You're not wrong, but there are usually signs as a child that a parent notices and goes to a doctor for. Unfortunately you aren't born with mental or physical diseases you have printed on your chest. OP may be very low on the spectrum, meaning he's high functioning and displaying few signs, and his parent dismissed them as "quirks".

Usually yes, but some parents don't even get their kids tested despite noticing some unusual or different behaviour from their child. Some forms of autism don't manifest fully until the individual is older - it really varies.

Childhood intervention has been more common in the past decade or two. But for people like me (and maybe OP), mild/functional autism wasn't on the radar of parents and teachers. The only person I ever knew with autism growing up was a kid who couldn't talk much and had violent outbursts all the time. He was on the extreme end of the spectrum. Anything less than something like that would fly totally under the radar where I'm from. Now I'm in OP's shoes, and am exploring the possibility of being somewhere on the spectrum as an adult.

I think it was only within the past 15 or so years that the autism spectrum has broadened. It is possible that when OP was a child they hadn't been looking for the milder signs yet. (Incidentally that's why there's been an increase of diagnoses of children among the autism spectrum--not because there are more, just the doctors have become better at recognizing the signs)

It gets missed, especially for people that can pass as just being quirky (so called high functioning people, basically) which is what happened with me. I didn't know I had Asperger's with ADHD symptoms until I was nineteen. The good thing is with a diagnosis, you can get help working around it.

And sometimes parents don't tell their kids in an attempt to "normalize" them. I was diagnosed as a kid, but not told until earlier this year, and I'm 23.

You're not wrong, but it varies depending on a lot of factors, including the way autism expresses itself in that particular person, gender and race. Autistics who learn to talk on time and have better social skills tend to be missed until they're older, and women and people of colour tend to be misdiagnosed until they're much older. For example, I wasn't diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum until I was seventeen.

Because if you're that low on the spectrum, they basically are.

My mother didn't get diagnosed with autism until she was around 45. After she had my little brother diagnosed, she found she understood and had experienced a lot of the symptoms and got herself tested. I think if it wasn't for getting my brother tested she would have just plodded along in life as usual, thinking she was a bit different and never being able to explain why.

The FML doesn't have a gender marker but bear in mind that females with Autism Spectrum Disorders are often diagnosed much later than their male counterparts because symptoms present differently. For instance, my Asperger's wasn't diagnosed until I was 24 mainly due to the fact that all my symptoms were *always* chalked up to various mental illnesses. Also, Autistic children grow up to be Autistic adults. Lots of people seem to forget this.

Very wrong sadly. autism was relatively recently discovered. and it has been even more recently discovered that autism covers a huge spectrum. not everyone with autism will be immediately obvious. Most are highly functional and have jobs, family and friends, they're missed because they don't fit the stereotypical autism box.

That's horrible your parents should have told you

Yeah, depending on the type of autism. I have Asperger's and didn't get diagnosed until I was 10, which is pretty late for any congenital condition.

Maybe OP has Asperger's Syndrome. That was only added to the spectrum when the DSM-V was released. I remember having to go in for a whole new evaluation, repeating all the same tests that I'd already taken three years previously, when I was initially diagnosed with Asperger's.

Lol I forgot that I'd replied to this already :P

This was amazingly said .

The biggest challenge that autistic people face is the ignorance of other people.