It can be incredibly frustrating for parents, carers and young people themselves when they are beginning to question whether they might be autistic to come up against the comment “but you don’t look autistic!” Parents have told us that they have felt belittled and made to feel as if their views and opinions are wrong or invalid by well-meaning professionals still holding outdated and frankly harmful views about what an autistic person should or should not be able to do. At Spectrum, we are working incredibly hard to help educate others and challenge these outdated views through our neuroaffirmative report-writing style and the language we choose to use to describe autistic children and young people.
We fully agree with the following quote taken from a social media post from Mrs Speechie P “a pediatric speech language pathologist, autism evaluation specialist, & disabilities advocate” who states, “Autism can look very different on the outside from person to person and be experienced very different from Autistic person to Autistic person. It can look like the girl on the left, the child on the right, a combination of the two - or even have little in common with these two profiles. Autism is a constellation of characteristics with differences (not deficits, not weaknesses - but differences) in social communication and interests, routines, and sensory processing”. https://www.facebook.com/MrsSpeechieP
