How can I support my daughter after being excluded from the post-exam holiday?

[dottieautie]

I’d posted in ND mumsnetters and no one responded so I thought I’d try here. I’m autistic myself and don’t navigate socially too well.

My eldest leaves school next summer. The final year group have a tradition of going on holiday after the exams and loads of kids all go. My daughter has looked forward to this for years but now she has no one to room share with. The place they’re going only do rooms of two and one of them needs to be 18 to book with the company everyone is going with and she will only be 17 (I’m told I can’t go to be the 18yo -thankfully). We discovered by booking separately or not through a package deal she could book the same flight and hotel for the same dates at 17, so she returned to her group of friends to tell them this and they told her it wouldn’t work. They’ve gone ahead and booked without her.

My heart breaks for her. It sounds to me from their responses like they don’t want her there but aren’t ballsy enough to say it outright. She’s high masking Audhd and none of her friends know this. She’s very sociable and loves to party with her so called friends so she doesn’t really stand out that I can tell as different, except she has no bestie.

How do I support her through this? She thought these girls were her people and now she’s seeing they’re not. She’s missing out on something she’s looked forward to for six years as a legendary high school leaving experience and nothing we suggest is acceptable.

how do I help her through this hurt and the next year of school with all these people planning this bloody holiday?

Your poor DD.

If it’s a whole year thing then could she still book separately and make an effort to be friendly to other people within the year group so she has people to hang around with when the holiday takes place.

What did her friends mean by “it wouldn’t work” when she said she could still go by booking separately?

Is there a parent of one of the girls that you can talk to? She may be able to explain what is going on or how your daughter comes across that you may be able to help her with?

This really confused me too. I have never come across this before.

Don’t people just book holidays with their mates rather than an entire year group?

I absolutely do not recommend DD books and attends separately. This could end very badly for her.

I know it’s difficult but she is old enough to understand that this group do not want her there and she needs to make new friends and new plans.

Here people book with friends, but entire schools (and entire cities worth of schools!) often head to the same destination. I could believe an entire year group heading to the same resort, or the same hotel.

My son would also be the one excluded. Not sure if this helps but I would accept they want to go and suggest that at Easter you will help them look at booking options. Usually by then the originally group will have started to fall out with each other.

Can she just book her own flight and hotel room
and meet them there?

Unfortunately this can be what happens with odd-numbered friendship groups and with kids who aren’t 18 yet by the time school ends (I was one myself), they can get left out of things.

By saying “it wouldn’t work” it does sound like they are purposely trying to exclude her from the holiday, but why would they do that if they are still friends with her the rest of the time? Are they still friends, or have they had a falling out?

I would suggest that you just leave it for now. The holiday is still almost a year away and your daughter might find a new friend to share with, or even to do something else with.

Yes this is what I’m thinking, it’s tough but try and see this exclusion as a blessing in disguise. I have a feeling they would’ve have been very kind to her

She will find her people soon enough!

I was your daughter. It is absolutely heartbreaking. I tried to over compensate and pay for “my friends”. Do everything to make them happy. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. 🙏🙏🙏🙏 your daughter finds her tribe.

@Btc76 is correct. The Equality Act stops service providers from discriminating against us, but individuals are free to associate with who they please in their private lives.

The right a neurotypical person has to shun me is the exact same right that I have to shun someone who is setting off my pervert alarm. If you try to mandate people being around those who make them feel uncomfortable for the sake of "inclusion", you undermine people's right to use that same shunning to safeguard themselves.

As for tone-policing Btc76, that shit's weaponised against autistic people all the time. "There are nicer ways of saying things", when a common feature of autism is struggling to compose any way of saying it, is a silencing tactic that disproportionately affects autistic people. I'm not kidding about struggling with saying things: I'm a picture thinker, I often go mute under pressure, and a Grammarly subscription to help with written tone is one of my workplace reasonable adjustments.

Your DD will be free to find her tribe soon, a tribe of fellow autistic people who understand her and who aren't forced to be around her because of being in the same school but instead have a free choice and so can genuinely choose to be around her.

It will hurt at first. Finding out just how convincingly and consistently neurotypicals can lie about how they feel about you always does. It's not just the loss of the perceived friendship, but the loss of trust in the whole of humanity not to lie through their teeth.

The whole year group won’t go will they? It’s a group within the group. And most of them will be 18 by then but not at the time of booking. I can assure you not everyone will go. Some won’t afford it and some parents won’t be keen either. I’d see what next year brings.

Gosh as a parent of a young AuDHD boy I had a sharp intake of breath reading this. There really are more compassionate ways of saying things and I would rather hang out with any of the autistic people I know than someone who delivers their opinions so unkindly.

Op, I sympathise so much. Are you in Australia, schoolies trip? I used to live and teach there. The trips can get pretty wild. Consider whether DD would cope well emotionally with the trip? It doesn't take away the hurt, but could be better for her to plan a different adventure.

My husband is autistic - he is a wonderful, successful man! He is so loyal, will do anything for his friends, and he's a total individual. He was horrendously bullied at school and had a tough time at uni. He found his tribe as he grew. I think being an autistic teen is such a difficult path. She's so lucky she has a supportive parent in you to help her navigate it. She will be ok x

She suggested this and the group have told her not to. It is clear they simply don’t want her to join them. 😞

Was she part of the discussion/invited when the talks about the holiday started? Was the initial issue that in the group of 7 6 had already paired off and she was left without an accompanying 18 yo? What did her friends actually say when she mentioned the alternative plan ? Why wouldn’t it work? If the discussion was via text , if she lets you, you’d be better off reading the messages yourself to see if you can understand the situation better.

On a really practical level I think it would be a good idea to plan a really nice week exactly for that time with her, maybe staying with family or friends or a trip somewhere cool with you. So that way throughout the year when it comes up in conversation she is not the sad one staying at home, but the one who can say: such a shame I cannot come, am in Penzance/Paris that week, do send some photos

that is how I would play it anyway

How tough for your daughter. If these have been her solid friends through school it seems odd they wouldn’t try and make it work. I wonder if it would be better if she went abroad elsewhere during the holiday time so she’s distracted. I’m another one who did Camp America and loved it!

This happened to my friend's dd (In another school) and it caused a great deal of hurt and anguish.

There are number of things you can do

1. Organise a post a level trip/holiday for her with friends outside of school

2. Explain to your dd that you can not 'force' the other girls to include her, that friendship once you reach adulthood is a free choice. I really mean this op, your dd needs to get out of the mindset that she can ram through her wants and needs, this will only serve to ostracise her more.

3. If you are friends with the mothers of the girls, can you speak to them?

4. Speak to the school and outline what has happened, and see if they are willing to talk to the girls about inclusivity

5. In the year you now have ahead, dd can develop friendships and networks outside of school, so she has many friendship groups to enjoy and not just one.

This kind of thing happens. Ask dd to encourage new friendships in school and invite them over/organise cinema and shopping trips. She needs to immediately broaden her horizons socially.

School will come to an end soon, and she will be free to join societies and clubs at university with a broader range of friends, and become more independent.

This is a terrible idea, as she will simply be left out of all the activities/club nights etc. It is also not safe especially to be so young and alone in some of these rowdy resorts. If they do not want her there, they will find a way to dodge her, and she will spend the week by herself feeling even worse.

I don’t argue that she’s wrong in that part of what she says (that people can choose their friends) but I disagree with her assumption that the group finds OPs daughter annoying when we have no evidence of that.

We’ve been told that this group has been OP’s daughter’s particular friendship group, rather than a random group of girls she approached, and it doesn’t read like they’ve excluded her from things before. This sounds like it’s come as a surprise.

So, why choose now to ditch her if they’ve all been happy enough as friends for a while? Why choose to exclude her from this particular activity alone? I’d say it’s more likely the fact that she’ll still be 17 when they travel than anything to do with her personality. Which is mean enough to be honest!

Oh gosh this makes me so sad. I have an autistic daughter who will be 17 when she finishes high school and I just realised how that might affect any post graduation trips people are planning. I can see this happening to her in a few years.

I would 100% not agree to pay anything for her to show up uninvited. You have a year, maybe she’ll figure out something else, maybe you can find something she’d love to do on her own, maybe she’ll meet someone nicer.

Can you keep her really really busy this year? Is there an activity she does or would want to do? My daughter does dance and we’ve recently let her sign up for even more dance as being busy is great for her. Maybe she’ll meet someone nice that way.

And yes it might be true that you just don’t see how hard it has been for these ex-friends and maybe they have had to look after your daughter in ways they don’t want to do on holiday but this is a really rubbish way to go about it. And a really horrible way to end a friendship with no warning.

But definitely, definitely she can’t go on her own. That would be terribly unsafe. They won’t look out for her and would have no issues leaving her alone at a club or just ignoring her altogether.

Sadly the group do not want her to go with them and have tried to convey this in a slightly opaque way- is that better or worse than being direct - I don’t really know.
Any forcing of the issue will make things wildly uncomfortable for the DD and is not going to result in her being accepted on the trip.

I would also say this is a self funded holiday not a school trip and horrible as it must be for OPs DD it’s not the right situation to turn into a Be Kind and inclusive lesson. The only thing worse than not going would be to be there under sufferance. On these trips everyone needs to look out for their pals and being in a solo room and not really part of the main group is a recipe for disaster.

That’s so tough for your DD. The bit that stuck out for me in your OP was that she’s friends with these girls but doesn’t have a “bestie”. I think this might be key. Is she perhaps more on the periphery of the group than she realises? The other girls are perhaps using the holiday as a not very kind or direct way of phasing her out.

A lot can change in a year of course but I think it’s really important now to talk to your DD about recognising her worth and not clinging to friendships with people who don’t value her.

No real advice just wanted to send sympathy- being a parent is tough sometimes.

Reading this made me feel so sad. Sad for people that are ND (like my son) and sad for them people who aren't if this is the examples they are being bought up with. What youre saying is absolutely right but my goodness, the way you said it was shameful.