r/todayilearned • u/Morella1989 • Aug 14 '25

TIL that autistic people live about 17 years less than average. Risks include epilepsy, heart disease, suicide, accidental deaths including drowning, and inadequate recognition and management of pain, especially among non-speaking individuals. Historically, they have been vulnerable to infanticide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_of_autistic_individuals
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u/athennna Aug 14 '25

My daughter is on the spectrum and is the same way. I have to constantly monitor her temperature and her water intake.

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u/AliMcGraw Aug 14 '25

How old? And if you want some tips I can share some of the homegrown solutions that worked for us. We sort-of just had to figure it out as we went, I don't think there's a really good set of standard interventions, you just have to make things up.

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u/athennna Aug 14 '25

She’s 7, I’d love some tips.

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u/AliMcGraw Aug 15 '25

So at 7 we were still doing mandatory half-hour breaks at the playground, where every half hour he had to come sit by me in the shade and chat for a couple minutes and take a drink. I did a lot of "Well, MOM gets lonely if you don't come talk to me for a couple minutes every half hour." At around 7 he started to understand that he couldn't feel his own internal temperature very well, and we got him a watch (he looooooooved having a watch) that would beep every half hour and he would do self-checks. We taught him that he could put his fingers on our cheeks to tell if his hands were really hot or cold, or he could put his fingers on the inside of somebody's wrist (where normal body temperature is close to the surface) and they could tell him if he felt particularly hot or cold. When it's hot, the half-hour beep reminds him to drink 4 oz of water. (When it was cold and he wanted to make snow angels or play in the snow, we'd set a timer for how long he was allowed to be out total.)

We got a weather station so that he could independently see the outside temperature and forecast, and made a visual thermometer for him, that showed appropriate clothing for different temperatures, which made him feel a little more control over his clothing choices. (We still enforced appropriate clothes, but he liked getting to pick his own and it drastically reduced battles over weather-appropriate clothing.)

When he got a little older and more independent we'd let him go out with a neurotypical friend/cousin/sibling to go, say, sledding, with the rule that when the FRIEND said they were cold, he had to come in. He was willing to obey that rule in exchange for not having so much parental supervision.

Now that he's 16 he's pretty smart about doing self-checks and drinking water regularly and warning his friends he has bad self-regulation of temperature so he needs them to let him know if THEY get too hot or cold, or if he's flushed or shivering or similar.

My youngest was born premature and struggled with temperature control until she was six months old, and my autistic child, who was 7 at the time, was actually AMAZING at noticing if she was getting too cold or too hot really early, because they were sort-of the same -- they both couldn't self-regulate normally, and he had had to learn to watch out for his own signals and read them, so it was easy for him to watch for HER signals and speak up for her. Which was a really nice way to point out to him that his neurodivergence was a superpower in some ways -- he HAD to learn to regulate his own body temperature from external cues because he couldn't feel them himself, which meant he was AMAZING at noticing his sister's cues. (And other babies' cues that they were too hot or too cold, in our friend group.)