Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi all
I am the father of a 15 year old girl who recently received an ASD diagnosis, and would be greatful for any advise you can offer about the next steps we should take to support her.
She is a generally happy articulate girl and we have a very happy homelife. She is academically gifted and we have been lucky that she has been in the same school for the last 10 years and appears to be comfortable there. As she has grown, she exhibited many of the usual AS behaviours - sensitivity to clothes, selective choices of foods, acute sense of smell, dispraxia, occasional insomnia and night-time anxiety, and a noticable lack of development of social and interpersonal skills. I noticed these behaviours after realising that I probably meet similar criteria for ASD or Aspergers, though I have not sought a diagnosis for myself.
We had her tested after she suggested to us that she thought she might be neurodivergant. She received a diagnosis of ASD at Level 1, without intellectual or language impairment. I understand that she was given the ADOS-2, SSIS, SEL, Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, and the WISC-V tests. She scored 19 on the ADOS-2 and 143 or 99.8 percentile on the WISC-V test.
She certainly could benefit from some therapy or coaching to improve her social skills, and interpersonal communication, and reduce her social anxiety. Her sense of independence or executive funciton is slow to develop too, but we hope this should come in time. I've read a lot of literature on ASD including all of the work by Tony Atwood, Temple Grandin, Ashley Stanford, Luke Beardon, and Liane Holliday.
I would be greateful if anybody can offer any advice or share their experience of how best to support her from here. We aren't sure what kind of therapy might be best - much of what is available seems very focused on problems, and past epxerience, wheras we feel that she would benefit from more future-focused skills building. I read some encouraging work on Solution Focused Brief Therapy and am interested to hear if anybody has had a postitive or negative experience of this.
Can anybody also suggest some good books that would suit her age written by women or people who have a similar diagnosis? And finally, can you also reccommend any short introductary books that I could suggest to other family members to give them some context or insight.
Many thanks
I haven't read it, but the author is a young autistic woman and it may be worth taking a look at: Hayden, Chloé (2022). Different, Not Less: A Neurodivergent's Guide to Embracing Your True Self and Finding Your Happily Ever After.
I am autistic and have a 22 year old autistic daughter. She is intellectually bright and has a first class chemistry degree. She has the usual autism related problems, poor sleep, food issues, anxiety, social difficulties. She found cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) useful, it was her therapist who first suggested that she might be autistic. This led to both of us being eventually diagnosed, within a day of each other. In primary school she reacted to the issues she had with a degree of aggression, earning her the nickname, 'the angry elf'. At senior school she had a group of friends, but found the endless squabbles and fallings out difficult to cope with. I think girls can sometimes be more cruel to each other than boys are. At university she received quite good support and considered that without it she might well have dropped out. In the end she came top of her year and won a Royal Society of Chemistry prize. When she was about 14 she started music lessons on electric guitar and drums. Through the place she was taught, she joined various bands and performed in pubs and clubs. This did absolute wonders for her confidence and now she is in a band, playing drums, with two other autistic people. I think she has a gig at a pub later this month.
I think the most important thing that any parent of an autistic child can do, beyond any type of therapy, is just to be entirely supportive.
Hi Martin
Thanks for your message. It's really encouraging to hear about your daughter's progress and success. Yes, I've heard that teen girls can be much more fickle in their relationships. We seem to have avoided issues with this so far, but I am really aware that at this age things can change quickly.
I'm curious if you shared your daughte's diagnosis with her school and university at the time and what kind of support they offered her? Did she feel that this support helped her or made her feel more isolated or different from her peer group?
And roughly at what age and for how long did she attend CBT? Right now, our daughter is reluctant to engage with a therapist, and says she doesn't feel that she needs it. But, in some sense she doesn't yet know what it may offer her. She tends to shy away from engaging with new social opportunities rather than risk placing herself in situations where she might feel uncomfortable, so I imagine CBT might give her some tools to better manage this anxiety.
Music sounds like it's been an amazing channel to develop your daughter's confidence. We're still looking for an outlet like this with our daughter, listening carefully when she expresses an interest in things and offering new encounters wherever we can in the hope that it sparks some enthusiasm. Her diagnosis has definately helped us be more patient in this as we try to find a balance of being lead by her preferences and trying to support her to grow.
Thanks too for your book suggestion. I'll certainly have a read of this and pass it on to her.
Thanks Martin. That really gives us some helpful insight. We have GCSE's coming up next year so it seems like a good time to speak to her school, and look at other options for additional coaching. A
My daughter was diagnosed just before starting university, so had no support through her school years. We realised that she had problems, but, as with my own, it hadn't occurred to us that autism might be the cause. I'm not particularly poorly informed in general, but information on the way autism presents in people with low support needs is not readily available, unless you are primed to look for it. It was because of anxiety that we had our daughter referred for CBT, I think she had a longer period of therapy than usual - perhaps 9 months or so, initially - because she developed a good relationship with her therapist and was moved between funding schemes. She also went back for more about two years later, I think that she was around 15 or 16 when she started.
My daughter wanted to share her diagnosis with the university; she realised that anything that would make the course easier for her to cope with, would be useful. She got an extra 25% of time in exams, and had her exams in small rooms with few other people present. Remembering my own experiences in large exam halls, this is a very useful accommodation. She had free 'time organisation' software and a microphone for recording lectures. Her lecturers were informed that she might ask many more questions and need extra clarification than most students, about what was required of her regarding essays and lab write ups. The disability support team were quite proactive in checking on her welfare and she had a named contact in the team. If she was feeling overwhelmed, she could email her tutor and arrange sanctioned time off from lectures; lecturers would email her either recorded lectures, or their notes and other teaching material, so she didn't lose out.
I don't think that she felt particularly isolated from her peers, she made a couple of friends on her course who are allistic. I think that she had more problems with her anxiety and perfectionism than with the attitudes of others to her.