DS is very much aware that he has autism. For us, the hard part is getting him to understand that most people don't.
DS was diagnosed with autism just a week after he turned 3. We have always used the words "autism" and "autistic" around him and talked about it openly. We have had books and articles about autism around the house since before his official diagnosis. (DS has hyperlexia and started reading when he was 2.) We are active in the autism community, and DS enjoys going to autism events. He likes being around kids and adults with autism (and he is really good at picking out which kids have autism and which are the non-autistic siblings). He is in a special Ed classroom and knows that his classmates have autism too.
It is very important to us to help DS develop self-advocacy skills. A big part of that is helping him understand his diagnoses (he has others in addition to autism) and how they affect him. So we talk about how autism makes some things easier for him, like reading and memory, and how it makes some things harder, like parties and loud noises. We work on helping him recognize when he is overwhelmed or confused and how to ask for help or a break.
As DS is getting older (he's 8.5), he is starting to realize more that he is different from some of the other kids he knows - his cousins and the kids in the regular classroom. This is part of why we got him the book I talked about in the other thread, "I Love Being My Own Autistic Self" by Landon Bryce. It has really generated some good talks with DS about his thoughts and feelings about being autistic.
Gena
DS, age 11 and always amazing
“Autistics are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg." - Paul Collins, Not Even Wrong