How to tell your child

[Everly18]

Hi, How did you tell your child about their autism diagnosis? Our 10 year old has just been diagnosed, she knows that we have been having appointments to help understand why she is having some difficulties in some areas but she doesn't know that she may have autism, although I believe that she knows what is it some extent as their are a couple of children in her year group with autism. We have an appointment tomorrow to discuss the report and I think our daughter is expected to be there for part of it as her name is on the participants list. However I'm also currently having a disagreement with my DH, he either thinks that they should tell her tomorrow, professionally so they can explain it properly to her or she doesn't need to know until she's a bit older, but I disagree, I feel that she does need to know so she can understand herself better, she knows that she is different to others and she thinks that she's weird, but she's not. I also don't think that she should find out from a stranger, I think that she should be told by her parents and I especially don't want it to be a surprise to her tomorrow if we don't atleast tell her a little beforehand.

My 8 year old DD was diagnosed recently. She already had a diagnosis of dyspraxia which we've never made a secret of - so she's always known it since she was diagnosed. The Autism diagnosis was harder to tell her about because she was older - but basically I told her, that it was just another way her brain worked differently and that she was absolutely awesome. Her reply was "oh like X" (her friend) and that was it - it was a bigger issue to me than to her by far.

We did some groundwork telling him about other people who were autistic, including lots of positives, to build a concept of autism without relating it to him. We pondered aloud whether a TV character or quiz show contestant might be autistic, in positive terms. Then similar to @CoffeeWithCheese, I just pointed out to him that one of the books I was reading with him was for children who were autistic and we were looking into whether he might be too, and he said "what, like X? Cool". He was diagnosed at 9.

We haven't kept it relentlessly positive, we just started out with that straw man. I think when we introduced autism we talked about how everyone has things they find easy and things that come harder to them, and when those things fall into a particular sort of pattern then it's called Autism. Looking at that pattern in DS made us wonder if he might be autistic.

Gus on The Dumping Ground was quite helpful. I don't think it's ever made explicit whether he is autistic or not, but he is accepted and respected by the others just as he is. We've also seen a couple of CBBC / BBC quiz shows

sorry, going round in circles there. I press led the post button by mistake mid-edit