to feel so overwhelmed with ASD teenage daughter?

[StressedSuzie]

She has just turned 13 and is struggling massively with anxiety.
She refuses to accept any help such as therapy or medication and insists that if everyone just did as she needed then all would be absolutely fine.
Seeing her walk out of school each day, completely drained and almost mute due to being so overwhelmed is so upsetting to see.
What do you do when your children have sky high anxiety but won’t accept any form of help? 😢

Plant the ideas and hope they come round!

I'm not sure how anyone thinks they can force someone to take medication or do therapy.

It's actually American and available on kindle etc.

This is the problem, in my experience, where children in mainstream have a lot of time off-timetable/dropping some subjects/not going on trips. It seems like a reasonable adjustment and that it should help, and for some it does, if it’s a short-term step while e.g. figuring out longer-term strategies that work best for them, having therapy, etc. Otherwise, they actually are just missing huge chunks of the curriculum and they can’t catch up easily so feel behind and they often feel left-out and isolated, that people are looking at them or talking about them (and there’s no getting round it, the other kids are aware of the absence of a member of their class - usually not unkindly). In my experience (~10 students over the last 5/6 years) it’s rare that those students do better in school over time (or even stay the same), they usually end up missing more and more school over time and it spirals. The school has provided so much support to help them but fundamentally, mainstream just isn’t going to work for them. Alternative provision or homeschool is probably a better option earlier on in these situations.

To be fair I don’t think she needs Drama or PE for any of her future career or life choices!

Of course, the individual subjects are not an issue, it’s the way that it removes them from the ‘normal’ experiences of their peers that tends to be the issue. Presumably, if she’s 13, these subjects will become optional pretty soon (although games lessons are presumably also an issue… which does usually continue as a requirement through to 16).

I hope you find a solution at school that works for her. From your more recent updates it sounds like food is a more pressing concern.

Just remember that she needs you and you will need a lot of reserves to cope long term, so you need to ‘fit your own oxygen mask first’. It’s not sustainable to be driving 90 mins to get Maltesers- perhaps to get her a full, healthy meal it might be vaguely reasonable, but not for empty calories. I think you’re in danger of encouraging an eating disorder rather than the opposite in that particular case. ASD teenagers are not immune to the ‘normal’ teenager behaviours of selfishness and boundary pushing. Other posters have given great advice about how you can give her some agency and control without needing to give her everything she asks for.

I’d put therapy to one side for now. Therapy works when you put the work in, and to do that you need to be personally committed. It’s not as effective when your reason for being there is “mum made me come”.

We found occupational therapy much more useful than psychology as an early teen . I went to the sessions, and brought it home to ds. Actually attending sessions set us back in other ways. But with the therapist I worked out a sensory profile for ds, and learned how to make day to day experiences more tolerable. We reduced sensory torments and triggers, increased regulating sensory input, and that made a massive difference to resilience,

In school, he needed a safe way to leave overwhelming situations. Just creating that option helped massively.

God help the poor ND kids you deal with !

you sound like you have zero empathy with parenting an Asc child

mine are school avoiders since year 6
you can’t just force ND kids to do things - I wish !

@StressedSuzie I feel your pain. Got DS 15 asd at home. It's a nightmare with all his ocd and weird demands. He is NOT being entitled but his demands come out of a place of fear. Ex. He will ask us to not move certain objects or not talk close to him. It's exhausting. He refuses therapy and tbh all therapists he has seen so far when he was younger didn't help him at all. He's on Sertraline 100 mg which was really effective in the beginning (10 y old old) for his ocd but doesn't help much now I think. Well, ofcourse they help but not as much. It's really tough OP and not many people can understand what life looks like for the DC concerned and their families.💗

I feel your pain, 4 years later and we're now only seeing an improvement. The only thing that worked for us, was taking her out of school and being placed in an ETA setting. It changed all our lives. Anxiety and OCD still bad but she is now cooperating with CAMHS.
I wish you luck. It's bloody hard.

I don’t think you understand - you literally cannot force someone to engage with something if they aren’t willing or able to. Rather than forcing one sort of therapy you need to look at alternative options.

We ended up home educating and paid for 1-1 art therapy.

High school is overwhelming for an autistic person, listen to what's she said "if everyone did what she needed she would be fine" that means that she is struggling with something at school and it sounds like no one is listening to what could help her, maybe it's the noisy crowded classes, maybe it's the disruption of having to have a different teacher for every lesson, has she told you what she feels may help her while at school? Like a quiet room she can go to when feeling overwhelmed that she can do her schoolwork in, or she can be let out of class early to avoid the crowded hallways (that's what my daughter does), adjustments like that can make a difference in my experience, my daughter has to leave classes 5 minutes before everyone else so she doesn't have to deal with the loud hallways between classes, she is also permitted to take her work and go to a specific room if she is overwhelmed without needing to ask

They can make her attend appts etc, but not engage with a therapist. If forced she is hardly likely to be open and as needed for it to be of any use.

Exactly. I have both personal experience as a mum and professional experience as a teacher in autism provision.
If you take that approach they will become more and more distressed at the prospect of going. Soon they will be distressed that it's nearly time to go, then that it is the day that they go.

It's really a bit arrogant to post such a sweeping statement when you (clearly) have no experience of having to negotiate getting an autistic teen to do something they feel uncomfortable doing.

At that age the child would need to be involved in the referral and agree to it.