When someone says autism, you typically fall into one of two camps.
You either picture a kid who’s socially awkward and is “just a bit weird”, or you picture a non-speaking kid who can’t make eye contact at all and seems to not know you’re there.
There’s one thing that both camps typically have in common, though.
They’re picturing an autistic boy.
While more boys than girls are diagnosed with autism, that does not mean that autism is a “boy’s disorder”.
There are tons of factors involved, like the signs of autism in boys being more known than signs in girls.
Today we’re covering just a few things you need to know about autism in girls.
What You Need to Know About Autism in Girls and How It’s Different From Boys
(Image description: blonde little girl putting together a puzzle on a table. Text reads: “What you should know about autism in girls” in teal and coral writing on a white background. Teal and Coral “Autistic Mama” infinity sign logo in top right corner)
Signs of Autism Were Made for Boys
The signs of autism that we are told to watch for at early ages were primarily made for boys.
That’s not to say that autistic girls can’t or don’t act similarly to autistic boys, but that sometimes they show their autism in different ways.
Many doctors focus on the social struggles for autistic children, but that particular side to autism may be more severe in boys than girls.
See, girls typically are much more social than boys, so a boy may be seen easily as autistic while a girl is labeled “shy” because her social struggles are less severe.
Autistic girls tend to have obsessions just like boys, but they’re seen as more socially appropriate, so they can be difficult to diagnose.
Their behavior isn’t any less autistic than boys, it’s simply not the stereotypical autistic traits because those traits were written for boys.
With Severe Autism, Girls Tend to Struggle More than Boys
So on the opposite side of the spectrum, when girls are more severely autistic, they tend to be more severe than boys.
They are more likely to be nonverbal and act out compared to boys, which is interesting because most of the time society sees girls as quicker to develop and more mild-mannered.
It seems as though autistic girls fall harder to one end of the spectrum while boys tend to be all over the map.
Again, this makes me wonder how much of this is because the spectrum was designed around autistic boys.
Life with an Autistic Daughter
Here’s the thing, friends… I don’t have an autistic daughter, at least, not that we know of yet.
So I can give facts and thoughts and opinions, but I can’t really share what it’s like living life with an autistic daughter.
I decided to share a few blogs that you may want to check out if you have an autistic daughter and want more real-life experience from mama’s like you!
Kori is one of my sweetest blog-friends, and I wholeheartedly recommend you check out her site!
“Are girls on the spectrum really that much different from their male counterparts? In my personal experience, yes. My daughter is one of the severe end/classic autism girls. She’s non-verbal and will likely be dependent on me or another adult for the rest of her life. It hasn’t always been easy, but I remind myself that it will be worth it.” –Kori, from Kori at Home
“When it was first brought up to me that there was a possibility that my daughter was autistic, I refused to listen. Every single day I worked with autistic children (all boys) and she was nothing like them. She was social. Even after her evaluation came back as PDD-nos, I struggled to believe it. How social she is not only threw me off but has also been a learning curve for every member of her educational team” –Stephanie, from Parenting Chaos
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I am an autistic girl whose intelligences are predominantly verbal and interpersonal. It keeps me up at night wondering why my peers act the way they do. I examine conflicts between written values and what people actually do. It troubles me. At least I know they exist because I’m willingly included in stuff. But would I be better off knowing that they don’t exist? After all, ignorance is bliss.
FlutistPride recently posted…Did We Really Choose it Right Saying We’re Okay This Way?
When I was 19 my mom gave me a book about Asperger’s syndrome and Temple Grandin’s “Thinking in Pictures”. So much about my childhood suddenly made sense. Soon after that my parents got me in to see a pediatric neurologist to be tested. He concluded that I was not on the spectrum because I was good at eye contact. I thought (but did not say) “there’s a reason for that – years of practice!” I trained myself to look at a person’s face when appropriate by staring at their nose. Once I was desensitized to that, I could move on to brief eye contact, then sustained eye contact.
He also implied that my belief that I might have Asperger’s was merely due to suggestibility, like a hypochondriac reading a medical journal. Which was a bit insulting, but also planted a seed of doubt – he was the expert after all.
Looking back, I have to wonder if he was operating under the boy-centric model of autism.
I’m an autistic girl, and at least one of my sisters is also autistic. I find it very interesting to analyze our history and presentation of our autism because while she presents much like a stereotypical autistic boy would, I very much do not.
I think an important part of autism in girls is that autistic strengths such as reasoning can be used very effectively to mask the aspects that are harder, such as socializing, since girls are much more motivated to socialize and often (whether this is socialized or natural) more empathetic. A large part of the reason I didn’t realize I was autistic until recently was because I compared myself with my sister, who had a diagnosis, and knew that I acted nothing like her. Externally, we are VERY different. I was able to use my analysis to create algorithms on how other people socialize and hence was able to use that to survive in social situations. This required a lot of being very quiet for a long time while I collected data, earning me the label ‘shy’ or ‘awkward’ but nothing else. And let’s be real, who isn’t a little awkward in their young adolescence? This confused my father, as I’d been a very outgoing kid before social expectations started to set in and suddenly I was unable to have friends because I couldn’t make small talk, and I didn’t know how to read body language, but aside him invalidating my anxiety because I hadn’t had a problem with socializing when I was in kindergarten and preschool (and he was right, since my anxiety was caused by something else that we knew nothing about at the time), that was that. Today it means that I rely heavily on group situations to build up my rapport with someone before I can feel comfortable with them more one-on-one, as I need others to get that person talking so I can build up my algorithm for them.
This also extends to empathy. As something that you’re supposed to not have with autism (which is of course bullshit, but it at least often looks that way from an ignorant perspective), this got me a free pass on not being autistic. I am highly emotionally empathetic, and when I’m being quiet and observant I can use both these things to create a database of sorts. I feel something shift emotionally, I look around and catalogue people’s faces and bodies. Next time I am shocked into realizing that I’m missing something, I can pull myself out of my algorithm-socializing-fixation to observe and search through my database until I possibly have a better idea about what I missed. It doesn’t always work, but it certainly works well enough for people to assume that I’m just ‘oblivious’ or ‘innocent’ or ‘distracted’ (I had an ADHD diagnosis far before any inkling of autism).
My masking works very well. I masked so well that I didn’t realized I had autism until I was 19, and I still question it because I am so good at coping, outwardly with these things. I had meltdowns frequently about not understanding social climates and having sensory overloads, to the point where I thought I was transgender for a couple years because I had no other explanation for my sensory and identity confusion (the latter because I felt lost as to who I was when I spent all my time around others acting like them), but still no one, including me, thought that there was anything aside my ADHD and anxiety causing this.
In comparison, my sister has it both worse and better–as it always is with the ‘high’ and ‘low’ functioning thing. While the labels are dumb, and even if we were going to apply them both my sister and I would fall under ‘high functioning’, I would definitely be ‘higher functioning’ than her. She also has ADHD and autism, and was a very difficult child. She wandered off, she found places where no one would think to look but she loved because they were safe from the overwhelm of social and sensory dynamics, she became aggressive and lashed out when she was forced into overwhelming contexts. Where I got quiet and sad and passive, she was active and acted out. Instead of chattering non-stop as I did or straight up clamming up, she made noises often associated with an autistic child. This earned her a diagnosis at eight years old. She’s now fifteen, and although she struggles with school, because of the resources this diagnosis opened up to her and the understanding of how her brain works she can study, take notes, and do homework. She’s not doing well in class, but she’s passing. She still stims and flaps her hands and makes noises rather than speaking, because those things are part of her and don’t stop her from being aces at life, and she looks “lower functioning” than me because of it. But if we’re going to look at it form an internal perspective–at her age, fifteen, I failed half of my classes and had a complete identity crisis that I’m only now, four years later, starting to recover from. My masking had such a detrimental affect that I didn’t even get my ADHD diagnosis until that year (although my parents knew I had it), and now in post-secondary I struggle to advocate for myself because I ‘seem’ normal. Now that she is older and we have in-depth conversations about mental health, I know that we are very, very similar. Our symptoms almost exactly match up, when we take the time to communicate to each other what we’re doing and why. We have different struggles, because I react passively to overwhelming stimuli and have a ‘flight’ response, so I often get sympathy from teachers and family when I meltdown. I don’t get as much help, but people are gentle with me. I am considered kind and empathetic because I notice when people are upset because of their energy, not their body language, and try to offer comfort in whatever algorithm seems most appropriate in the moment. My sister, however, is a fighter. She reacts aggressively, and while this means that she is in continuous conflict with her teachers and our parents and anyone else who tries to tell her what to do, it also means that people are like “oh my lord we have to make this better, please get her help.” She is also kind and empathetic, but because in the moment she lashes out, people don’t see that unless they know her very, very well. Of course it’s only because my parents are as good as they are and our current social clime that that means real help and not just learning to mask, but I digress, that is another thought process, and I’ve been rambling on long enough here already!