The greatest danger for a child with Asperger Syndrome (AS) may come from the fact that others do not understand why some things are difficult for him.
The AS chat room I participate in demonstrates the difficulties that arise when people do not expect to communicate easily with each other. The participants often express concern that something they have said has offended somebody else. To avoid these problems, society tends to have a fairly rigid set of expectations about how people should behave. These expectations are convenient, because it enables a person to act on the assumption that the other person will do what is expected. This saves everyone from a lot of thinking.
Most people feel uncomfortable when they interact with an adult with Downs Syndrome. Such a person may be described as having a mental age of eight, but because we see an adult body, we are not confident that it would be appropriate to act as we would with an eight-year-old. The DS is aware of these different expectations, and tends to act very cautiously, not wanting to fail visibly. Certainly, they do not act with the delightful spontaneity of an average eight-year-old.
In one way, DS is easier to deal with than AS. It is clear to everyone that the DS cannot lead a normally productive life and must in some way be sheltered. AS people usually have much to offer the world. Some of the most talented ones have so much to offer that they can, in effect, force the world to grant them an exemption from the normal social expectations. Those of us who have a little less to offer are often rejected because we find it impossible to understand and meet these expectations.
It's easy to demonstrate how powerful these expectations are. If you see someone every day, it is expected that you will acknowledge each other very briefly every day. "Hi, how are your roses coming along?" "Great, how was your son's soccer game?" "He scored a goal!" "Wonderful!" or something like that. If someone has been away for several weeks, it is expected that a much longer conversation will take place. It's great fun to treat someone you last saw a few hours ago EXACTLY as if he had been away a long time. He will grow puzzled, and may even become angry, although he could probably not give a reason for his reaction. (This works best if you try it on someone you might be thought to have a sexual interest in, but it works pretty well on anyone.) Someone with AS experiences this kind of puzzled or hostile reaction in a large fraction of his interactions with others, so it is really not surprising that he becomes reluctant to interact with others. Then, of course, his reluctance is blamed for his isolation.
Schools are the most rigid institutions in the world in their expectations. No sane employer grades the janitor and the CEO on the same scale, but both were graded on the same scale when they were children. Even schools recognize that Downs Syndrome children have to be managed differently, but too often they argue that AS children should be treated just like everyone else, and measure them by the same expectations.
This results in an AS child who is doing his best getting a hostile official response. This is the most demoralizing thing that can happen to anyone. Even in an ideal society, an AS child would have to learn the discouraging truth that when an interaction between himself and another goes wrong, it is always up to him to try to put it right, because the other is unused to such difficulties arising. That officialdom gives the same response is devastating. By the time an AS child leaves high school, he has probably become convinced, in the deep recesses of his soul, that his best efforts will always be unacceptable. He may never recover.
An AS child who experiences a sufficiently nurturing environment will have a different reaction. He tends to enjoy explicit rules, and can find his way to becoming responsible for enforcing the rules on the rest of the student body. The most complex relationship to maintain is one of equality - it is much easier to understand and implement the military doctrine of "whenever two soldiers are together, one's in charge!" so an AS person, wanting the simplest possible relationships, will often accept responsibility for his peers.
This is essentially what happened to my AS father. Both his parents were warm and supportive, and he went to school during the depression, when highly capable people were glad to get teaching jobs. He did get into trouble with one teacher when he was eight, but his parents both made it clear to him that they supported him fully in this conflict. It still had a deep impact on him, and he still, nearly eighty years later, recalls the incident with bitterness, but his parents managed to avoid the incident becoming disabling. As he became a teenager, his abilities were recognized, and he began to be given increasing responsibilities over his peers.
After he finished his education, he joined the company where his father (who also has AS) worked. He worked in the founding branch of the company in Birmingham (England), while his father was one of the partners in the London branch. The owner of the Birmingham branch, a man on the verge of retirement, quickly recognized in him similar qualities to his father, and quickly passed authority over to him. He found himself running a growing business from a very early age. His employees considered him remote and strange, but logical and fair, so they were happy enough, even though he would occasionally have unpredictable attacks of rage.
The only problems arose after the founder retired, and my father found himself reporting partly to his father. Since both of them had AS, neither had the skills to manage this relationship, and each often became offended at some remark that the other meant in all innocence. Still, my father's life would have to be considered a success overall. He does grumble that his employees were generally not people he enjoyed working with, but that is no doubt as much a matter of his AS as their limitations.
My life went somewhat differently. My mother has many fine qualities, but they are, on the whole, not those that find their highest expression in motherhood. My father would certainly have liked to treat me as his father had treated him, but all his attention was focused on running his branch so well that his father could have no possibility of saying anything that could be taken as critical. When I was at school, the economy was growing, so schools had fewer choices when hiring teachers. One way and another, I had a less supportive upbringing than my father did. High school was such a nightmare that I once attempted suicide, though I'm not sure how much that was for show.
After I finished my education, I wanted to program computers. At that time, computers were very expensive, so only large organizations had them. Working at large organizations, I found that my eccentricities were not well tolerated, and when I had original ideas they were regarded as impertinent, so their possible value was never checked. In large organizations, all decisions are made largely on the basis of blame avoidance, and since I was considered unpredictable, no-one wanted to take the risk of being asked why they had promoted me. This seemed to me to be simple confirmation of my unacceptability, as had been so forcefully demonstrated at school.
This went on for nearly twenty years, before I happened to start work at a small company that wrote and sold its own computer software. Here I was working directly for people who had a real stake in the success of the company, so my abilities began to be appreciated. The second half of my career has been more like my father's. The traumas of my school years and the first half of my career have still left their marks.