conuly | A while back I said to somebody

that many autistics I know seem to have at least one narcissistic* parent. (Edit: It's more specific. The ones I'm thinking of have one narcissistic and one probably-autistic parent. I didn't think of it because, duh, you expect autistics to have autistic parents.) And then I went back and edited to say "anecdotally".

And ever since then it's been percolating in my mind. Is this some sort of fluke of the autistics I know, or is it a legit trend? Am I perhaps in my mind blowing up a couple of people into a pattern that doesn't even really exist among people I know?

Hard to say. Has anybody else noticed this, or do you think I'm full of it here?

Edit: I crossposted here and you may want to read Lucy's comment. Additionally, google suggests other people have noticed this trend. And I had to wade through a lot of shitty "is autism really narcissism????" links to find anything useful, so you can thank me for that!

I need better numbers. It's all well and good to say "I think you're wrong, only 10% of the autistics I know are in this situation", but if only 3% of non-autistics with no autistic siblings have a narcissistic parent, well, that's your correlation right there. But I just pulled those numbers out of my butt because I don't have numbers.

Maybe I should go back to google with better search terms.

* Here used in the more informal sense of "unpleasant and/or actually abusive with these character traits" rather than a strictly clinical sense, though I imagine there is some very strong overlap.

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From:

wpadmirer

Huh. Of the families I know with autistic children, it could be true for at least a couple of them.

From:

cosmolinguist

I don't think it's true, and am certain in some faces it's not, for any of the half-dozen or so autistic people whose parents I know well enough to say.

From:

loligo

I have never noticed such a pattern. Are there any other commonalities between the autistic people that you're thinking of? (Like, did you meet most of them in a particular setting that might attract people recovering from bad parenting?)

From:

lilysea

I have an autistic friend with a narcissist mother,

but I also have autistic friends WITHOUT narcissist mothers,

and a non-autistic friend with a narcissist parent, so...

From:

pauraque

My brother is autistic (though I'm not) and our father is a narcissist, and I have an autistic friend whose mother is a narcissist. But I can also think of autistic people without narcissistic parents and narcissistic parents without autistic children. It's possible there's a trend but I don't see it in my small sample size.

What I would venture to say, based on my personal experiences, is that people with narcissistic traits may be particularly ill-equipped to meet the needs of a kid with autism, since a parent who lacks empathy and perceives their child's "bad" or "embarrassing" behavior as a negative reflection on themselves and a threat to their own perfection is going to respond to that behavior in some very counterproductive ways. The dynamic is certainly... distinct. And that may lead us to notice it more and look for evidence that confirms it's a trend.

From:

ironed_orchid

That is a very good way of putting it.

From:

monanotlisa

That is a good theory about visibility and presentation.

My other thought was that people with brain patterns deviating from some norm* setting may have a higher genetic likelihood of passing on deviating connectivity in the brain. But until I see some solid data for that I'd be careful to make any assumptions; human beings are too complex, and neuroscience is still catching up.

* I'm saying this because one of my friends once told me that "only 7% of people have normal brains," but they may have made that up, although they did go on to get a PhD in Psychology, and a Dr. habil, so.

From:

conuly

When I first (not very consciously) noted this pattern, no. Most of the autistics I knew came from autistic-specific forums.

Later... maybe? But not on purpose, exactly.

Though come to think of it, there is a commonality. I said "at least one narcissistic parent", but for at least half of them it's exactly one, and the other is a shitty parent but probably on the spectrum. Maybe their autistic parent was less primed to defend against narcissistic bullshit?

Edited Date: 2017-12-18 06:13 pm (UTC)

From:

conuly

That's a possibility.

From:

conuly

Oh, it's definitely the case that people who are neurologically atypical in one area will tend to be atypical in other areas (for example, there is a small, but real, correlation between autism and transgender and left-handedness) and that these things are hereditary in weird ways.

From:

conuly

Well, it's definitely not true for every person, and I didn't think that one, thank goodness :)

From:

monanotlisa

Now that is interesting.

From:

conuly

Indeed. And this one is not anecdata, though anecdata is how I noticed it. (Almost all my transgender friends are on the spectrum.) There are legit studies about this.

I'm scared to try to look up for actual studies about this one I'm asking about, though, because of the strong tendency for people to try to conflate autism and sociopathy due to a wild misunderstanding of the concept of empathy.

Edited Date: 2017-12-18 06:07 pm (UTC)

From:

zhelana

I do not have a narcissistic parent - though my own autism might have been misdiagnosed schizophrenia as no doctor has said anything about it since the schiz diagnosis. I still have a lot of the traits though.

My aunt may be a bit of a narcissist though - so maybe those genes run through my father's family?

From:

konsectatrix

I suspect you might have multiple cases of autistics not recognizing narcissistic folks (because honestly, that one person that doesn't make a lick of sense but seems to like you is just an Nth degree version of NT people that also don't make a lick if sense in many if the same ways) and just rolling with it.

Edit: As for your other thought, yeah, ppl have noticed this trend. An online friend calls a certain organization "Autism Would Speak If Narcissistic Personality Disorder Would STFU For A Minute."

Edited Date: 2017-12-18 07:36 pm (UTC)

From:

wendelah1

I only know one family who have children with autism. They had six children between them, two with other partners, and four during their marriage. The two older children are neurotypical. Three of the four children they had together have autism. I'm not a clinician but as far as I know, neither parent is narcissistic.

I don't know anyone personally that I would call a narcissist. One of my parents and a sibling are pretty self-absorbed, though not to the point of being abusive. Selfish is how I would describe them.

From:

alatefeline

I'm an outlier data point for you, then. I'm autistic. Neither of my parents is either autistic or narcissistic.

I think they're both ... autism cousins, maybe ... but neither one is armchair-diagnosable with anything that I can tell. My Mom probably comes closer. My Dad is reserved, gentle, prefers to work with his hands, cares deeply about a lot of things, has long-term intense interests in his hobbies, likes to organize things correctly, is incredibly well-read and scientifically-minded but left formal education partway through college, BUT, he is also highly socially competent, well-spoken, good at abstractions, able to prioritize others readily, laid back about other's actions. My Mom is often anxious, emotionally easily flustered, gets disorganized easily, is able to handle a lot of social-emotional labor such as phone calls and travel plans but doesn't actually enjoy doing them, worries about being perceived poorly by other people, is sometimes rigid about what she wants other people to do or easily upset, BUT, she is also a soothing presence, has systems that mostly work for her to organize things, offers to set plans up for other people but has learned to let them do it for themselves too, enjoys social gatherings a lot as long as she's had the chance to get ready, and is flexibly willing to be outgoing and social or to entertain herself with a book and tea.

That said, I think that a correlation is certainly possible. That wouldn't necessarily mean that the phenomenon of A [parents of children with autism making their alleged advocacy all about themselves] is caused in any large part by B [a predisposition towards adults with narcissism having offspring with autism]. I think that A [the self-absorbed 'autism parent' phenomenon] is fully explainable in terms of the cultural forces at work given C1 [the shear between common experiences such as trying to be a 'good parent' given implicit ableist expectations of a child's social and intellectual development,] C2 [trying to help a child who is often genuinely suffering,] C3 [trying to relate to a child who is very different than the parent,] and C4 [trying to comply with peer pressure on how to do parenting and do parenting of a specific 'type' of kid.] Which is not to say that that can't dovetail perfectly with narcissism to make for a monster-parent; but I think that the whole all-about-me-autism-parent phenomenon is widespread precisely because of the existence of numerous *neurotypical*, stressed-out parents of neurodivergent, stressed-out kids in our ableist society. Also, I think it's false to state that parents of children with other neurodivergences or disabilities *don't* commonly get into the mindset of constantly explaining their child, fixing their child's behavior, advocating for their child's alleged disability needs rather than their child's individual needs, and so on, even if it's less cohesively organized. I have definitely seen parents doing this, in the school setting, with young children who have some special needs but no diagnosis and are probably not autistic, with children who are dyslexic or anxious or younger/smaller/developmentally younger than peers but whose biggest problem is parental nerves, with kids with specific neurological conditions I won't go into here but definitely lie in the realm of needing extensive support, and so on. As well as an interesting inverse where parents are somehow okay with their children being constantly 'in trouble' but don't want to have a support plan for unsafe behavior cross over into actually talking about special education services. Bad parenting comes in lot of specific flavors.

I imagine numbers that are remotely reliable will be EXTREMELY difficult to find in this case. I'm going to go out on a limb below with what I think could be reasons why...

(Anyone who knows more statistics than a couple of educational-data focused grad classes is MORE THAN welcome to correct me here...) One, there may not have been a study done just to look at the overlap of these soceific conditions. Two, any study that would in theory collect this data might have missed it, since involving *families* rather than individuals could mean longer time frame and/or getting similar rigorous data for people of different generations ... so anything except very large studies might well have rates of people dropping out or just not getting fully recorded that may make any small or subtle effects fall out of what's statistically notable. Three, both autism spectrum disorder and narcissistic personality disorder (using the DSM-5 terms since they'd be current even though I have a LOT of issues with the DSM-5) have patterns of being diagnosed more or less frequently by gender, by race, and by co-morbid conditions, in ways that have been shown to match up with social stereotypes about hysterical women and emotionally unavailable men, so there's already some missing people in both categories. Four, even if the data on 'this many kids diagnosed with X have one parent diagnosed with Y' been collected and published, it might not have been published in a way that draws attention to the link you're looking for. Five, it's really hard to extrapolate from statistics on how many people have specific diagnoses to how many people have traits clustering with a diagnosis but not at a clinically diagnosable level, but it seems the frequency of the traits of narcissistic personality + child with autism + not-good parenting is what you're actually looking for.

Which brings me to a final point. I think as someone with autism, and with little to no understanding of narcissistic personality disorder, I shouldn't speculate about it. But I know that the stereotype of someone 'acting autistic' has very little to do with the reality of having AS, so I think that it's like;y that the stereotype of someone 'acting narcissistic' is a poor representation of people who have NP. So are you wondering about parents who have that diagnosis, parents who act in accordance with that stereotype, or both? Because they aren't the same thing. I am trying to be sure that I don't conflate them in the course of talking about this admittedly interesting question. I think I've probably screwed up by now, so, well, I guess people can tell me how to fix it if they want, because my mind is spinning its gears.

From:

alatefeline

Agreed. I think I may have edged up to this thought and failed to fully formulate it; I'm glad someone did.

From:

alatefeline

And other oddities - asymmetries and mirrorings and shapes of body parts being slightly different than average because of different rates of growth - that aren't necessarily neurological, too. I'm Aspie and I have several small but notable asymmetries, one being the scar from a partial extra pinkie finger on my right hand. I have stubby fingers with distinct webbing, too. But while there are conditions that could cause that and autism both, I don't have them. Some kind of link is likely, but how it works is a mystery.

From:

alatefeline

Sorry I got a bit carried away with my replies. *thwaps self with pillow*

From:

boxofdelights

Anecdata: I know two women with autistic children. Both women are lovely, and are devoted to careers of helping people (one priest, one doctor -- which doesn't preclude you being a narcissist, I've known some narcissistic doctors, but in these cases, hearing them talk about their work, I'm confident they are not). Both of their spouses are such introverts that I have no idea whether they have any narcissistic traits!

From:

conuly

In the past, you didn't qualify for a diagnosis of autism if you had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and if you weren't spot on you got the schiz diagnosis even if it wasn't wholly appropriate. I don't know what your situation is, but it's not impossible that your doctors are still thinking it's an either/or situation.