telling your child their diagnosis

Hi -my son is 8 years old and diagnonsed with high functioning autism 18 months ago. He struggles with social situations, making friends and staying calm as well as managing his immense anxiety. He has a part time LSA at school.  

We have so far not told him his diagnosis as we felt it would not really help him and might be detrimental. We talk in terms of him having difficulties others don't and needing support for this reason.  However, we feel that it may be time to tell him he has ASD and then linked to this maybe to be more open about his diagnosiswith others as well. (we wouldn't do this if he doesn't know himself).

However, we don't want him to feel labelled and for this to have a negative effect. Opinion seems to be divided on whether it is a good idea to tell a child this age when they are high functioning asit is perhaps not so obvious to others with these children.  Not sure if this post makes sense...hope it does! Appreciate thoughts.  Thank you.

Parents
  • thanks so much for all your replies. Really helpful.

    It is just so hard to know what is the right thing but agree that we need to focus on all the things he has that are positive and increasing his self esteem while at the same time perhaps giving him the diagnosis so he doesn't feel that he is just failing compared to his peers.  

Reply
  • thanks so much for all your replies. Really helpful.

    It is just so hard to know what is the right thing but agree that we need to focus on all the things he has that are positive and increasing his self esteem while at the same time perhaps giving him the diagnosis so he doesn't feel that he is just failing compared to his peers.  

Children
No Data