I was in a Facebook group for AuDHD women when I saw the post. A mom, heartbroken, wondering if her daughter didn’t make the dance team because she was just a little too different. Too odd. Too herself.
Then I saw a comment that stopped me cold.
The gist of it: our job as parents is to help our kids assimilate. That it’s doing them a favor in the long run.
I remember being that kid who just wanted to belong somewhere. Anywhere. I didn’t know I was AuDHD. I didn’t have words for why I felt like I was always slightly out of sync with everyone around me. I just knew it hurt. So I did what kids do when they’re hurting and desperate to be loved. I changed. I watched other people and tried to copy what made them likable. I said yes when I meant no. I laughed at things that confused me. I prayed, genuinely prayed, that today would be the day someone picked me and meant it.
I masked heavily, and it still didn’t keep me from being bullied for being “other.”
The rejection still came. It always does. But by the time it arrived, I’d already lost something harder to get back than a friendship. I’d lost track of who I actually was.
Now I’m 51, late-diagnosed, and still excavating myself from under the masks I built as a kid just trying to survive. That’s not dramatic. That’s just true.
So when I see someone say the answer is to teach our kids to assimilate, something in me breaks a little. Because I know what that actually costs. Not in theory. In my bones.
Here’s what I want that mom, and every parent of a weird wonderful kid, to hear:
Rejection hurts. But being told you have to change to be worthy of belonging? That’s rejection too. It just comes from the people who were supposed to be safe.
When we tell kids to mask, to tone it down, to just try harder to fit in, we are sending them a message. We may not mean to. We may be doing it out of love and fear because watching your child get left out is its own kind of pain. But the message lands the same way: who you are is the problem.
And they believe us. Kids always believe us.
I’m not pretending rejection doesn’t hurt. It does. I have boys of my own and I feel that fear for them. But I’d rather help them learn to process the hurt than teach them to earn belonging by disappearing themselves.
Because here’s what nobody told me: early authentic rejection is actually useful. It weeds out people who were never going to be safe anyway. It hurts faster and cleaner than losing someone after years of performing for them, after you’ve already handed them the parts of yourself you can’t easily get back.
The goal isn’t to make our kids palatable to everyone. The goal is to help them know they deserve people who show up for them. Not the performance. Not the carefully managed version. Them.
I wish someone had told me that when I was young and desperate and trying so hard to be normal. I wish someone had said: you don’t have to fix yourself. You just have to find your people. And you can’t find them if you’re hiding.
I’m still figuring that out at 51. Because nobody told me it was okay to just be.
So I’m telling you now, in case nobody told you either.
Let your kid be the weird one. The right people will find them when they stop having to hide.
The ones who don’t? They were never going to stay anyway.
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