To ask how did you tell your DC the first time about their neurodiverse condition?

[Return2thebasic]

To minimise any hurt feelings, self doubts or alienation from those neurotypical, how did you open the topic with them the first time and do you consider you did a good job?

Has your DC been assessed yet? What age are they?

My DS was 8YO when he had the assessments. So we discussed some of it with him before the assessments. Then when he got the diagnosis, we sat him down and told him he had autism.

I'm not sure we've done the best job. We talk to him about it. He's also the age where he can find out information for himself which he has done. He watches videos on you tube about it.

Hey, I told my son this year, he asked me why he thought differently to his peers.
I said his brain was wired slightly differently to others. But it wasn't a bad thing it was his superpower.

We googled famous people with neurodivergent autism and this really helped.

You just need to word in a positive way. Because it is! It's what makes my son awesome.

He's been diagnosed last month. We haven't told him and he did all the questionnaires and the assessment interview thinking it's something that helps his study...and he didn't question it because of his ADHD condition (too busy to think through...).

He's 10. We got a book for him with gentle information about this condition. DH is going to have a chat with him after Christmas. But I don't think he has a plan on how to talk about it with DS.

@user1467639835 , thank you so much for the tips! It sounds like a good approach.

It's amazing your son is so aware and could actually notice and ask about it. Our DS has never felt he's too different from others, as he just doesn't have the attention span to go through the deep thinking process... 😓

He's 11 btw, so not far off yours. Yes, it was good that he noticed. But it was because he was bullied so it didn't come from a good place. He's started a new school and has an amazing senco teacher.
Fingers crossed your son will understand, it doesn't hold them back they just approach things differently. Which isn't a bad thing.
Good luck x

We started when he was fairly small talking about how different people have brains that are good at different things, and that some people had brains that were quite different in what they found easy and hard compared to many people. We talked about what he found easy and what he found hard, and that there were other people like him who had similar kinds of brains. And then one day while discussing that I said that people with those kinds of brains had a particular name, and that he was autistic. He brings it up periodically to talk more about what that means or to tell me he’s found another autistic friend or to ask questions. He doesn’t always like some of his traits (and he doesn’t regard his autism as a superpower), but having a name for them and an explanation and knowing there are others like him has been nothing but positive - he already knew perfectly well that he was a bit different and struggled with things, telling him he was autistic didn’t add to those difficulties.

But we’ve been talking to him along these lines since he was three and he was diagnosed at six, so there was never a single “big reveal” conversation.

DC was 6yr old, I got them the book "All Cats Are Autistic". I told them about their diagnosis, we read it together, and then talked about it.

@Glitterandcard , massive thanks for sharing!

I myself only got diagnosed 5 years ago. Before that, I knew there's something about DS is not like neurotypical kids but couldn't pin down what that was.

It's made a bit uncertain also because he's on the mild/modest side of the spectrum. School barely noticed anything except some tendency of play fighting and day dreaming in class. Certainly they didn't see him as a problem at all, so we had to go for private diagnosis in the end.

Before his assessment, we weren't even sure if he has it or just willful justification thrown in by me to not punish him for all the silly things he's done over the years.

But thanks for your sharing the approach you used. I will have a good think about it to pick out some parts that I could use. 🙏