My favorite response is: "and you don't "look" ignorant.'

We've stopped offering his diagnosis as any kind of explanation as people are just so proned to offer their opinions. Instead we usually say he's sensitive.

I TRY to give an educated answer- I am a teacher after all- I DO NOT usually sound as eloquent as the posters here. I DO have a great deal of thinking of as many snarky responses as I would like to say and then share them with the in crowd later. The truth is that people with normally developing children don't understand. How could they? How could any of us succinctly - on the spur of the moment - respond to asinine statements? I recommend coming up with a couple of responses you feel are adequate - some for polite people and some for those other kinds of people- memorize them and have done. Put your energy into your kiddos and your family and YOURSELF. Let the the world spin on...it's going to anyway.

We get some of the same responses. It is a good opportunity to educate people. I am graduating in July with my Elementary Education degree and you would not believe the educators I have come in contact with that really do not know much about Autism.

Stay strong because after a while this nonsense will drive you nuts. Tell the person who said it that the statement is NOT helpful, that autism is a large spectrum and your child's symptoms do impact his life. BTW, the comment of the family member makes me so pissed off. I would tell them, "What you have said to me is in no way supportive. It's clear that the statement is made to make you feel better, because it dose absolutely nothing for us. In the beginning I allowed many people to minimize our experience because it made them feel better, well all it did was build resentment and now those people really are not in our lives.

I feel for you with people saying 'all kids could be autistic by definition' - people that don't live with it have no idea what a typical day is for us. It's fairly ignorant for someone to say to a family with ASD involved. And yes, when someone says he doesn't 'look' like he has it - I usually try and take it as an opportunity to educate the person in what Autism is, and often more importantly, what it is not.

As a flight attendant, I am in contact with 300-600 people a day on various flights, which by the numbers means between four and seven of them are likely autistic. Even as an ASD parent, I might only be able to pick out one or two, and it all falls back to the many, many faces Autism may show.

We all experience people's misunderstandings about the condition, and the only solution I can see is addressing them one by one as situations arise, and hope they can pass on the word.