How would you rate your childhood?

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I get the impression that most of us on the Autism Spectrum had a lot of difficulties during their childhoods. I'm curious to know to how people look back on this. I will define childhood as that period between age five or six and age twelve or thirteen.

If I could go back to being one I would. To take away all this stress, anxiety and other crap for the opportunity to be feeling happy all the time with my mom and dad, I would do it in a heartbeat.

My childhood was tormented, and not very happy. But it could have been waaaaaaaaay worse.

What little I actually remember of my childhood was often filled with lots of isolation and temperamental arguments. There were some good times, but I'd say they only accounted for maybe 25% of it.

i can not "answer" your poll because the most positive of your options is still too negative for me to check.

i had quite a satisfactory childhood that i would not wish to trade for anything else.

i was adopted at 2 weeks old, and the family i was adopted into had 3 girls who were 11, 13 and 15 respectively.
my youngest step sister was quite a precocious girl and she had a baby at 15 years old and moved out of the family home to get married at that time.
the other 2 step sisters left home soon after, and by the time i was 5, i was the only child in the family home. it was very large and i had many rooms.

i was diagnosed with autism when i was less than 1 year old due to a plethora of symptoms, however it was realized that i was not mentally ret*d, and so i was given quite a "well lit stage" in order to communicate what i wanted to say to all the people in my life when i wished to say things.

my parents (step (which i did not know until i was 15 years old)) were very well off, and since i was effectively an "only" child for all of my childhood, i partook in the benefits of that wealth without hindrance from siblings.

i had 4 rooms in the main house when i was a child, and we had a 400 acre farm in beautiful countryside where i spent so many billions of thoughts whilst i was in the wilderness there.
my parents made allowances for my behaviour (given all things fairly considered), and my sisters were aghast that my parents treated me in a way that they would not have been treated if they had exhibited the same behaviour.
"whatever...." - was my attitude toward their disgruntlement.
my sisters grew rapidly to dislike me even when they were living at home because i was not interested in them when i was a baby. i did not look at their faces much even if they were grimmacing and trying to appeal to me.

they never posed a problem for me however, and i lived my childhood without much reference to them.

i went to a normal school (albeit with special classes to attend) until i was about 12 , and then i was sent (with my happily given permission) to an adolescent unit because they thought (and were probably correct) that i would never learn to connect with anyone in a normal unstructured setting (like primary (elementary) schools are).

the school i was sent to was an absolutely palatial estate (thomas walker estate), and it sprawled over 100 acres with manicured gardens and flowerbeds, and disused horse stables and other disused various cottages, as well as the sandstone mansion that comprised the school and living quarters.

it had a large theatre in it with a grand piano that i often went beserk on when i was agitated, and it had rope pulled lifts from the backstage up into bell towers that overlooked the city of sydney, and i used to (in company often) go up there to just ponder things or chat.
it had an east wing (the sleeping and recreation wing) and a west wing (the school) and a central building (huge) where the kitchens and dining room and the theatre and arts rooms etc were.

for all this, there were only 19 kids who were enrolled in the unit. what a blast? a hadful of kids with so much ground and empty houses to explore, and great psych nurses who were our minders after school etc.

my psychiatrist there was marie bashir who was the governor of NSW until recently, but at that time she was not famous, but she had an amazing personality. for those people who are autsralians, the next paragraph may be pertinent, but for others it would not be so much.
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her laugh rang out not loudly, but in a way that all ears were attuned to in a deep way. she was revered even then by everyone who she came in contact with, and when she laughed, all conversations stopped and all scrubbing motions(of the cleaner/s) stopped and their attention was drawn to what she may be laughing about.
she never seemed to even flinch in the light of the attention she got, and she remained purely spontaneous in all of her actions and i was very impressed by her.
what you see on TV since she attained the public eye is nothing compared to who she really is behind closed doors.

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so i had a very good childhood and even though i am quite abnormal in my approach to communication and connections (in real life), i nonetheless managed to step my way through happily.

Mine was traumatic. I first became suicidal at 10 years old.
I'm 44 now and am only beginning to recover.

I voted for the second option - it wasn't all fun and games, but I really have no room to complain. Looking back, however, I must have felt awfully lonely at times....but other than that, it was pretty average. My adolescence was rougher, but than again, that's a hard time for pretty much everybody,

I voted second. I see others had it worse than me so it makes mine look like nothing I went through and I was lucky I had understanding parents and a Mom who advocated for me. There was misunderstandings and teasing and bullying and I was suicidal in 6th grade and suffered a nervous breakdown and there was some trauma. But it doesn't make it unvalid just because others had it worse. It just shows me how much better my childhood was compared to others and how normal it was compared to abused children. I would say 6th grade was the worst when I was at my worst moments of my life.

Mine was a bit of a blur with the occasional traumatic event. There are spots of my childhood I remember clearly but they're all of traumatic stuff that happened to me or nightmares. The rest of it, I felt like I went through the motions of stuff without any clear understanding. I went to a mainstream elementary school and high school but no one ever explained the examinations to me or why I needed to study for them or what the hell I was studying for so I happily forgot each unit taught after the unit tests were over. No one explained to me why it wasn't acceptable to go roaming around the school field when I should have been in class. I got punished for playing truant for that. And no one explained to me that stuff I saw on TV were not to be reenacted in real life. Boy, I got into some trouble with that one. Childhood was at best, confusing, at worst, traumatic.

Mine was really quite traumatic, so not good at all.

Mine sure did had so many happy moments that I wish I could get back, I loved my neighbourhood and the people even if I never interacted with them I'm full of regret that I wish I did connect to all those people who I know I will never see again. My childhood also had so many isolation and loneliness. There were many deaths of many close people I still even after 10 years want to get back and still feel the great emptiness and gape of their loss.
My depressions started for me from age 6

Would rate it somewhere between the 3rd and 4th option. Not voting, because none of those options really capture how I feel about it. Suffice to say, I would gladly wipe out all memories of my family apart from my mum. I often wished I had been born into a different family.

I voted on the 3rd one. Although I was severely abused emotionally. I experienced very little psychical abuse.

My childhood had some rough patches, but things didn't go to hell until I was 13, so I wouldn't mind going back to childhood.

I think the reason I can remember my childhood as good is that for so long according to my mother I was oblivious to everything around me (which would explain why I don't have memories of most of that time). The things I do remember are playing at recess, playing at home with my sister, playing with my sister an brother, and playing by myself. I also remember the bad things such as my brother teasing my and my sister, being told off my a teacher in a way that I considered unfair and still do though I'm trying to put childish stuff in the past and stop holding life long grudges against slights from when I was a little kid. Teasing was always an issues for me and only recently have I figured out why. What my family (I assume) views as friendly teasing I see as an attack/harassment and I was already a shy timid girl so being Autistic made that part much worse (my father, brother, paternal grandfather and many other men on my dad's side are very get on the floor tickle the kid at random or toss them into the lake and other rough stuff that my brother and too a lesser degree my sister liked and stuff I mostly hated. I learned that saying 'no' or 'stop' does nothing and the best things to do is being out of reach to start with or fight the person off, I am and have never been physically strong so the second option never worked very well with my brother though my dad usually backed off if I was clearly not okay with being teased.)

I was bullied alot & had LOTs of fights with my parents because they didn't know about the issues I was dealing with.