Parents don't want their kids to die so they place some reasonable restrictions on activities in order to reduce risk. After all, they only have 1 or 2 kids so they can't afford to lose one. Historically families had many more children and it was perfectly normal to lose 1 or 2 (usually to infectious disease).
With school bureaucrats the story is different. They place unhealthily stringent limits on risk. They can't afford to lose a single child even though they have 200,000 of them. Because they might get sued or have their careers damaged.
Before an autistic child, or any child, can make guesses about people's intentions, he has to know that such things even exist. If you learn this late then, sure, your responses are going to be different, even problematic (not guided by the inexplicit knowledge other children developed at an earlier stage).
No, there are spontaneous and unexplained 'cures' which I'm guessing occur where people have been given the space and time to develop autonomously, without excessive interference. This applies proportionally to ordinary children to.
My guess is that if there's no sense of self or other then there's no getting upset about others: there's just upset or 'upsetness' (which others may misinterpret as normal empathy).
>'Let’s pretend you are like me. You can’t talk, but you have a well-functioning mind'
I thought that one of the few genuine insights made about autism is that so-called autistic people have difficultly reading intentions (their own, or other people's) or even appreciating what minds and intentions are. Which is why they appear selfish, and why they're unqualified to make such statements.
Also sceptical that coercing people to behave in socially acceptable ways is necessary or desirable.
People who are basically happy and left to develop autonomously will tend to converge with social expectations as required. Maybe the spontaneous cures of autism are examples of that: happy children, perhaps shielded from bullying, whose parents supported them enough for this lengthy process to occur.
Whereas trying to train people like dolphins risks making them miserable and thwarting that development.