Reply to Sharing an ASD dx with child when you're not sure if you buy it

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Sharing an ASD dx with child when you're not sure if you buy it"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of parents in this thread are saying it's fine to wait to tell.

Our daughter was diagnosed at 11 yo and because we were not sure we agreed with the diagnoses and because it was during a weird time with covid, we waited a year to tell her.

Our daughter is still upset with us over this because she feels the diagnosis explains a lot of things about herself that she was blaming herself for.  It gave her a certain freedom and acceptance of herself.  My daughter says, "it really affects your perception of yourself and allows you to be easier on yourself, to know the diagnosis.  And it's not the sort of information you can keep to yourself -- it profoundly impacts the experience of your child.  The longer you wait, the worse it will be -- for yourselves and for your child -- when your child does find out.  It is your child's right to know, and you should tell them now, you're not doing yourself or your child any favors by keeping it a secret.  It's a very common experience for people getting an ASD diagnosis to feel a weight lifted off your chest, to know that you're not weird or deficient, but there's an explanation for your experience and feelings."

Just to go against the grain of all the other parents in here -- from a kid's perspective, my middle schooler would have preferred to know when we knew.[/quote]

Just re-posting my daughter's take on this, again, quoted above.  My daughter was attributing her lack of control over her emotions to a failing within herself, something other kids were able to manage but that she was deficient in.  She was released from this by knowing of her diagnosis and no longer blamed herself for having greater than usual difficulty in managing her emotions.  She read about ASD and saw where she fit into some parts of the spectrum and didn't fit into others.  Some things clicked for her.  If your kid is having emotional behaviors that fall outside what a lot of other kids are experiencing, it's possible that they are blaming themselves for these behaviors and see themselves, quietly, maybe without even telling you, as a big failure.  I don't want that for anyone's kid.  Sorry for taking the thread so personally, but it is a personal issue to my family given the experience we have had, and it's weird seeing so many people in this thread talk about actually having received both ADHD and ASD diagnoses for their kids and sharing the ADHD diagnosis but withholding the ASD diagnosis.  I see it as resulting from the internal stigma we as parents feel from the diagnosis, whereas for our kids it is actually helpful, freeing information.  But as we've all seen, ymmv.[/quote]

Pp - I applaud you bc this has obviously been the right step for your kid!
I do keep coming back to emotional regulation not being diagnostic of asd and thus I think that’s where you see people lean more toward sharing that adhd dx where emotional regulation is concerned with their dc. Adhd to be clear -  also removed emotional regulation deficits from the dsm - so it is also not diagnostic as of now, but it is part of the original adhd dx and a substantial cohort of experts including Russell Barkley who literally wrote the book on adhd consider it to be the hallmark attribute of adhd that should be reintroduced into the dsm. All that is to say I think if your core issue is emotional regulation with no obvious consistent connection to other issues (social/ external stimuli) then as a parent you would lean more toward adhd than asd typically as a first step especially if adhd is very apparent.  I think for asd I would expect to see the emotional regulation coupled with other issues. So it’s not so much a taboo (though I do agree with you that asd is still in a less understood space) as that emotional regulation as a principal driving issue is more associated with adhd than asd  [/quote]

I agree with both PPs here. I will say that I think that emotional regulation issues are more common in ASD among girls (or AFAB people) than boys since we tend to be more harsh on them when they don't conform. And with both genders there is the matter of difficulty with transitions and often that difficulty manifests in emotional meltdowns.

But yes, when we see emotional regulation issues our minds should go to ADHD before ASD. Something I learned from Dr. Barkley that was so enlightening to me is what emotional regulation difficulties look like in people with ADHD. He said that people with ADHD experience emotions that make sense because the emotion is triggered by an event that would cause that emotion in everybody, but they experience the emotion very intensely because of inhibition difficulties. The emotions also go away rather quickly. It's really interesting because my son who has ADHD clearly has these pretty extreme emotional reactions to things that upset him, but never because he was so absorbed in something that switching tasks causes severe emotional distress. When DD was younger and we told her she had to switch tasks, she screamed, hit herself, burst out in tears, and said she wanted to kill herself, and was like that for hours. [/quote]

op - yes i have noticed that he has these extreme emotional reactions but then they are fleeting - he never holds onto it or very rarely for more than a few minutes. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics