Q. My kid leaves merit awards from school in their school bag and tears them up and I find them in the bin. If I find them in their bag before they destroy them they don’t want to talk about them and get angry if I get congratulate them. If I’m lucky I get a shrug and told it’s no big deal. What’s this about?
Dad of autistic (and gifted / “2E”) son aged 11
A.
While there are a number of reasons your child might be doing this, including as a response to bullying at school, PDA, fear of future expectations, and impostor syndrome. I’d like to use this opportunity to touch on the latter.
Impostor syndrome in autistic people, and people with ADHD and other neurodivergencies, can begin remarkably early due to a combination of masking, feeling unseen and unheard, external criticisms, and low self-esteem.
What is it?
Impostor syndrome is a term that has been used since the late 1970s. It is a feeling of anxiety, and a lack of the internal experience of success, despite whatever genuine external, objective success is achieved.
This can result in people feeling like a fraud, as if they’re faking, doubting their own abilities, and finding it difficult to accept praise or acknowledge skills or achievements.
Even in moments of significant external, objective success, neurodivergent people can feel like absolute phonies, and entirely undeserving of any credit or praise.
Why does it happen?
Masking
As many neurodivergent people spend a significant amount of their time masking, there can be a sense of disconnect between self and “masked self”. If, for example, an autistic person masks heavily at work and is very successful in their role, they may feel that they aren’t eligible to take credit for their success because it isn’t them that has achieved it; credit is due to a pseudo-fictional character they play at work.
Lack of validation
Feeling unseen and unheard is a common experience for neurodivergent people. As such, it is not generally a familiar experience to be seen and validated appropriately. When it does happen, be that receiving praise for work well done, or fielding compliments, the neurodivergent person might not be adequately able to process this information and respond appropriately. Whether it’s because the positive reinforcement itself doesn’t connect, or whether it’s that this information triggers a complex range of feelings other than pride, a lack of familiarity with validation and praise can make accepting external reinforcement very foreign and difficult.
External criticisms
Due to the increased amount of external criticism received by neurodivergent people, they become more conditioned to receiving and believing negative feedback than positive. This external feedback also leads to increased levels of depression and anxiety, which also negatively impacts on the ability to believe positive comments.
“It is estimated that those with ADHD receive 20,000 corrective or negative messages by age 10. They view themselves as fundamentally different and flawed”
– WILLIAM DODSON MD
Neurodivergent people can be conditioned into believing negative feedback, and rejecting the positive.
Low self-esteem
Many of the factors above, as well as many other aspects of neurodivergent existence in a neurotypical world, mean many ND people have low self-esteem and negative self-image. As a result, when they achieve objectively great things, it can be hard to either believe that they are as great as people are saying they are, or to believe that it was achieved through skill or hard work opposed to luck.
Helping Your ND Child
It is difficult to preempt these sort of experiences generally found in neurodivergent adults, but it can be done. It is also important to be aware of their existence, so it can be addressed as soon as it rears its ugly head, before it becomes habit and normality.
Giving additional praise for success in younger neurodivergent people may be of assistance. Instead of “Great work on the 98% on your test,” elaborating with, “Well done on the 98%! You clearly listened well in class, processed the topic really well, and concentrated during the exam. You’re really smart, and you put in the right amount of effort too!”
Obviously in these cases it’s important not to exaggerate, or to attribute success to things your child doesn’t do. For example, if my parents had attributed my good grades to “You clearly studied really hard for this!” I’d have felt like even more of a fraud, because studying was a major failing of mine. But by complimenting things you know your child does do – or tries hard at – that lead to their success, you will be fuelling the feeling that they have earned their success. That they are worthy of praise. That their win is valid, and very much theirs.
Similarly, avoid spending too much time downplaying their success. While it’s important to teach our children to be humble, too many children – especially gifted kids – are told “You’re lucky you’re so smart, and hardly have to study,” or “You got 98%? How funny is that? You said you didn’t even try during that test!” Reminding your child that every success is well-founded, be that through hard work, application of strategies and coping mechanisms, overcoming adversity, or the use of their clever brain, is an important learning before impostor syndrome becomes a reality.
Countering the risk factors above will also naturally prevent impostor syndrome. You can do this by:
- Encouraging authenticity, and reducing masking
- Validation and acknowledgment. Making sure your child feels heard and seen.
- Reducing criticisms, and being hyper-aware of how frequently neurodivergent children receive unintentional criticism regarding neurodivergent behaviours such as stimming and emotional expression.
- Promoting healthy self-esteem through praise, internal validation, affirmations, positive mantras, mindfulness, and gratitude journals.
A Different kind of effort
One thing that can make it hard to praise the efforts of gifted neurodivergent people in academic success, is that it can appear easy. And while the academic side of things may indeed be virtually effortless, neurodivergent people are required to apply so much additional effort that this in itself requires praise.
Sure, the questions on a maths test may make sense and be easy to answer, but how’s the sensory experience for your child, sitting in a hard classroom chair, listening to a ticking clock, smelling the lunch in the school bag of the person next to them, etc? How’s the emotional stress and pressure of not knowing if the exam will be as easy as they assume? What was the social experience in the playground before the test? How well did they sleep the night before? How comfy are their socks today? Do they know what’s happening during the next period at school?
This gets credit. This deserves praise. Sure, the maths part was easy, but well done to them for countering, adapting to, ignoring, and accepting so many other factors that could have derailed their success!
What If I think I’m too late?
If your child is already exhibiting signs of impostor syndrome, sit with them to mindfully attribute their own skills or efforts to successes as they occur. If they shrug off an excellent exam result with, “I didn’t even have to try,” remind them that’s because they’re smart, and because they absorbed the information as they were taught it. If they tell you they didn’t really deserve an award, make it very clear to them why they did, and why they would have received it over other people.
Everyone, neurodivergent or otherwise, deserves to feel empowered to take credit for their own successes, whether they require extreme effort or natural talent. Because every success requires effort in one way or another.