Many autistic people don’t make eye contact.
Making eye contact can hurt us or make it hard to pay attention.
It can be hard to listen to what someone says and look at their eyes at the same time.
So we don’t look at their eyes.
Non-autistic people can tell someone’s feelings by looking at their eyes.
They also use eye contact to share their own feelings.
This is why eye contact is so important to them.
Autistic people have different ways of sharing our feelings.
We usually don’t use eye contact to do that.
For example, we might just say how we are feeling.
Sometimes, some autistic people seem to make eye contact.
We might learn how to pretend to make eye contact.
For example, we can look at someone’s nose instead of their eyes.
Or we might look in someone’s eyes even though we don’t like to.
Some autistic people don’t mind making eye contact, but most of us do.