How did you tell your older Dc about Aspergers?

[flowwithit]

We are just in process of completing diagnosis for Ds age 11yrs. I am worried about telling him and how to do this best? Psychaitrist advised us he will be told on next app as it is important to be told be Dr. I would like to protect the little self esteem he has as best i can but was thinking was best to be very factual and not too emotional, i also have the Jude Welton guide for family and friends. How did you do this after your diagnosis pls?

I would be interested to hear what advice you get about this. My DS also recently diagnosed has always had hypersensitive hearing (poor auditory processing). So we have always talked about his 'sensitive ears'....the advice I got was to talk to him about it as the questions arise i.e. follow his lead rather than 'impose' the information on him.
That is what I have done...so now he knows that he is not good at running because his sensitive ears are linked in a way to his muscles.

Saying that I have kept the 'label' of Aspergers private as I feel people who dont know/dont care/ want to wound can use a label like that in a negative way.

He already knows he's different.

He'll be pleased to find out there's a reason why.

We told ds as he was in the process of the dx. (he was nearl 11 when he got the formal dx).It started out as ' we are going to see if the reason you find x difficult is because you may have aspergers'... (simply because i didn't want him to stress wondering why he was there) .We then dscussed all the things that the sessions threw up with him and then also the final dx.

He already knew he was different and that he found things hard.
My worry was that he was beginning to turn this knowledge in on himself.There were little flashes of poor self esteem.

The dx was a huge relief for all of us....and i'm so grateful that we managed to catch those seeds of poor self esteem then (and it was by no means an early dx).
The dx allowed ds to put these things in a box...' i am different and i find these things hard because i have aspergers'.....not 'i am different and i find things hard because i am a bad/crap person'