I started a thread recently about my daughter struggling to make friends along with other bits and bobs.
Someone mentioned had we considered her having ASC? I looked online and was surprised to see how many traits she has.
We adopted her when she was 14 months.
Delightful, bright, articulate (spoke very young), loud and feisty! She is now 17.
All through school she has had trouble making and keeping friends. She never really knew how to be, was the annoying one when she was younger and fell out with girls a lot.
It seemed to change at secondary school initially but as time wore on she struggled again and then got bullied. She does say in hindsight she knows she didn’t help the situation.
So we changed her school in year 9. It was a good move, no one was horrible but she really struggled to fit in. And she became a very quiet girl, the previous school had knocked her confidence.
She was the year of no GCSEs and lockdown was awful. She had no one to talk to and was terrible to live with.
She decided to start again at a new school for sixth form. So far this has worked ok but the dream of waltzing in and getting friends yet again hasn’t happened. She felt confident in herself when she started and really laid it on. I think she put other girls off by being so confident, but it was all a bit of an act. She didn’t know how to be. A couple of months on and she gets on well with a couple of the boys but no girls. She finds boys a lot easier to talk to. She really doesn’t know how to act around her peers. She awkward and so aware of saying and doing the wrong thing.
Someone mentioned to me could she have ASC. When I googled it I could see definite traits.
•The awkwardness in social situations with her peers. She’s great in adult company.
•She gets a bee in her bonnet about something and goes on and on. Repetitive. Never shuts up. At the moment it’s food and tells me the same thing over and over. She’s into chocolate and eats loads instead of decent meals. She will tell us constantly that it’s about the calories and she wants the chocolate, and can’t have it if she eats big meals too. It’s draining. So we are just letting her get on with it.
•She gets aggressive and confrontational very easily. Especially when we are giving our opinion on something she’s raised, but doesn’t want to hear our responses. To be honest I rarely now start a conversation with her.
•She tells me regularly she really struggles to concentrate in class. It just doesn’t go in. She has to come home and basically re-learn the work. We will be very surprised if she sees A levels through to the end.
•She wants my approval for most of what she does. She has always been this way. Tells me everything, the good and the bad and everything in between. She says my opinion is so important but basically wants me to approve everything she says. Which obviously isn’t always possible. When I don’t agree or challenge her she can’t accept it and I am accused of making her panic or upsetting her.
We actually started a process with CAMHS over the summer and a lady there did question ADHD, but we never pursued it any further because she didn’t want us to.
But she is so responsible in so many other ways. Takes herself off to Westfield shopping on her own, has had a couple of little part time jobs and got her latest one when she was out, had her interview in the park! She went and bought a jacket and sat on her own under a tree for the interview! Got the job!
She’s generally well liked by teachers and her employers.
I have read that autism in girls is far harder to diagnose and often gets missed.
So what do we do now? I haven’t mentioned anything to her as there’s a good chance she will go beserk and be really angry and upset that we think she may be on the spectrum.
We have considered going straight to the school and talking to the senco leader, maybe they could watch her a bit and it could come from them, not us. Or we just leave it all as it is.
Really hard to know where to go from here.