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Mar 22, 2023Liked by Ozy Brennan

Regarding point thirteen (there seem to be two points thirteen, I mean the first one) - if your child is behind expectations for their age group for knowing what other people are thinking or feeling, or constantly finds this point difficult and becomes unhappy every time you bring up this topic, then maybe see if you can get them assessed for autism spectrum conditions (or whatever they're called this week, apparently calling it a "disorder" is bad now).

You'll have two great advantages over my parents' generation: 1. there's a lot more information and understanding about autism in general, and 2. most of the information isn't written by Bruno Bettelheim (the stuff that is, you can safely ignore).

My own experience as a child, as far as I can remember, is that adults were noticeably disappointed with me every time I tried my best to answer a "what do you think they're feeling" question, even if they were trying to hide this from me. I also sort of remember that after a while, I decided it wasn't worth putting effort into trying to answer these questions as I'd be told I'd got it wrong anyway (often with some kind of "you're not even trying" or "you're not paying attention" when I was), so I might as well just make something up at random and get the same reply.

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"If you want your children to be able to name their feelings, talk to them about your feelings (in an age-appropriate manner, of course)."

...I am confused about what age-inappropriate talking-about-my-feelings would look like. Is this just a matter of "they're missing background information, inferential gaps are large, and so they might have trouble following statements like 'I'm feeling something sort of social-anxiety-adjacent, except unusually well-justified by my genuine endorsed expectations of how this interaction is likely to go' due to missing context"? Is this a "don't admit to feeling fear when trying to model fearlessness" thing? Or are there other angles on age-appropriateness that I'm missing here?

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