By Maxfield Sparrow
I am an autistic person who has been using the internet as a social prosthetic device since 1983. I was born in 1967 and began therapy in 1972, so the iPad didn’t exist and the only screen time parents worried about was the five channels of broadcast television available twenty hours a day. TV was fine, but my real passion was books. I was hyperlexic and from a very early age I had an unquenchable thirst for written language. My obsession with reading was considered pathological, and adults took my books away to try to force me to socialize with other children instead.
It didn’t work. But it is sadly common that those of us with developmental disabilities are held to higher standards than everyone else. As children, once we are identified, everything about us is scrutinized. Well-meaning adults, fearing for our future, hold us to higher standards of everything from politeness to academic discipline to the age-appropriateness of our interests to the ways we move through the world. We’re not allowed to “get away with” the things non-disabled kids do every day.
So it doesn’t surprise me that a growing field of academic research seeks to answer the question: How can we cut down on autistic children’s screen time? And it doesn’t surprise me (though it does distress me) that all the studies I have read were using the effects of screen time on typically developing children as supporting evidence for why it is so important to limit autistic screen time.
A representative example: A study from 2022 reduced children’s screen time from an average of over five hours per day to only 5 minutes per day and declared the intervention a success because it was “tolerated,” parents reported less stress, and the children displayed fewer observable autistic symptoms. I understand the difficulty of assessing the internal well-being of a three-year-old, but we autistic people need researchers to develop better criteria for success than our symptoms, compliance, and manageability. I’m more compliant when I have a fever, more compliant when I’m too depressed to care anymore, more compliant when dissociating from a trauma response. Not all reduction of symptoms is a success. Symptoms are just what other people see; they aren’t what we are experiencing inside.
We know that the same stimulus can affect autistic people quite differently from our neurologically typical peers, yet the literature reveals researchers using dozens of studies of how screen time affects typically developing children to jump past the question of how it affects us and go straight into developing strategies for taking our screens away. How is it rigorous science to adjust the behavior of a minority population based on how the majority responds without first verifying that the members of the minority are affected in the same ways? How do we respond when researchers use studies done exclusively on men to shape therapies for women? Autistic people were excluded from the screen time studies in the first place, by researchers who knew the diagnosis would be a confounding factor in the research. How is it that the studies that intentionally excluded us are then used to justify treatment options for autistic children?
I’ve had so many parents, teachers, and case managers tell me about autistic people in their lives whose access to an iPad was taken from them because the person with authority viewed the iPad as an optional toy rather than a powerful tool for an autistic person. Even if they’re “just playing,” autistic kids using devices are engaged in the powerful work of growing, developing, and enjoying the one and only life they’ve been given to live.
Using screen time to play may prepare kids for a future in which the internet will be an important social prosthetic for them.
Or not. To paraphrase Camus, “Nobody realizes that some autistic people expend tremendous energy merely to fail at passing as neurotypical.” Research is beginning to catch up with what we’ve been telling the world for decades: it takes a lot of energy to try to be “indistinguishable from our peers”. Not all of us are able to perform neurotypicality. Some of us literally kill ourselves trying to maintain the act.
For those of us who go on to be social or who work at school and jobs, letting us have unstructured screen time as children, whether in addition to structured screen time or on its own, will pave the way for more connection with the world in the future, whatever that connection ends up looking like. It won’t always be social or vocational. But everyone deserves access to the tools that allow them to connect with the world in the ways that foster their well-being.
And in the meantime, the line between playing games and being social gets fuzzy. People socialize online through playing games together. And games can be a refuge from a world of bullies while kids wait to be old enough to find friends who accept them as they are. (Psst… the internet can be a great way to find those people, whether remote or local.) Books were a similar refuge for me. In childhood, they were a refuge from a world of struggle. Now I connect with other people socially and professionally through reading and writing. Taking my books away served no positive purpose in my life. It’s time to stop pathologizing autistic people for wanting to engage in things we enjoy and excel at.
There are currently autistic lawyers, professors, scientists, and more who didn’t speak as children. There are artists, poets, lobbyists, and more who do not speak as adults. More and more autistic people are graduating university without being able to speak, except through typing. Over 2% of U.S. children are autistic. Where are the lifespan development studies we need? What does screen time do to autistic children? What does it do for them? Why are we trying to take away screens before answering those questions?
Researchers justify strategies to separate autistic people from their tablets and computers by citing statistics showing autistic youth using their tablets far more for gaming and less for socializing than neurotypical youth, but a systematic review of twenty years of studying internet communication found autistic people talking about having more control over how they communicate with others, feeling more calm during online interactions than in-person socialization, feeling connected to other autistic people, and being able to take part in a global community of others who share their neurotypical and identity. Autistic people (who often get short-changed on sex education in school) reported learning about sexuality, accessing queer resources, and finding romance or sex online much easier than in person. These experiences are what autistic people risk missing out on entirely when access to the internet is interrupted or removed.
Whether for socializing, research, work, pursuing personal interests, or unwinding from living in a world designed for people with a different neurology, internet skills are the autistic end run. Don’t assume that all screen time is damaging to all people in the same ways.
Maxfield Sparrow is an autistic author, artist, advocate, and speaker.
