would know that autism spectrum disorder has a wide range of displayed behaviors and severity that differs widely between individuals.
In fact, the perfect case study to prove this comes from myself and my twin brother. Both of us were diagnosed to have autism spectrum disorder early in our lives; we were less than two years old. Both of us were raised the exact same way, so nurture can’t be considered a significant factor in our differences.
However, I started speaking at around six years old, while my brother found his words at age 12. I learned how to fit into the socially accepted standards of school, while my brother doesn’t get the concepts of tests (we learned that he uses the same order every time on Scantron tests). I have (slowly) grown to love hanging out with friends, while my brother prefers to spend his time alone or with close family.
Despite these differences, early in the public school system, we were essentially treated as if we were the same person. Once our diagnoses became apparent, instead of being seen as two distinct human beings, we were treated as clones, despite the differences in our personalities and needs.
We were the ones who needed to be protected, treated as if we were inferior to the other kids in our kindergarten class; we were handled and separated as if we weren’t worthy of being included in the same activities. Teachers would use less complicated words, change their tone of voice to one that they would use to address a baby or a dog, and handle us in a completely different manner than the neurotypical people in our classes.
Even if the adults in our lives didn’t know it at the time, I know for a fact that both of us had the emotional intelligence and ability to feel horrible about our ostracization.
We knew that just because we were autistic did not automatically mean that we were dumber than our peers or that we needed things to be simplified. Indeed, I believe that the early infantilization of myself and my brother hurt our development because we were not interacted with at a development and age-appropriate level.
Even though times have changed since we were in elementary school, I continued to see people interact with my brother to this very day as if he was an infant stuck in a teenage body, like how they pitch their voices up an octave after learning that he has autism. And because of this treatment, for the longest time, I did not feel comfortable disclosing my own autism for fear of similar infantilization.
And despite the hard work that he has done to improve his vocabulary, writing, and verbal skills, I’m sure that even psychologists compare myself and my brother – they would instantly conclude that my brother is dumber than I am; that he’s further along the spectrum than me, that they would need to talk to him like an infant to get through to him.
But guess what? My brother is one of the smartest people I know.
He can identify all fifty states on a map in less than 20 seconds. For every date in history, he knows what day of the week it falls under. If you play him a country song, he could tell you what it is and sing along with it. And he knows a lot more about U.S. history, biology, English and math than standardized test results might show.
He might still enjoy watching Disney Junior shows, and he might flap his arms when he gets excited, but that does not mean he is less intelligent than any of us. It does not mean that he should be seen as an inspiration for simply existing.
No, my brother is an inspiration to me because of his intelligence, because of the way he lives with a smile on his face, and because of how he helped me gain the confidence to proudly express my autism.
In conclusion, I hope you can learn something from our experiences. Please stop treating autistic people, especially autistic adults, like they are babbling children. Because most of the time, what seems like a child on the outside can turn out to be a radiant, sharp, amazing person when you dig even an inch below the surface.