In Part I of this post, I raised the concern that many young autistic people can become dependent on their parents or support systems, and that many young autistic people aren’t being expected to succeed in adulthood.  As a result, they are unprepared for the adult transition.

In Part I, I recommended that we should do more to prepare young people for the demands of adulthood in the years before they pass that magical dividing line and become adults.  In Part II, I’m going to make what almost sounds like an opposite argument: that, after people pass over the line and become adults, we should do more to allow a gentle transition.

As I said in Part I, our social system expects everything to change when people cross this magical line into adulthood.  Suddenly, transitioning youth are faced with different environments, different support systems, different expectations.  There is little continuity.  It’s difficult for neurotypical people to transition into adulthood, and many struggle with it.[1]  Autistic people, who already exert themselves trying to cope in a world designed for neurotypical people, will find transition an even bigger challenge.

This is why I suggest a staggered transition.  When I started attending university, I remained at home.  I moved from a high school academic context to a university academic context, and that was a manageable adjustment on its own, without bringing independent living into the picture.  It would have been much more difficult if I had moved and started living in an unfamiliar city at the same time!  That’s why I always urge college-aspiring autistics to attend a local institution, if there is one in their community.  It’s always possible to transfer later, once we’ve adapted to the college academic context.  By the time I graduated with my BA and went off to attend grad school, I was well-adapted to the environment of the college and the psychology research lab, so I was able to focus on the transition to independent living.  I broke the transition into stages; I didn’t try everything at once.[2]  Others might attend a local “community college” and then transfer to a more distant university after a couple of years.

That’s just an example of what I’m suggesting we do in early adulthood.  We can stagger the transition as much as possible, rather than expecting the autistic person to adjust to a totally different world all at once.

Now, I do want to be clear about one thing that probably shouldn’t be delayed: I do think it’s very important that people do something in the way of paid work or postsecondary study as soon as they’re out of high school.  As I mentioned in Part I, there’s a large group of very able autistic people who will never work or attend postsecondary education in adulthood (Taylor et al., 2015).  Once one gets in the habit of not working or studying, I imagine it would be much harder to break that habit.  Autistic people who aren’t working or studying have poorer mental health (Knüppel et al., 2018), and mental health challenges and learned helplessness will only make it harder to break into the labour market.  Besides, not working or studying leaves one’s resume blank of experience.

But even if someone is working or studying, that still leaves many other new demands of adulthood that we can postpone a little if we want.  Many autistic people will feel pressure from society to demonstrate their independence, but I think it’s perfectly acceptable for us to be on a different developmental timeline.  And let’s not forget that many neurotypicals today will continue to live with their parents for years (or decades) after entering adulthood.

In fact, when you think about it, even the idea of the fully-independent young adult leaving home to pursue their dreams is still a very recent construct.  It’s only really been made possible by the greater mobility (socially and geographically) that is possible in the modern world, compared to the rest of history and prehistory, as well as by our individualistic culture.  Thus, although we have tended to think of independence as the norm in our society, in most human societies, young adults have remained alongside their parents for much longer.  And, as rising costs of postsecondary education and housing give young adults today a greater financial incentive to remain with their parents, we may be drifting back towards the historical norm.

And ultimately, Sara Sanders Gardner (2018), the autistic director of the outstanding Autism Spectrum Navigators program at Bellevue College, reminds us that nobody is truly independent.  We are part of a vast society, and all of us depend on the activities of countless other people, many of whom we will never meet.  I didn’t make the computer on which I’m typing these words, nor do I run the servers that host this blog, nor do I even have a good sense of how any of that technology works.  I also didn’t grow the food I ate for lunch.  Even the ideas in this post aren’t entirely original: my views have doubtless been influenced by many other sources over the years.  As Gardner concludes, humans are interdependent beings, not independent beings.

Footnotes

[1] As an aside, I’m a bit baffled by the relatively large number of developmental psychology studies focusing on adolescence and the relatively small number dealing with adult transition.  You would think, given the challenge inherent in adult transition, that psychologists would do more to study it.  Especially since college undergraduates are such an easy population to study!

I guess psychology researchers got in the habit of studying adolescence back when adolescence was a period of emerging adulthood, and even though adulthood is delayed these days, people haven’t changed over yet?

I’m also a bit skeptical about the topics within adolescence researchers focus on.  There’s a lot about risk-taking, drugs, etc., but I feel like there’s still relatively little work on the increasing complexity of social relationships through middle and high school.

[2] Another big bonus: Living at home saves money.

References

Gardner, S. S. (2018, April 30). The danger of pursuing independence as a goal for autistic young adults. Stairway to STEM. Retrieved fromhttps://www.stairwaytostem.org/parents/interdependence-pillar/

Knüppel, A., Telléus, G. K., Jakobsen, H., & Lauritsen, M. B. (2018). Characteristics of young adults with autism spectrum disorder performing different daytime activities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3730-7

Taylor, J. L., Henninger, N. A., & Mailick, M. R. (2015). Longitudinal patterns of employment and postsecondary education for adults with autism and average-range IQ. Autism, 19(7), 785–793. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361315585643