Podcast Recap: Should I tell my child about their neurodiversity?

Welcome to Podcast Recaps: where we offer highlights from some of Neurodiverging’s most popular podcasts, in written form! In Episode 22, Danielle answered a question about telling children about their diagnoses. Let’s see what she said:

Today I want to discuss a couple of questions that I’ve gotten a few times:

• Should I tell my child about their autism?
• How do I portray being autistic as an ultimately positive and valuable identity, while not skipping over the real challenges that are associated with it?

This can be a complicated question because everybody’s situation is different and unique. Different kids are different: different ages, different abilities to understand what’s going on in the world.

Parents have more or less experience with real autistic people. Parents are, or are not, autistic themselves. So there’s a lot of variables in place. I have my own ways of approaching autism in our family, as an autistic parent with an autistic child but our ways won’t work for everyone.

Luckily what is really cool is that we actually have research on this. Today I want to share with you some different research that has been performed around this question, and what we can take away from some of those pieces.

I’m going to reference a paper called “Short Report: Autistic Parents Views and Experiences of Talking About Autism with Their Autistic Children” by Crane, etc.

The first theme the researchers identified can be summarized as: honest discussions about being autistic should be part of your everyday life. Whether you are autistic as a parent yourself, or whether your child is autistic, if you want to normalize autism, and you want to make it clear that autism is a natural variation of humanity and part of the human world we live in, then you have to normalize autism by talking about it.

That doesn’t mean you have to be having deep, serious conversations with your children at all times! Bringing it up in everyday conversation can be really helpful for everyone involved. As an example from my everyday life, in our house when I get overwhelmed, I’ll just say, “My brain is really overwhelmed.” By saying this, I’m pointing out the fact that my brain is reacting differently to the situation than another person’s brain might.

If I’m having a challenge that is based in my autism or my neurotype, then I do try to draw attention to it, because I think it’s really important to model that for my children. But I’ll also highlight if I’m doing something really cool. When you see your autistic or ADHD child’s brain doing something that is really useful, or cool, or creative, and it’s something a neurotypical brain might not do as well or as easily, you can simply say to your child, “I notice your brain is doing this, and I think it’s really cool!”

The truth is that a lot of children who are autistic, ADHD, or have a different neurotype are told (or shown) that the way that their brains work differently are not good, not valid, and not valuable to the world. If you can point out circumstances where their brains and our brains are useful, valuable, and valid, that can go a long way to countering any kind of stigma they’re getting from outside your home or media or anything else.

Now, this idea of open honest discussions about being autistic in everyday life is also really important in terms of the question I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Should I tell my child about their autism diagnosis?

I completely understand why some parents, especially neurotypical parents, experience concern or stress when they have to tell their child about an autism or ADHD diagnosis. I think, personally — as someone who was diagnosed as an adult — getting my diagnosis saved my life. The diagnosis made everything make sense. I knew that I was different and not processing things the same way as other people. and I was really good at things that other people didn’t seem to be good at, and I had huge challenges in spaces where other people didn’t seem to be challenged. I knew that already.

Now, this idea of open honest discussions about being autistic in everyday life is also really important in terms of the question I mentioned at the beginning of this post: Should I tell my child about their autism diagnosis?

I completely understand why some parents, especially neurotypical parents, experience concern or stress when they have to tell their child about an autism or ADHD diagnosis. I think, personally — as someone who was diagnosed as an adult — getting my diagnosis saved my life.

The diagnosis made everything make sense. I knew that I was different and not processing things the same way as other people. and I was really good at things that other people didn’t seem to be good at, and I had huge challenges in spaces where other people didn’t seem to be challenged. I knew those things, already. The autism diagnosis didn’t change anything about me, but it gave me a framework to understand how my brain is challenged in some ways, but also how my brain is awesome at some things. Having that framework saying, “I’m not a neurotypical person but I’m definitely a person. I’m definitely still normal in this other way,” is really valuable.

Your child knows they’re different and that they are doing things differently. If you don’t take the chance to get in there early to normalize that difference for them and say, “There are other people like you! You’re not a weirdo, you are part of this group over here. I know you’ve noticed you’re not part of this neurotypical group. There’s still a group for you. You are still part of the world and part of society.”

I don’t say this to scare you, or to make you feel like I’m judging you as a parent. It is true that some children may not have the tools to understand this kind of framing. But on the whole, most kids are capable of being told about an autism diagnosis in an age-appropriate way.

Read the podcast transcript. Use your favorite podcast service to listen to the episode: Apple Podcasts | Podchaser | Spotify | Google Podcasts

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• Read “Short report: Autistic parents’ views and experiences of talking about autism with their autistic children by Laura Crane, Lok Man Lui, Jade Davies, and Elizabeth Pellicano.

This article was written by Crystal Farmer, based on a podcast by Danielle Sullivan. You can learn more about Crystal and the Neurodiverging team here: https://www.neurodiverging.com/about-neurodiverging/