to feel so overwhelmed with ASD teenage daughter?

Perhaps your AudHD child does not have demand avoidant features to their profile, but expert advice in these circumstances is not to push.

I Feel your pain. I am mum to an AudHD 16 year old. It’s a difficult one but I really think you need to be strong with your daughter. As a previous poster said she is too young to know what will help. You need to do everything you can to persuade her. Maybe you could come to an agreement where she tries help for a few months. She will be railing against change because she’s on the spectrum. Sometimes you need to give them a shove. If she had a broken leg would she refuse to go to Aand E no should would not.

@Notimeforaname and clearly no idea how therapy actually works 🤦‍♀️.

Same again to you. I hope this attitude doesn't follow you in real life.
Nothing difficult is simple is it? I wasn't alluding to that at all.

Ok... capitulate?
I have read the thread but not a professional. Shame you only concentrated on me saying something mistakenly. I had no idea it was a club I wasn't allowed to join.

Giving in😂

If only it was that simple🥴

We didn’t actively seek it!

She was sitting in her pyschiatrist appointment, and l
noticed she was watching Dd picking her fingers. She said ‘l wonder if she’s ADHD doing that.. Then l mentioned that she always had a racing mind.

I would NEVER have though she had ADHD. Except she did procrastinate a lot. I just though she was ASD.

Anyway she did the test, started on adhd meds and is like a different person. Brain fog gone, anxiety reduced, much more bouncy and friendly.

Like a switch has been flipped.

Guessing you haven't read the thread if you think this is about 'giving in'?

Been there. Got the t shirt.

What worked:
Communicating with counsellor via writing until she feels safe
ADHD meds were game changers in terms of anxiety ) we didn’t even think she had adhd
Paying her to comply
Paying to see private pysch
Accepting burnout
Gettimg an EHCP

What didn’t work:
Forcing or ‘being a parent
Fluoxetine
Trying to parent like the parent of an NT using boundaries which made everything worse.

She needs to be in a NT school. Mine couldn’t cope with shouty teachers or questions.

“school just need to understand that she cannot do drama / PE / Trips of any kind / have no teachers who raise a voice”

These do seem to be reasonable accommodations.

I am wondering whether much of her “issues” are really due to unaccommodated ASD rather than anxiety? Not having your autism accommodated can cause anxiety. She may be right when she says
”if everyone just did as she needed then all would be absolutely fine.”

I agree that some of her demands are unreasonable, the complete silence after 9pm for example. But that’s ASD, not anxiety making her unable to understand that it isn’t possible.

You do not give in to these requests written in your post though do you @StressedSuzie ?
She shouldn't be given control over an entire household, that is far too much power for a teenager. It can sometimes have the opposite effect and make them feel out of control (sorry if that's patronising, i'm sure you know far more than me) and you end up in a vicious cycle.

Is there anything she will engage with? Will she watch things on YouTube or listen to podcasts for example? Will she go on a long drive with you and listen to something in the car? Start small, see if this opens her up to further support. There will be podcasts etc out there by people who she may feel a connection with, it's just finding them.

I was quite like this as a teenager, really feel for your DD and your family. I was a difficult teenager to be around too. Adolescence is such a hard time anyway, and autism makes it so much harder to understand and cope with the changes. This is a jumble of thoughts, but a few things that helped/would have helped me.

In retrospect, less school would have been amazing for my wellbeing. Would never have agreed to it though, because even though it was awful it was “what I do”. Even as an adult I have a hard time calling in sick when I’m ill because “on weekdays I go to work”. The problem for me is that the minute you take away work/school, time becomes a blank space and that’s quite scary - I just can’t imagine doing anything other than my normal day. I also feel really anxious at the thought of then having to go back to work and answer questions about where I’ve been. Perhaps a suggestion of “instead of school we/you can do x, y, z” would help to make things a bit more concrete.

It helped me to find out that I’m not alone. Going to a women’s autism group was life changing, as was reading about others’ experiences. For such a long time I felt like the odd one out, and I didn’t fit in with the boys in my high school’s SEN hub either. It was only when I met other autistic women that I had a feeling of community. It sounds like your DD might be having the “why is everyone else wrong, why am I the only one like me” feeling, which is a very difficult thing. I remember it really hitting me at adolescence when I began to understand that other people were separate sentient creatures. (Rather than copies of me that just weren’t very good at being me!) I think I was 13 or 14 when I realised that everyone else was in fact normal and I was not. It was a really hard time.

Social Stories were good for me too. I think they’re often used with younger children, but I’ve had them written for me as an adolescent and adult. If they’re short and simple enough they can be memorised, I mutter them under my breath a lot when things are difficult to cope with. It’s comforting because it tells you what’s happening, that it’s all OK, and how to respond. “Sometimes I am late”, “Sometimes plans change”, and “Sometimes other people are wrong” are my greatest hits.

I hope something in this jumble is helpful, even if it’s just a “this random internet person has been here and came through the other side”.

@Octavia64 Thank you so much for taking the time to write that. There’s a lot of similarities with my daughter - her school anxiety built up to school refusal (she would genuinely try to go, but just couldn’t) and then it all culminated in her sleeping 16 hours a day for a month. We’re still at the beginning of looking for diagnoses (although have suspected ASD since she was 4). Up until now, she’s always got by okay, so there was no question of her ever being assessed. College for GCSEs is a really good point though - we could probably manage some kind of home education until then, and at least that’s given me a good starting point! Thank you!

@RonObvious

My DD dropped out in the first year of a levels

At the time she had no diagnoses but was clearly anxious.

She was also very physically unwell with significant joint pain and fatigue.

She was referred to the me/CFS people and was eventually diagnosed with CFS, fibromyalgia, hashimoto's thyroiditis, adhd, anxiety, depression, and is now in the process of getting the autism diagnosis as well. (I mean technically they are assessing her because they wouldn't assess her until she'd been on the adhd drugs for two years so they could see "what was left" and it turns out there is a lot left).

Because of this we know quite a lot of people who have dropped out of school at various points. There are alternatives to mainstream school and my DD did much better once she felt in control of deciding what courses she did and her general academic direction,

College was much much better than school (she dropped out of a sixth form where she had had a scholarship). Some colleges offer a 14-16 pathway for students who have been home edded/sick etc to get GCSEs in a non school environment and the students I know who have done these found them much better.

Btecs and access courses are also very good for applying to uni from - my DD did an access to science course which she topped up with a level maths studying herself and sitting the exam as a private candidate.

The access course was at an FE college and they were very supportive but also the lack of school pressure (you must revise 2 hours a night or you will fail kind of thing) made a massive difference.

I have worked in education mostly as a teacher for twenty years and there are plenty of kids who really just don't cope well with the pressure and social expectations of school. It doesn't mean they won't cope with adulthood, just they need a different kind of support to get there.

Or pre-teens. My ten year old DS will refuse to do things - getting the nasal flu vaccine was one thing. I disagreed with his decision, we talked about it on a number of occasions and I couldn't change his mind - he finds it physically painful but has been told by previous teachers that it doesn't hurt. How would I have made him have it without damaging our relationship and without the risk of injury? Would a HCP give it to a distressed ten year old who was refusing?

The only things to take away are to do with his special interests and that brings it's own set of problems with increasing anxiety, dysregulation, violent meltdowns, EBSA. He had a natural consequence in this case - he caught flu for the first time and found it very distressing.

It's not as easy as you're the parent, just make them.

Autistic people spend most of every day having to fit in and live life not to how they want or find easier. So she’s already doing that.

I think you would benefit from further training on autism in girls (the Autistic Girls Network would be a good place to start - their courses, or the white paper on their website if funding doesn’t stretch to a formal course):

• to improve your understanding generally, especially around masking. Many autistic girls and women are being much more resilient than you probably give them credit for but it is really detrimental to their mental health to expect them just to cope
• to support these people’s needs appropriately, to avoid putting your employer at risk of a claim of disability discrimination
• because you really don’t want to be hearing on the grapevine about even more difficult mental health problems than anxiety in young people you’ve been involved with professionally.

And to many posters on this thread: parents of anxious autistic children are generally doing our best. We aren’t usually eschewing obvious, readily available options, whether that’s neuro-affirming mental health support or appropriate educational provision. If only it just came down to ineffectual parenting on our part, that would be a piece of piss to fix!

Sorry to derail - can I ask what age she dropped out? My daughter is 12 and secondary school has been an absolute disaster for her so far. I guess I'm just looking for positive stories!

I guess you have ample experience of dealing with teens on the spectrum?