Study challenges the belief that high IQ autistic individuals always struggle with daily tasks. First, autistic people can learn life skills. Second, IQ alone is not a good way to understand a person’s strengths, challenges, and growth potential.
Study challenges the belief that high IQ autistic individuals always struggle with daily tasks
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**Study challenges the belief that high IQ autistic individuals always struggle with daily tasks**
A recent study published in the journal [*Autism Research*](https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.70280) suggests that autistic individuals with average or higher cognitive abilities often develop daily living skills that match their intelligence over time. The findings provide evidence that when a gap between intelligence and life skills does occur, it tends to emerge gradually during childhood rather than being present from birth. This challenges the common assumption that autistic people with average or high intelligence will always struggle with everyday tasks.
These findings offer an optimistic perspective on development and learning for the autistic population. Clarke highlighted two main lessons she hopes the public will take away from the project.
“First, autistic people can learn life skills. It may take more time, support, and opportunities for practice than it does for neurotypical individuals, but we should not assume that being autistic means someone cannot learn to complete daily living tasks or live independently,” Clarke said.
“Second, IQ alone is not a good way to understand a person’s strengths, challenges, and growth potential,” Clarke said. “We should not rely solely on cognitive ability to infer what they may be capable of learning and achieving in the future.”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aur.70280
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IME People have a cartoonishly simplistic view of what autism is so this is pretty unsurprising to me
honestly IQ has been known to be a terrible proxy for actual adaptive functioning for decades. it’s wild that so many clinical and state support systems still use it as a strict cutoff for services
My son has repeatedly said “I don’t want to be gifted; I need to be able to put on my own underwear”. Now I just need him to start reading scientific papers…
The funny thing about it is the things we struggle with are often not what people expect
It’s almost like IQ is completely misunderstood and borderline useless as a metric today.
My issues as an autistic person in accomplishing daily tasks come from childhood trauma more than anything. Growing up autistic in our society practically guarantees it, everything is systematized yet the systems aren’t built for us, and somehow we are to blame for this.
My boundaries were constantly violated, my feelings rarely respected, my sensory issues were simply not believed and it was a moral failing on my part. Nobody would explain anything to me and at first I thought that’s because as a society we hadn’t gotten there yet, we hadn’t figured out how to handle it but we would.
But as an adult I’ve found that all the answers were already there but the people around me either didn’t know or didn’t care. Just like how we’ve known animals experience pain and emotions for a very long time but was easier for society to pretend otherwise. Neurotypicals are so very good at pretending, and not joining them in their backwards ass delusions is a criminal offense.
Anyway; it’s tough to control for trauma when studying autism. We’re basically all traumatized
Anecdote: I was never diagnosed as autistic as a child, but I strongly suspect that’s because back in the 1960s autistic diagnosis was reserved for what would now be considered extreme cases. My brother eventually was, my son has been and we are all of the same nature. The last time I checked my IQ, aged 70, it was 130. Which is a considerable drop from what I got on IQ tests as a child. I was a nerd, I was bullied, I had no friends. But I still got on a Cambridge University science degree which set up a good career which I’ve just retired from. Still have difficulty making friends etc., but no problems with navigating daily life.
In my experience at home, we’ve all got different chores we are okay to do at different times, and just hope it all pans out, and sometimes we’re all equally struck by some issue and they dont get done for a while.
If I wasn’t able to do my daily tasks (like waking up on time, do the regular chores a household has and everything else) nothing would get done.
But then again; most people still have a very outdated idea of what autism looks like, especially in women.
People still using IQ as a predictive tool for an individual in 2026 is crazy