As a parent, your job is to focus on survival, with thriving as the goal. For all of you. It will be difficult to see progress or improvement, but look for them and acknowledge them whenever you can.
Part of survival for me is things I read to help me understand them better. So that even though their normal puberty behaviors continued, I had more understanding and patience.
Part of that was reminding myself all the things they DIDN’T know. That helped me put context around the things I might get frustrated that they weren’t doing. “She doesn’t even know how to balance a checkbook - why do I think she can navigate a complex interpersonal conflict?”
However hard this is for you and your wife, it’s harder for your daughter by orders of magnitude.
And this was another thing that helped us HUGELY. I shared all my parent-reading facts with them. “You may feel this, you may feel that.” “You may feel angry and have no idea why, but you really and truly do feel the anger, and I believe you, and it’s valid. Try to let me know if you’re feeling combative for no reason and you aren’t in control and you need some space, okay? Then come to me when it’s over and we can talk.” I told her I would remember that I loved her, and that she loved me, even when she was struggling. And that I would say so.
My daughter LOVED that in her tweens when she could say to me (many times) “I’m having a moment, mom.” And she was able that way to express her anger frustration and chaos, and STILL not feel like she was hurting me.
Then there was the time she said something mean about not doing the dishes, and I said, as I learned to always do at that moment, “I love you too, honey.” She rolled her eyes and said, “mooooom. You are suppoesed to shout at me, ‘don’t you talk like that’ and I shout back, ‘I can do what I want’ and you shout, ‘do the dishes,’ and I shout, ‘I’m not going to!’ And you leave the room, stomping, and I do the dishes anyway after you’re gone.”
And I looked at her.
And she looked back. “The shouting mom? Now?”
Hoooookay, so I shouted my lines, and she shouted hers, and I stomped, and looked back over my shoulder, and she winked… and did the dishes.
It was funny and cute, but clearly she actually needed the shouting - for some hormonally incomprehensible reason. But all of our previous reading and sharing of research prepared her for
it being okay to need that and allowed her to ask for that space.
I really should have continued with this instead of diverging in my post above:
There might be some advantages for a definitive assessment that might (or might not) identify your daughter as on the autism spectrum. This is more difficult and more nuanced for girls compared with boys.
Very definitely different. Girls are not given the space to be autistic as much as boys are. They display differently and it’s hard to get support for the way they display. Definitely worth the read on what differences exist. Most Autistic girls don’t get diagnosed until much much later, and after difficulties in school from the lack of diagnosis, that they usually suffer in silence.
My son is probably very close to your age, to give you a time reference. In our school system, being identified as having any kind of learning disability or disability was likely to get you tracked into only dealing with that identified disability and made it much more difficult to get both the support needed AND the academic needs met. If you can, talk to other parents who have kids that may be somewhat similar to your daughter and ask them about how well their kids' needs are being met.
With my son I had worries that if they knew he was on the spectrum, they would use limited and incorrect knowledge to address it. Like, “well he’s autistic, we’ll make everything about dinosaurs.” Wrong answer - for that kid.
I will confess that I made a grave error with my own kids by trying to get the system to work for my kids (and many of their friends) which was and remains an impossible task in my district.
My district wouldn’t give him services because “his grades are fine.” So being autistic and smart means he doesn’t need services? No, it means he has plenty of time for services!! And if you don’t meet either need, he has plenty of time to disrupt! I complained, “he’s doing fine, but he’s disrupting OTHER kids’ learning and it requires some services to help!” No, he’s at the top of his class, so no issue.
I should have done the more self centered thing and worked solely on enriching my kids education and extending lessons at home. To a large extent, this happened naturally but I was extremely frustrated with our school system's focus on neatness and everyone on the same page at the same time learning instead of adapting to the actual needs of individual kids--not just my own. I saw a number of children with mediocre grades but with high academic abilities who were being ignored because they did not have a loud bossy mom like me because their parents were busy working 2-3 jobs each to keep food on the table and the electric on.
Yeah, I went in and volunteered to give greek and latin root word classes to my son instead of spelling lessons (he was disruptive in spelling because he couldn’t engage in lists of easy words and the school felt the words he needed - 5 grades above - were too “mature”, never mind that he was reading those books so obviously he could handle them. But… yeah,). So I came in twice a week and delivered a personal etymology class - and they gave me 4 more kids to join him.
Labels such as ASD, ADHD, ODD, etc are very important as we can then arrange support. Especially with transitioning to high school
I think in most cases this is true and helpful, but a parent should watch out for whether the district has professionals or if they are lumping the ASD, ADD etc with unrelated learning disabilities and trying to give everyone the same treatment.
I understand her better than just about anyone on the planet, including my wife (though I'm needing to adapt to her lying for convenience behaviors now). But there is a block there that I still can't peer into. I struggle most with dealing with that block.
For lying, we felt it was a good conversation to have to ask what they intended to get. “I know it’s not true, and I am not angry, but I’m curious. What were you hoping to get out of that answer. Or did you think about it? How do you think other people will react if you say one thing, but they know something else? Is it worth being inaccurate like that?” And being prepared for the very real fact that they may not have any idea why they are lying and it’s so embarrassing that they deny it to the last breath. And that’s oky, just planting a seed, and creating a safe space to talk if they can later.
And related to that, and harking back to an earlier part of the discussion in this thread, I worked with my kids very very hard on what we called the “5-part apology”. My son, from autism and also sensory processing disorder, would frequently do things that upset others, particularly teachers. So I got him (and also his sister) his own leather-bound book, and we required that he write down his apologies, so that he could remember them and learn form them. Every apology MUST have all 5 elements. And after you write the draft in your book, you’ll copy it onto a notepaper for your teacher.
The elements must be addressed in order:
- I understand and name what happened, specifically
- I acknowledge how it impacted others, specifically
- I acknowledge how it impacts me or my reputation, specifically
- I name how I will repair this situation
- I name what I will do to make sure it does not happen again
I made him write it, and make a copy for the teacher or the person impacted. He didn’t understand the point of the effort, thought it was a waste of time, but he could follow the formula.
Then one day at school he got in trouble for throwing nuts at school. The teacher stopped him and spoke sharply. He hung his head and said (teacher told me this later), “I’m sorry. I threw nuts at the table where you were teaching. This disrupted your lesson and made everyone think I was in the way on purpose. I’ll clean up the nuts and remember when I come down the stairs that people are studying and I have to stay out of the way.” And she said she was just, “uh, yes, uh, exactly. Thank you.” And he came home and told me how wonderful the formula was and how it worked to make the situation better. And it was like the sun rising in a misty meadow. He was now a True Believer in the 5-part apology (and can quickly point out when politicians fail at it!)
Anyway, the idea of apologizing to help the situation is not intuitive or easy. And I think the same is true for tween lying. A low-key chance to understand why it’s coming out of one’s own mouth might be really helpful. I used to lie as a tween. For no real reason other than that’s the way I wanted the world to be - and it was instead very turbulent and confusing and I had no control. So I said what I wanted, not what was real.
