Autism support urged to confront the ‘double empathy’ gap

Practitioners are being urged to treat communication breakdowns as a shared responsibility, rather than expecting autistic children alone to adapt to non-autistic norms.

In the eleventh instalment of her 12-part series on autistic experience, Jo Grace argues that one of the most persistent misunderstandings in autism support is the assumption that communication failures are caused by autistic people alone. Writing on Parenta, Grace says her own family life has shaped her thinking on neurodiversity, but the wider point is more practical than personal: if adults in early years and education settings want to support autistic children well, they need to stop treating misunderstanding as a one-way problem.

The idea she challenges has deep roots in autism theory. As Grace notes, influential work by Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith helped establish the long-standing view that autistic people lack social insight, empathy or the ability to understand other people’s perspectives. That framing has fed decades of teaching strategies and interventions designed to help autistic children adapt to non-autistic social norms. But newer research has pushed back against the notion that the difficulty sits only with autistic people.

Damian Milton’s double empathy problem, first set out in 2012, proposes that social misunderstanding is reciprocal rather than one-sided. Research associated with that theory suggests autistic people may communicate and connect more easily with one another, while non-autistic people can struggle just as much to interpret autistic intentions, emotions and styles of interaction. A 2020 study cited in Grace’s article found that “the misunderstanding goes both ways”, reinforcing the argument that mutual misreading, not individual deficit, is often at the heart of the problem.

Grace uses a simple language analogy to make the point accessible for practitioners: if an English speaker and a French speaker cannot understand one another, it would be absurd to assume that the French speaker is defective and must be taught to think, speak and behave like the English speaker. Yet that is effectively how autism has often been treated in practice. The better response, she argues, is to recognise communication as relational: both sides have a role, and both sides may need support.

That shift matters in everyday settings. Grace’s central recommendation is that practitioners should not only help autistic children navigate non-autistic expectations, but also help non-autistic adults and children understand autistic communication. She argues that training everyone in the differences they are likely to encounter can reduce confusion, ease social pressure and create space for autistic children to be themselves rather than performability being mistaken for progress. For parents and carers, the message is just as clear: if a child is misunderstood, it is worth asking not only what they need to change, but what the environment needs to learn.