Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Assimilation? Rethinking Autism and Empathy in Parenting Advice
The latest piece from Autism Parenting Magazine, "Emotional Intelligence and Autism: Strategies for Development," aims to help parents support their autistic children. But in doing so, it risks reinforcing one of the oldest misunderstandings in autism discourse: that we lack emotion, empathy or the capacity to connect.
Let’s be clear: helping autistic kids with emotion regulation and communication is important. But if we start from the assumption that autism is a deficit to overcome — rather than a neurotype to understand — we miss the point. Worse, we teach children that their emotional style is wrong before they ever learn it’s valid.
The Frame Shapes the Findings
The article divides emotional intelligence into four components: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. In each domain, autistic children are said to "struggle" or "lack ability."
But who defines those abilities? Who sets the standard for "appropriate" emotional expression? When the benchmark is neurotypical norms — eye contact, tone matching, facial mirroring — autistic emotion becomes something to fix, not understand.
There’s no mention of the Double Empathy Problem. No exploration of sensory-based regulation. No recognition that “low empathy” is often a misreading of how autistic people express care, not whether we feel it.
What Emotional Intelligence Leaves Out
Autistic people feel deeply. Sometimes too deeply. We may not always show it in ways neurotypicals recognize, but we live in emotional landscapes — shaped by pattern, movement, sensation and context. When those realities are ignored, emotional intelligence becomes emotional assimilation.
This isn’t a failure of parenting. It’s a failure of the frameworks we give parents.
Toward Something Better
What if emotional support for autistic kids wasn’t about correction, but connection? What if it made space for:
Emotional regulation strategies that honor sensory needs, not just behavioral compliance
Communication tools that don’t require masking to be understood
Empathy practices that go both ways — teaching parents to read autistic emotion as much as teaching autistic kids to perform theirs
Parenting advice rooted in deficit won’t get us there. But parenting rooted in mutual understanding — that will.
A Word to Parents
If you read the article and found it helpful, you’re not wrong. You’re trying to support your child in a world that often doesn’t.
But your child doesn’t need to be more like other people to be worthy of support. They need support that starts from who they are — not who the world tells them to become.
So the next time someone offers strategies to "build emotional intelligence," ask what kind of intelligence they mean. And whose emotions they’re trying to make more legible.
Because the goal isn’t to make autistic children easier to manage.
It’s to make the world easier for them to live in.