Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi everyone
Our 15 year old daughter was diagnosed when she was about 8 years old. She has had great SENCO support throughout her education and at primary school was able - to a degree - to form good friendships. However, since she went to secondary school her ability to interact socially and form friendships has become really hard for her.
She tells us that she just doesn't know how to talk to others and she holds back because she is afraid of being judged by her peers and ostracised. There is a SENCO at the school and we are in regular contact with her, but everything they are trying to help her is not really working. It means she is left out of most activities and doesn't engage with the school or her peer group in any meaningful way.
We chatted with R about this the other evening and suggested maybe she could talk to a therapist / counsellor about this outside of the school environment and she was amenable to this suggestion.
I'd love to hear from other parents in the community that are dealing with this challenge and get suggestions on what other forms of support might be available and have proved helpful for you,
Thanks for listening!
Nick
Thanks you Juniper I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts
She needs ADHD and Dyslexic friends.
As a much older women who went through this, the first thing she needs to learn is how to assert boundaries and a few good books on rules to engage in adult relationships, which are completely different than when we're young. I mentioned to another autistic young adult, Simon Griffin's F**king Good Manners is a fun read for everyone, especially teens - loaded with excellent detailed instructions with a forbidden twist (loads of the f word). However, Ethics and Philosophy can do the trick as well. We need to be able to expect Respectfulness in order to find the right friends.
Another idea could be a safe theatre group, even improv - which is unbelievably difficult for Autistics BUT this art form provides a good start to learning about motives and rules to engage. It's often a choose your own adventure experience, but with techniques and tricks such as the Yes And Technique (there's a book on this).
But the problem is more complex. Teens are somewhat play-acting adulthood without the lived experience of bad decisions and terrible consequences. They are playing with Social Rules which include sociopathic and other games of deception and mystery. Some are exciting, some are for social dominance and Autistics will become prey in these scenarios. We might have a vocabulary which we access for its basic function, but we don't catch the Social Linguistics of our peers. So, for instance, even when a bit of Symbolic Logic revolutionised my ability to follow what others were saying, it would still be 15 years before I really understood words are not just conveying what 's in the dictionary.
Good christian values exist, but morals can be corrupted depending on what's socially approved. However, one of the biggest issues Autistics have is understanding distance - psychological and physical. We sense perceive everything as too real, too close or too intimate. We don't desnsensitise like our peers, so there is a big difference in how we experience life even if we have trouble naming our feelings, they can be all encompassing and too many to articulate.
Regardless, life is better with one or two good friends and learning to invest in friendship, allowing time for those to grow, is incredibly important.