Parent Asks How To Protect Son From ‘Catching’ Autism From His Friend, Gets A Wake-Up Call From The Commenters

While the internet can be an amazing place to learn about the world, unfortunately, not everyone uses that opportunity. Even with so much information about autism available at our fingertips, there are still some pretty ignorant people out there who believe nonsense and can’t find even 5 minutes to Google the scientific truth.

Case in point, one person’s incredibly insensitive question that they posed on Quora has gone viral, and internet users can’t believe that someone could be so ignorant. Somebody said that their son hangs out with an autistic child, exclaimed that they don’t want their kid to become autistic, and asked how they could “nip this problem in the bud.”

Well, Reddit user Kewlgemini06 shut the person down with a strongly-worded and witty answer. They didn’t hold back. Scroll down, have a read, and let us know what you think about the situation in the comments below, dear Pandas.

Somebody very ignorant about autism asked a question on Quora and was promptly shut down

Image credits: reddit.com

There’s a bit of drama surrounding the Quora screenshot, as some people appear to be trying to get a lot of karma on Reddit without crediting the original poster (there was even a mock trial on Reddit about this). Kewlgemini06 originally posted about their Quora comeback in Reddit’s r/autism community where their post got 11.2k upvotes.

The original poster’s answer got a lot of people’s attention and some saw it as an opportunity to get some of that popularity for themselves. So much so that some redditors posted Kewlgemini06’s Quora answer on different subreddits without properly crediting them. Most recently, the story got reposted on the r/MurderedByWords subreddit where it got over 62.9k upvotes and on the r/memes subreddit for over 147k upvotes.

But back to the main topic, there are a lot of misconceptions and myths about autism. For example, some people believe that those who have autism don’t want friends. Meanwhile, the truth is that some people with autism struggle with social skills which makes it hard for them to interact with others in the same way.

There’s another widespread myth that people with autism can’t feel or express any emotions. That’s not true: they simply communicate their emotions and perceive everyone else’s emotions in different ways. And no, autism doesn’t spread by talking to people who have autism! It’s a developmental disorder that appears during infancy or in childhood.