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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DC has those diagnoses, asd, adhd, pda, anxiety and sensory issues.  He masks at school and craves novelty so loves visiting his cousins and behaves (somewhat) unproblematically there.  So no one sees it but us at home.  Or maybe we're just lousy parents.  [/quote]

I mean … I don’t think you are lousy parents but [b]I also don’t think a child can “mask” to that extent.[/b] [/quote]

Eyeroll.  You think wrong.[/quote]

would you like to support that with evidence? behavior does change with environment but [b]the “masking” discourse suggests that kids are deliberately hiding their condition at school.[/b] that’s not really believable. of course kids behave differently at school v home, but the stressors are different. my kid is generally much better at home than school but he’s not “masking” at home - he has many fewer stressors at home that trigger him.

most of the DSM diagnoses require the symptoms to be apparent across multiple domains. if your kid is only having behavioral issues at home - yes that it due to something happening at home, likely including parenting style - not because your kid is somehow fooling everyone else. [/quote]

(For clarification, I am the eyeroll PP but not the original PP who said "maybe we're just lousy parents" - although I feel similarly.)

Anecdotes don't equal data and I have only personal experience as I haven't had time to go looking for data, but in my experience, this is exactly what is happening - yes, my kid would deliberately hide his condition, or more specifically his distress, at school.  I have watched him tell a counselor - one he knows and trusts - that he's fine now and would take their advice and go back to the classroom, even with me sitting right next to him pointing out that's not what he told me a minute ago, and then the instant the counselor left, he burst into tears and saying "no actually I can't do this! please don't make me go back!"  He could hide a full-blown panic attack in the middle of the lunchroom with no one the wiser, until he was in a safe space.  He would spend every ounce of energy he had to bottle up his distress and just get through the school day without crying, because he could not stand for people to see him cry. (Never mind that its not physically possible to learn under that level of stress.)  And then as soon as he got home, the dam would break and alllllll that distress would come spilling out.

"Behavior issues" are not the only symptoms.  Behavior is communication, and behavior issues are signals to the outside world that something is wrong.  But the absence of obvious signals doesn't necessarily equal an absence of problems.  It just means you may need to look harder to find them.  Especially in a typical large classroom environment, one can absolutely have symptoms that fly under the radar because they aren't obvious as "issues" in that environment.

"Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity" can look like talking too much / dominating the conversation, or it can look like [i]not talking at all[/i].  "Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors" can look like refusal to make eye contact and making strange hand gestures, or it can look like staring straight at you and not moving (and likely not actually absorbing anything you say).  "Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities" can be less than obvious when the interest itself is not that abnormal, but the intensity or focus is - like the 13yo boy who will talk about Minecraft for 4 hours but who can't hold a typical conversation about anything else.

Which of these is likely to get overlooked in a middle school classroom with 40 kids? Does that mean those symptoms don't "count"?  Middle schoolers can be CRUEL - do you blame the kid for learning their peers will make fun of them if they flap their arms or walk on their toes and learn to only do that at home?  Do you blame the kid with crippling anxiety for not drawing *any* attention to themselves?  Do you blame the kid for trusting their mom enough to say "I hate school so much I wish I could die", but not being able to say that to a school counselor?[/quote]

so the kid isn’t actually masking then? they are having difficulties at school but internalizing instead of externalizing. [/quote]

Not the PP, but I think masking and internalizing are pretty much the same thing. A way of pretending to outsiders that you are fine when you aren't. So the problems won't show up on the checklists that teachers complete, making it more difficult to get a diagnosis. And it comes at a very high cost.[/quote]

No, they are not the same thing. internalizing means a symptom that is directed inwardly like depression. Externalizing usually means behavior that impacts others. [/quote]

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