Autistics and Being a Night Owl

MANY AUTISTICS PREFER THE NIGHT-TIME - LEAVING THEM OUT OF SYNC WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD

I am likely stating the obvious when I reflect from my own (AuDHD/PDA Profile) life that very many autistics in the still of night:

- get a much lower sensory load 

- face far reduced social demands

- see our focus and flow enhanced

- have more autonomy and control

- experience less observation and surveillance

- get access to resources often otherwise shared

- are able to self-regulate better

- can sense subtle interoceptive signals more easily

- enjoy more consistency and predictability

- find task initiation more accessible to us

- get to make less decisions

- sync better with our own life rhythms

- can build a world more suited to our needs

- are helped by greater emotional safety and lower vigilance

- are freer to autonomously and authentically be ourselves

- can pursue interests deeply, monotropically

- find a different cognitive mode can operate

- are no longer pressured by performance and masking demands

- feel we own our time rather than earn/borrow it from others

- think and feel better, with greater quality output

- deal with and file things away better, satisfyingly.

If the daytime world is to compete against the nighttime world --- de-facto competition between what is for many the non-autistic world versus the autistic world --- then I recommend to parents an exercise that follows from all that - one that might help them see how complex this all is, and why so many parents in the end either resort to coercion and overriding, imposing demands around scheduling on autistic's lives... or compromise as much as possible.

Take each of the above, and collaboratively (with your autistic child or adult) write down one or more ways that the daytime environment could be altered till it is BETTER or at least less hostile to the way an autistic is, or leans. Is that, cumulatively, even possible?  Of course a few changes could be made, but all?

It can commonly feel like bad parenting otherwise, when it is all an extraordinary response to an extraordinary situation, an extraordinary person, and a world that largely fails autistics and merrily goes on to DENY the consequences.