Hello,
I’m . I’m a 9 year old autistic boy. I’d like to share my experiences about school with you.
Before I started getting the help I needed, I felt like my school wanted me to work infinitely hard on everything. For example, I was having lots of trouble understanding something and doing it right, and they would just tell me to try harder, when I was already trying really hard and didn’t understand. Like how I was meant to do a particular school project.
Another way I think about it is that they were getting mad at me for not being able to get to the end of an infinitely long race track.
This made me feel scared and like I could never get things right, and that I just wasn’t right. Like there was something wrong with me.
When they would get angry with me I would feel scared. Then I would try to protect myself. Then I would do things like attack them or running home. I tried very hard not to do this sort of thing, but because I was scared all the time, it still happened a lot. Then they’d get angry at me and treat me worse. That would make me more scared, so I would run away and attack more. Then this would repeat. So things just got worse.
Then I got my autism diagnosis. And then we got help at school. The school got help to know how to treat me better. So then I wasn’t running away as much and I wasn’t attacking people much. And now it’s easier for the school to treat me better.
I think kids like me need to get help earlier so they don’t get into the loop of being treated worse and them behaving worse. I wish my school had believed me when I said I was trying really hard.
Thanks for reading my story.