As for your question: invite the kid and take their needs into account? Is it really that hard to grasp? I don't get it. Some kids have an allergy. Some kids have lice. Some kids have tamper tantrums. Some kids have farts. Some kids have skin infections. Some kids pee in their pants. Some kids have ADHD. Some kids have.. well I guess you get the point by now.
Try out the children playing at your (or their) premises, see if they get along with each other without too much hassle. Make clear rules. Explain things in a positive way. If it doesn't work out, be honest about it to the parents. Don't make it as if "you want to do your kid a favor". You're doing it for selfish reasons because you cannot handle the kid. That's fine (though not ideal), but do say that. Cause that's actually what you're really saying in a kind of nice package which is as fake as you can make it.
You just related a story where you sat and judged two people for over an hour! You tell us why you did it if you want to know why people do it!
The autistic people you know are the lucky ones. 80% of people with autism have intellectual disabilities(low iq) and as many as 50% are non-verbal.
It's more than not wanting to be someone perceived as quirky or strange.
That's because diagnosis is geared to those people. Adults who cope relatively well in most situations don't know they have autism, don't seek a diagnosis, and there isn't a dx service available to them if they do know what to ask for.
Hmm... I hope someone more knowledgeable than me in biology jumps in to lend their thought, but I'm extremely skeptical of takes like this - another one I see a lot online is that somehow homosexuality has "evolutionary explanations." It doesn't jive with my understanding of how evolution works.
Statements like that seem to imply there is some sort of intelligent force or plan behind evolution, when instead it is "directed" by noise, not "reacting to" noise.
As far as I know there's no way for evolution to "sprinkled a bit of autism" across a population for an increased chance of population survival - I don't see how such a mechanism could exist.
That's not to say that autism doesn't somehow improve society or populations, maybe it does, I don't know. But I don't think we can point to evolution as the mechanism.
Consider a gene that promotes compassion, selflessness and sharing. While it may lower your individual fitness, groups with some individuals with this gene may fare better as a whole.
Same as autism. For example, say autistic people see connections that other people don't. Having a low rate of "different thinkers" is positive for the group as a whole, even if the individuals may be disadvantaged in other ways.
This doesn't mean that any particular individual will have a higher rate (although most will).
One hypothesis for the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire is that Christianity provided social services that improved reproductive rates by a couple of percentage points. Maintain that over a particularly stressful upheaval in the social order and you don't need many generations to significantly outbreed your rivals.
Social services, and perhaps this might have some impact:
"In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin, “Human Life”), which reemphasized the Church’s constant teaching that it is always intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence."
Not strictly autism, but sickle cell anemia is a disease caused by carrying two copies of a recessive gene. If you have two copies of the recessive gene, you suffer from a debilitating illness. If you carry one copy of the normal gene and one copy of the disease causing recessive version, you have increased resistance to malaria, which has killed more humans than everything else combined. So evolution definitely does contribute to the prevalence of sickle cell anemia. Almost everyone in the US we suffers from sickle cell anemia is of sun Saharan African descent, where malaria is especially relevant.
While autism certainly isn't as simple as sickle cell anemia, there does exist the possibility that genetic components which contribute to autism can also contribute to other, more positive traits with fewer risk factors.
It's kind of a corollary to the No Free Lunch theorom, really. The genes that cause autism in one configuration are probably vital in most other configurations and turning them off willy-nilly would likely be bad.
That's kind of what you're doing right now. We use judgement all the time but the definition of acceptable criteria is not universal nor static. You can work to change the narrative but you can't fix the game.
Judging is a natural, normal, unavoidable thing we all do.
We must all become more accepting of each other and broaden the range of “acceptable behavior.” I was at Starbucks yesterday and overheard 2 friends dissecting everything they didn’t like about other people for over an hour. The subjects of gossip didn’t seem to have wronged them in any way. Why is this a normal thing in America? Do we have nothing better to do than judge others?