DD is in Year 8. She’s always been quite introverted and on the edge of things socially although she does well with her work. She has a good friend from primary at another school whom she still sees lots of. Other than that though, she rarely does anything with peers out of school.
Yesterday she was telling me how overwhelming she finds the school dining hall. It’s so big with so much background noise. The tables are for 9 or 10. She says she finds it hard to focus on conversation whilst eating at the same time. She can’t keep up and so tends to zone out instead and not even try.
She struggles with unstructured time with peers generally and doesn’t like break times. She says it’s not that anyone is unpleasant to her (mostly) but she finds following a group conversation really hard. She also has difficulty bringing herself into a conversation and so gets left out a lot. She prefers situations where there’s an adult in charge to structure things, make sure everyone gets a chance, etc. After lunch she’ll often go to the library to do her homework as she finds it easier to ‘focus on just one thing’ in a quiet place, rather than go back to the classroom and just hang out with others.
She’s a bit a maths geek, although at a selective school thankfully this doesn’t’t seem to be an issue and I’m not aware that she’s ever been teased. Her interests are not very mainstream though which I don’t think helps her socially. She’s quite child-like and doesn’t really follow teen pop culture. I’m not sure whether she’s just young for her age (her older sister seemed much more mature at this point) or whether there’s more to it.
She did see the school counsellor last year (at staff’s suggestion) to try to help her become more socially integrated. If anything I think this made things worse. The counsellor just put pressure on her to make more effort to talk to people, etc. without any appreciation of the things which make this difficult for her. She ended up getting frustrated and feeling like she was failing.
I’m wondering whether there’s a better way to help her? Does it sound as if there could be neurodiversity here? If so, what do we do about it?