I dont mean to be coming across as rude, but I believe the better way to handle the six year old is to encourage the process of creativity and imagination. There are enough people in his life (at least a Quadrupillion!!) that will try to tell him that hes being impractical and unrealistic, no need to add to that count.

This kid isn't wired like you. Normal children do not have those reasoning abilities at that age. You can't reasonably project from your experience to his, but are more likely to, because that's how people with autistic traits relate.

"You would be shitty parents and you're autistic". Nice line of argument.

I think that parental expectations of children to dislike criticism is a large factor in why they usually grow up to dislike it.

Again, (and I don't mean any of this to sound harsh) your thoughts are not too relevant, because you can't use your kind of reasoning here.

My dad (who is on the spectrum) ended up being horribly abusive to me throughout my childhood and teenage years because of thinking a lot like this. I don't want to conflate you and him, just to warn you that there is a really big trap it's easy for people with your personality traits to fall into around being overly logical, the projection that people with deficient mirror neurons have to resort to for relating to people, and how to treat and raise kids.

You should recognize that you need the help of a person who doesn't share your mind-blindness to make appropriate judgements about children and how to relate to them. You absolutely cannot figure out how to treat kids on your own if you are on the spectrum. Using your logic, you should recognize it doesn't apply, and that you need a tool that isn't in your toolbox. Either a person who does have that skill who you listen to, or enough study of child psychology to reason your way to the right way to treat neurotypical kids.

" You should recognize that you need the help of a person who doesn't share your mind-blindness to make appropriate judgements about children and how to relate to them. You absolutely cannot figure out how to treat kids on your own if you are on the spectrum."

That is so disgustingly far from an objective statement.

That sounds awful out of context (which I probably failed to convey well). I was speaking particularly to xlnt, directly in response to things he said that saliently reminded me of the justifications my autistic father used to feel like he was doing the right thing during the years when he was extremely (and, importantly) unknowingly abusive to me, with the intention of challenging that part of his worldview. I didn't mean 'you' in any more universal sense then that, and I most certainly didn't mean it in the way you are reading it. I should of more carefully limited the scope of what I was saying to him, and made a point of mentioning that many autistic people are naturally great and understanding with kids. I'm not a great writer, so I'm sorry for that. Also, this discussion was going on for a while way down-thread and then this branch started, so you may have read the discussion out of chronological order.

People who talk about raising kids as if they were robots, and their job is to use logic to make sure the robot always gives precisely the right output for it's own good later on need help raising kids. That much is undoubtedly true. You are reading me as meaning something I didn't mean.

This is an argument about thinking versus feeling on the MBTI scale and you can't reduce something along those axises to right and wrong... raising kids is more complicated than that.

This is also ad hominem because xlnt is not talking about raising kids like they are robots; he believes it is best to treat them like people. You are misunderstanding his actual beliefs because you are stuck on an argument of little meaning. http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ This is the philosophy in question, debate that if you want.

I do, mostly and personally, agree with that. Though I would say it's generally the right of the parent to raise the child as the parent sees fit, within reason of course.

PS would you like to continue this by AIM or email? curi42 / [email protected]

I don't use AIM but I will drop you an email after I get off my ass for a half hour and grab something to eat from my trailer.

So suppose we take the list of all the people who have similar views to me, on these issues. Then we go through the list and check if each person is autistic. If we find one who isn't autistic, then can we count these as valid positions?

I'll drop you that email, maybe we are getting too far off topic.

Autism != Asperger's Syndrome

The existence of mirror neurons is not just a theory. A mirror neuron is (by definition) a neuron that fires both when you do something and someone else has done something. Those are observed. It is a theory that it causes autism, but not a theory that they fire less in autistic children, or that these areas of the brain are almost precisely the same places where autistic spectrum people have thinner brains then controls.