Why does parenthood often reveal previously unidentified autistic traits?

It’s been a busy week, out and about in the car. It has given me a welcome opportunity to listen to some podcasts – The Late Discovered Club with Catherine Asta and All Aboard ADHD with Claire Quigley Ward being current favourites. As neurodiversity is one of my specialist interests, I have heard and read many parents’ stories of discovering their neurodivergence over the last few years.

One frequently recurring theme is how becoming a parent often triggers the start of their late discovery journey. In this newsletter, I will reflect on how becoming a parent impacted and triggered my self-identification as autistic.

Pregnancy and early years

From a young age, I always imagined having children of my own. I wasn’t in any hurry and was a relatively ‘old’ mother, having my eldest in my early thirties. Becoming parents was something my husband and I had been looking forward to. We had a few relatives and friends who already had children, but we weren’t in close contact with many young babies or children before becoming parents. When it arrived, parenthood was a shock to the system.

I was lucky to have a smooth first pregnancy. However, I found the realities of the newborn stage challenging, especially with a baby who seemed to sleep only roughly 1 night in 7 and was very difficult to soothe. I breastfed and found that difficult, painful at times, and tying because I couldn’t express milk, and it felt like a never-ending routine of little sleep and lots of feeding. There’s much societal pressure around babies, mainly feeding and sleeping. Everyone else is keen to tell you ‘The right thing to do’. You have advice coming from all directions, often unsolicited, and I usually didn’t trust my instincts. Things improved sleep-wise from around 3-4 months, so I could start to enjoy motherhood more.

With hindsight, the most prominent autistic trait that became apparent again when I was a new parent was my struggles with social communication and friendships. It brought back all the memories and difficulties I had experienced before forming settled friendships with my university housemates and meeting my husband in my late teens and early twenties. In the intervening years, I had not had to think too much about social gatherings aside from occasionally in a work context, as we had an established group of friends and relatives that we saw in a rough rotation and with whom I was comfortable.

As a new parent, I felt enormous pressure to make new parent friends locally, as our friends and relatives lived further afield. I joined mother and baby groups and later toddler activity/playgroups, but I never found them easy to navigate. Other people always had friends they knew or could talk easily with others there. The feelings I had experienced, particularly as a teenager and to a certain extent as a young adult, of always being on the periphery of social groups, looking in with longing and unable to find the words and behaviours to become part of the ‘in crowd’ resurfaced.

I did establish a couple of friends that I saw in groups and eventually progressed to seeing outside of groups, but again, that felt like much effort to pluck up the courage to ask people if they wanted to meet up. Once I returned to the workplace when my daughter was 10 months old, I found it easier to navigate the social side again as there was less time to fill socially, and therefore, I put less pressure on myself to be more social. As she got older, she made friends through her day nursery, so I got to know their parents, some of whom I knew vaguely from baby groups, through children’s parties in her toddler/pre-school years.

I settled into good routines with my eldest. I worked three days a week while she was in nursery, and I had a couple of established ‘mum friends’ whom I met up with every couple of weeks. My parents came up one day a week to spend the day with us, and we saw my in-laws regularly at weekends.

Juggling with a second child

Things got trickier again when a new element was introduced to the family dynamic in the form of my son, with a 2.5-year age gap. He was born via emergency caesarean; we were fortunate not to lose him, as he had been struggling for the final week or so of the pregnancy. This changed the dynamics, especially after the operation, as it made it much harder to care for and be physically close to my daughter, who was an active toddler by then.

My son was much more settled as a newborn, although he would not be put down to sleep for the first couple of weeks. Still, tag team holding between me, my husband and my parents was a blessed relief compared to the distress my daughter experienced and, therefore, we experienced in her early weeks. As I healed physically and we settled into life as a family of four, we settled into some routine again. I didn’t feel the same social pressures quite as keenly the second time around, although my nervousness and feeling awkward in those more extensive group settings has never really gone away. I had retained the ‘mum friends’ I made initially and made a few new ones, especially after we moved house, and my daughter started at the local school nursery.

With hindsight, both children had habits and behaviours as babies and young children that I now see as clear markers of their neurodivergence, but at the time, it didn’t cross my mind. They struggled with changes to routine, new places and new people, large and noisy environments, being expected to conform, and the demands of things like structured group activities and lessons. They were different but close as young children. By coincidence or not, many of my relatives and our friend’s children have later been diagnosed with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia, so to a large extent, whilst my children were very young, we were naturally around those who were similar, even though none had diagnoses at that stage. So their differences and mine were not so apparent.

The impact of school

It wasn’t until my children reached formal school age and started attending our local primary school nursery that their issues became more apparent. The problems were obvious initially, but I didn’t consider them possible neurodivergent traits until they were in Y4 and Y2, respectively. As I had struggled with anxiety in the past, I, and the school, put down all of their struggles to anxiety and lack of social confidence.

Personally, as a parent, I found the whole school experience overwhelming. There were so many other people, expectations around children's behaviour, and the lack of support we received when they didn’t behave like other children. Mostly, this revolved around separation/social anxiety and getting them into the school at the start of the day. Mornings were a rush and a nightmare juggling two young children alone as my husband would leave early for work. Eventually, they would settle once new routines were established and familiarity with staff and classrooms grew. The loss of my father-in-law, the children’s Grandad, when my daughter was in Reception class impacted all our mental health and was also identified as a possible trigger for behaviours which, in hindsight, were also linked to neurodivergent traits.

Once in school, they were both well regarded, academically achieving age-related expectations. Behaviourally, the school never had any significant issues for many years. My daughter had a lovely group of friends, and my son, whilst he didn’t form a close friendship, seemed happy enough to engage with his sister’s friends and their siblings and got on well superficially with children in his year group.

I struggled more with the school pressures and demands – homework and feeling obligated to get the children to do work, whilst not agreeing with the principle of them having homework at such a young age, endless different themes and events going on throughout the school year requiring levels of creativity I don’t possess around costumes and props. Parents' evenings were generally positive, although lack of confidence came back as a comment several times, which, as a parent who lacks confidence, is probably the worst thing to hear about your child.

Neurodivergent traits identified in both children

Parents often only identify their neurodivergence after first identifying traits in their children. I only considered neurodivergent traits in myself after autistic traits were identified separately in both children in the spring of 2021. I was fortunate timing-wise with this. I founded Actually Education CIC in June 2021 and gained valuable insights from that process and the connections it brought, which gave me a positive neuro-difference-affirming outlook.

I initially considered that I may be ADHD and requested a referral for assessment via the GP. This was after I heard about the hyperactive and impulsive tendencies not necessarily being overtly physical and that it could be more mental hyperactivity. This referral was rejected due to a lack of evidence of traits in my childhood. After I self-identified as autistic two years later, and with prompts from social media and my therapist, I eventually came to recognise these traits as hypomanic episodes of bipolar.

I knew about the hereditary link with many neurodivergent conditions and, therefore, considered the possibility that I could be autistic for approximately two years before getting comfortable with self-identifying as such. It was only through much reading about different autistic and AuDHD folks' stories and experiences that I started to understand my experiences.

It took all that time because whilst some elements seemed to fit, others didn’t. I wasn’t conscious of masking, sensory sensitivities, or having meltdowns. The first thing that resonated was reading a couple of fictional books from the perspective of a PDA child, written with input from PDA children and adults. PDA stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance and is sometimes identified as a specific profile of autism. That sense of not being physically able to do things even when I wanted to do them rang lots of bells, as did the impact of other people placing demands and expectations on me.

The lightbulb moment of certainty

Whilst my son’s autistic traits were recognised and identified early on, we struggled to get the school to see the autistic traits that we started to see in my daughter. She had become an expert masker by that stage, and they only saw anxiety. Whilst I had been able to refer him for neurodevelopmental assessment in May 2022, I couldn’t refer her due to the need for symptoms to be observed in two settings. However, come May 2023, she was finally receiving support from CAMHS for anxiety, which she found helpful, and as part of those sessions, I was enquiring whether they were seeing signs and could progress an internal referral.

I was asked to provide evidence to support the referral request. My daughter was keen for this to progress and so insisted we get on with it right away; I remember it clearly because it was the day of the King’s Coronation, and I had been planning to watch that coverage on TV. I decided to take all the symptoms identified on the NHS website for younger and older children for both autism and ADHD and put them into a table in Word. I added columns for child, home and school observations (I was aware that both children had teachers who were supportive and understood them and were willing to assist me in gathering evidence to support their referrals, as the assessments would likely not be until the following academic year I was keen to get their observations in writing).

I started to go through the symptoms with my daughter, noting her traits. I used a similar process with my son, although he didn’t input into the process himself in the same way, being that bit younger and less aware of his possible neurodivergence at that stage. It was reflecting on their traits and how similar in many ways different elements were to my childhood that I had that lightbulb or flash of certainty that I was indeed autistic.

Unmasking and starting to see my autistic traits more clearly

Over the coming weeks and months, I gradually realised just how much I had learnt subconsciously over the years to hide and mask. I realised I was sensitive to noise and started experimenting with Flare earbuds. I also realised that I was sensitive to touch and weight on the top of my head, causing physical pain and discomfort when wearing hats or overhead earphones for extended periods.

I started to understand how meltdowns and shutdowns impacted me and manifested. Those occasional angry outbursts, which tended to be out of character, I now sensed the physical and mental reaction I was experiencing and what may be triggering the meltdown. I started to understand how I may have been experiencing autistic burnout and how misinterpreting that as depression initially was contributing to burnout, leading to depression when I didn’t allow my body and mind to rest.

I felt a massive sense of relief being confident in identifying myself as autistic finally after two years of wondering. I fully embraced the positives of being autistic, and I told people socially and at work soon after this initial lightbulb moment. I saw how I had been negatively impacted by not knowing I was autistic, why I had struggled over the years since childhood with various aspects of life, and how I had successfully adapted around barriers over the years without even realising that was what I was doing.

Resources

Whatever stage of your journey of discovery you are on, if you are considering you may be neurodivergent yourself, the following resources may be interesting and give you insights into your own experiences.

• The Late Discovered Club - https://www.thelatediscoveredclub.com/
• All Aboard ADHD - https://www.allaboardadhd.com/
• Autistic Revolution - https://autistic-revolution.com/

About the author

I am Joanne (Jo) Feaster, a late-identified autistic and bipolar woman. I started self-identifying as autistic in May 2023 and was diagnosed with bipolar type 2 in July 2023. I am married and live in Leeds with my husband John, and my two amazing children, both of whom have been diagnosed in late 2023 and early 2024 as autistic and ADHD.

I write to aid my mental health and to share my lived experiences as an autistic and bipolar woman and parent carer of my neurodivergent children. I subscribe to the social model of disability and the neurodiversity paradigm. I see our strengths, positive qualities, and spiky profiles just as much as I recognise the barriers we face from society.