Recognition? — Young Authorship
by Maurice Frank
Consider, if you would, self worth. If you have known depression, you may identify keenly with the importance of holding on to the good qualities in yourself, that independently of the antics of the world around you, you matter and your nice qualities are solidly real. Aspies should be good at this: if the way we judge truth and life is logical and not driven by group psychology, then so is how we see ourselves. If anything is outstandingly worth being an aspie for, it's this independence from the fickle flow of peer groups. The other side of this can be an intense feeling for social fairness, and pain when it fails.
I am a child author. This is generally agreed a nice thing to be. If you treasure the strengths of aspies, as is rather the point of services, then you have to help us affirm this virtue, child authorship. There is fantastic emotional importance in it, as there should be in any endeavour that is there for any person to choose if only they are free. But free is exactly what children are not, in the hands of forces in both school and social services concerned only with power to occupy children's time for dictated purposes. The undeniability of these systems' failiures has been a key element in AS gaining decent recognition at all. So you can see there would be negative life effects we need to assert our worth by fighting to put right, not by accepting.
It's one of those uncomfortable things that are important to make widely known: that there is a sinister missing generation of child authors, including me. In the era of high volume and abusively tight enforcement of school homework, since 1978, I challenge anyone to look up the record and see that no child author has emerged to success, without having some special factor in their life outside school to protect them from homework ruining it. They might be home educated, or had a writing opportunity given as a therapy, or were backed by a group with a special medical interest such as GFCF diet. I had no circumstantial luck like these: most children don't.
Criminally idiotic life ruining homework crushed my chance to complete a sci-fi novel. Clearly I never asked for that, or for the open wound of reading the words "It is not often that a 14 year old boy gets a book published" when it was my free right to achieve that too, it should have been allowed to happen, and instead it is missing from the stream of time as starkly as the books lost in the sacking of the Library of Alexandria. That was a famous collection of ancient Greek science and literature, long built up and eventually burnt down by a superstitious mob in 416AD, and remembered as a symbol of what rejecting knowledge means. It is not the case that any child with the ability to be an author can succeed on merit, but usually folk think it is, and with aspie child authors being a present phenomenon, it's emotionally important that the prominent autistic organisations raise public awareness of this one.
So, let's analyse the challenge of how to assert to society the positives we are entitled to, including "I am a child author", starting from a position of injustice that is really not at all radiantly jolly. For a start, it will be the caring type of positivity, rather than the exuberant type. This is good, it suits a serious minded aspie like me. What caring response are all child author experiences entitled to? - Recognition. This follows because you have to recognise a personal quality in order to be affirmative of it, and so does the world in relating to you. So you speak out for recognition, and if you are an aspie you list recognition of this issue as one of your needs, both to and through the growing aspie scene. You do it to reclaim for all the oppressed child authors that they shall be known for the personal quality of being child authors. To be who you really are, not what a man with too much power chose for you, is the difference between freedom and slavery. This is the most important positive you can ever have, so you don't let anyone stop you explaining the negative, the wrong done to the stolen generation of child authors. Out there on the net, which can be a tricky place if you are sensitive, some funny forces exist who would prefer this subject not spoken of, for reasons best known to themselves. Lives shall not be written off. By explaining the negative you uphold the positive, the truth of their child authorship, for a worldwide range of harmed people: child sweatshop labourers, survivors of all types of racist horrors, or they simply grew up under any form of dictatorship. You don't just tell them: be happy because you are now free in your adult lives. Every personal quality matters by right, including age specific ones. You learn from the past to avoid repeating it and to do folk justice.
Our recognition is even a positive for the ASD child authors who made it. They wished to be helpful, hence they need the ASD community not to let their successes become instead a cause of upset for the stolen generation child authors. Isn't it better for all parties that we all feel involved in making ASD life fairer, in recognising that we all have life problems and are all entitled to the same opportunities? If a child only succeeds in producing joint writing with heavy parental involvement, fine if that is what works for them, but that is not making it as a self sufficient child author, so they have that fact startlingly in common with us of the stolen generation. Looking out for comparisons like that can help self esteem, for the child in that position as well as for us. When a frustration is shared it breaks down divisions. There are 2 more positives: self esteem and sharing of information.
I retained a small positive item from what happened to me: for before it happened I was lucky enough to get child author publicity in Welsh newspapers: South Wales Echo 20 August 1980 and Western Mail 19 January 1982. After getting that recognition of my efforts at the time, clearly I am not left with nothing. The point of boasting of this is that it vindicates the whole truth of oppressed child authors, it lights up a historical record that we were there. You can refer to this to have the confidence to speak out, if you lack a record of your own. Please don't live in fear that no one will believe you were a child author.
Maurice Frank - revised February 2004