It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed.
If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?
In the given example, it may be apparent to the child that mum is angry/annoyed. But they are likely to be confused as to why.
(which is where DoreenMichele's point about educating the parents comes in - if they can clearly articulate how they feel and why in a given situation, then the autistic child is likely to be able to learn and remember this, even if it might take them a few repetitions of the situation for it sink it (like anyone learning anything that isn't intuitive to them))
I spent a lot of time in therapy. I've learned to keep more quiet about things that seem obvious to me because I do at times miss the fact that what is obvious to me is something someone else thinks they are very cleverly hiding or some crap. Like anyone, I have something of a tendency to assume that what is obvious to me is obvious to others.
An awful lot of so-called social skill appears to be knowing what polite lies you are supposed to collude with to make the people around you comfortable. This is actually the root cause of the persistence of a lot of social ills.
If you can't tell someone "Yeah, that's racist/classist/sexist baloney, give me a break" because that's too rude to tolerate, don't be all shocked when the world is overrun with racism, classism, sexism, etc.
Abusive people also count on normalizing their ugly behaviors and on people around them not saying "No, dude, that's not funny at all. Stop that." We have movie scenes where some child is hiding from a visiting aunt and her icky slobbery kisses and tendency to pinch his cheeks hard and the parents giggle about the behavior of the child rather than tell the aunt "Bitch, keep your hands to yourself. No, you don't have a right to do this to my child. They don't like it, so don't do it."
And then we are all mystified at how to stop child molesters. But you can't tell people "Um, yeah. You are actively colluding with child molesters when you do stuff like that."
Because that would be rude. Or something.
If I'm with people who's emotional responses I've learned, I can understand somewhat their desires and intentions are. I've found listening to their breathing gives me a big head start on understanding their current wellbeing and I go from there.
With strangers and in scenarios where the communication protocol changes then it becomes enough of a task to decode the emotional exchanges happening that I'm sure I'd fail a test for theory of mind. I can't read what strangers want, I know that they do have intentions and desires but I can't map them until I understand that person's emotional language.
There's a definite distinction between lacking a theory of mind entirely and not having the tools available to build a reliable one. I think a lot of autistic people have a rudimentary theory of mind but understand desires and intentions perfectly when told explicitly ahead of time.
Well, that claim is frequently made, but not everyone agrees that it has been sufficiently demonstrated. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/
Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.)
My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids.
I know quite a lot about autism and related issues.
My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with.
Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.
But I think the greatest help in my social skills was watching a lot of TV shows (especially sit-coms). Many make fun of socially awkard situations, word plays, misunderstandings taken to the extreme teaches you social interaction by example and it's fun :).
I often forget how difficult they can be and how impaired they are. Then we end up for some odd reason at a crowded restaurant and my oldest son is climbing the walls and I remember that this used to be a routine thing and the more he is subjected to it, the more difficult he is to deal with -- and understandably so because he's extremely stressed.
Anyone who knows anything about ASD usually asks me sooner or later if he is autistic. The fact that he's not normal isn't anything subtle at all. He still does not "blend" with normal society.
But he's a lot more functional than I ever expected him to be and he nursed me back to health after doctors basically wrote me off for dead, so I certainly don't see him as incompetent. He will probably never hold a "normal" job and there are lots of people who don't have "normal" jobs.
I don't see why we can't have more emphasis in this world on helping people find their niche instead of on trying to force fit square pegs to round holes and pretending there are no square holes out there. Square holes exist. We just have this very broken idea that because someone is ill suited to X they are simply bad and terrible and incompetent people who cannot be fixed.
This has not been my experience and I also think the world has changed a whole lot. My parents also like things quiet and like having control over their environment. No one has ever suggested there was something wrong with them because of it.
My dad grew up on a farm. My mother worked in the fields as a teen and got paid in kind in post-WW2 Germany where the economy was so very bad (meaning if she helped harvest cherries, she came home with a bushel of cherries to help feed the family). Historically, farms were much quieter than modern life and most people lived and/or worked on them.
The world changed in a way such that it's much noisier and busier and people have much less latitude for arranging their lives as they see fit, but instead of recognizing that, we just give all the children who don't like that a label and claim they are broken.
I'm very skeptical of that explanation -- that we just suddenly and mysteriously have tons and tons of bad apple children for no apparent reason. (Because if you suggest they are medically impaired from a toxic world full of chemicals that didn't exist a hundred years ago, now you are an illogical conspiracy theory nutter. So we don't have an official explanation for why these kids deserve to be called disabled.)
For example, I work as a lawyer in a law firm. There are a couple of associates who I suspect are in fact on the spectrum. People sometimes make fun of them, they generally like to work alone and in isolation, but they are brilliant attorneys and praised and respected for their work.
Telling other people "She has selective mutism" turned out to make the child's social problems so much worse that she stopped doing that and began telling people "She's just shy." like her own parents had said about her when she was growing up.
I think people seek diagnoses when they are too impaired to cope on their own and they are in social settings where having a label is the only way other people will accommodate them.
My sons don't have a formal diagnosis because I homeschooled, so I didn't need it to get them accommodation. My oldest is so obviously not normally that I still have people just assume he's aspie without me ever saying anything about him having special needs. And he's better and more normal seeming than he used to be, which sometimes causes problem when people assume he's being intentionally difficult instead of assuming he's impaired in some way.
I always told him he just has to find his niche in life.
His dad was career military. I think he probably qualifies as on the spectrum. He will probably never be officially diagnosed. Being in the military worked for him.
It's recommended that you buy multiple copies of the same outfit for your aspie kid to accommodate their sensory issues. Einstein dressed that way and there are other people who have dressed that way without having a diagnosis of ASD.
The military expects you to wear a uniform. So you are required to have multiple copies of the same outfit to wear to work and you can't wear anything else.
Many people complain bitterly about things like school uniforms. I knew more than one military member whose attitude was more like "One less thing for me to worry about!"
We are all a sum of a bunch of different things, including social climate around us. It's much easier to blame the individual and double down on expecting them to fit in than to tell the rest of the world to get over its crap.
Please notice that human rights issues like racism, sexism, etc. are battles to tell the rest of the world to quit its crap. We aren't there yet for various types of people we have decided are "disabled."
I am medically handicapped. I have a compromised immune system. My life has been easier in many ways since the pandemic started because suddenly the rest of the world cares about germ control. Normally, it's just my personal problem that other people's nasty habits literally make me sick.
I hope we outlaw blowing your nose at restaurant tables and stuff like that because of the pandemic. That would permanently improve my quality of life and ability to participate regularly in normal society instead of hiding out at home most of the time.