Just one I pulled up and skimmed a bit:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/31/5391233...

It's not something I keep at my fingertips. I don't have any daughters.

There is always a grey zone of some bandwidth between "I simply can't do it at all" and "I just don't want it bad enough." Expecting people to just want it bad enough can do them a lot of harm, but sometimes it can (also) be the push they need to force themselves to do the hard thing and make it work, though it tends to really cost them.

When there is too much pressure to perform combined with inability to perform and lack of support for helping them perform, this can go really bad places. But, there is some truth to the idea that if you just insist X is not okay, you get more compliance, even though it is harder for some people to comply than others.

I personally think that a very large factor in the so-called autism epidemic is that society has changed. Rather than recognizing that element, we blame individual children as being defective.

Functional adults are made, not born. Humans raise our children for many years. If you don't intuitively just know social stuff works this way, some of it can be learned. It helps enormously if there is a sympathetic adult giving instruction instead of being all "And the beatings shall continue until morale improves."

My dad was nearly 41 when I was born. He was literally old enough to be my grandfather and, like most people of his era, he grew up on a farm with no TV and general lack of modern noise makers that simply didn't exist back then.

My parents both simply expected the house to be quiet so they could sleep. I moved home during my divorce and I was very struck by this.

No one diagnosed my parents with "sensory issues." No one labeled them because they expected quiet in the house. They weren't determined to be excessively sensitive noise and in need of getting over it for the convenience of other people.

They were just old and things being quiet was their norm and it was their house I was living in, so it was their rules. You have to respect that.

Life has gotten a lot noisier. People tend to live in larger cities instead of smaller communities where they need to interact with a great many more people, plus moving around is much more the norm. Life has sped up a whole lot. Etc. Etc.

But we don't go "Wait a minute. Kids used to grow up with a smaller number of social contacts in quieter surroundings with much less overall pressure. Maybe we don't simply have some unexplainable epidemic of socially defective children. Maybe the world has changed in ways that children weren't designed for."

Nope, we just assume that the ones who can't take the noise and can't rapidly adapt to high levels of change and can't cope with a jillion different people are missing something and are a nuisance requiring special accommodation.

I've made a lot of lifestyle changes to accommodate my needs and the needs of my adult sons who still live with me. I forget how impaired my oldest can be in noisy, crowded settings because we've arranged our lives where he almost never has to spend time in such settings. And he's vastly more functional than he's supposed to be capable of because I've never told him he's defective for not being a social butterfly and preferring his peace and quiet and only wanting a strong connection to close family members.

You know, kind of like his grandparents that no one thought had anything wrong with them for having such preferences.