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Any online comminity for Autistic Teens?

PeteSW

Hi

I'm new here, so my apologies if this has been discussed before. My teenage daughter is autistic and currently very lonely. The people she meets who share her interests already seem to have established friendship groups, and while they are often friendly, she lacks close friendships. It does not help that we live in a rural area, so there are fewer people for her to meet face-to-face anyway. This has led me to wonder whether there were any 'safe' online communities she could join. 

When I joined this group, I did see links to the communities on The Mix. Before I encouraged her to join them and possibly get disappointed, I wondered whether anyone here had opinions of how good they would be for under 16s?    

Many thanks to anyone who can help

  • The benefit of The Mix is that it is 'pre-moderated' so a moderator reviews every message before it is visible to other users and can raise issues if a safeguarding issue occurs and prevent some malicious actors on the website

    This does of course come with downsides, conversations can be slow (particularly in the late evenings and weekends which is when under 16s are often most active), and as a result communities aren't always very busy and conversations can die.

    I think it's worth a go though. It's a safe space to discuss some of the stuff with people of a similar age

    Other pre-moderated or highly moderated under 16 focused groups that might be good include The Student Room (highly moderated rather than pre-moderated, but every flag I've used has resulted in a take down within a few hours), Kooth (designed for mental health stuff but also has interest based forums and is pre-moderated), and the tellmi app (again, pre-moderated, some mental health stuff, some interest based stuff, and this one streams your feed by age group so you mostly see people within a few years of age)

    Hope that is useful?

  • Hi PeteSW
     
    Welcome to the community.
     
    I'm sorry your teenage daughter is so lonely. The teens can be such a challenging time of life for many autistic girls but you are doing a good job supporting her. It can't be easy for you either.
     
    I haven't any information about The Mix other than what is stated on this website so I'm bumping up your post so that others may see it.
     
    This isn't what you have asked for but just in case your daughter would be interested, our Know Yourself series is a set of free resources which includes videos and downloadable guides aiming to support young people and helping them to understand what being autistic means.
     
    Good luck and best wishes.
     
    Christine Mod