When A Neurodivergent Child’s Body Stops Masking: A Parent’s Real Experience
I’m leaning against the elementary school fence, sipping lukewarm iced coffee, when I see my 10-year-old, Eli, coming around the corner. He’s not walking like he used to after a full day of school—shoulders hunched, face smoothed into the “good kid” expression he worked on for three years to avoid drawing attention. Today, he’s flapping both hands so hard his elbows are hitting his ribs, humming out loud at full volume, and stepping on every crack in the sidewalk just because he can, even when other kids side-step around him snickering. The PTA mom standing next to me shifts her canvas tote and nods toward him. “Eli seems really wound up today. Is everything okay?”
I used to apologize in that moment. I used to nudge his shoulder, mutter “inside voice” and tuck his hands into his jacket pockets before we even reached the car. That was before the stomach aches that started in second grade. Three times a week, he’d come home with his shirt pulled tight over his belly, too sick to eat dinner, too sick to even sit on the couch and rewatch his favorite Avatar: The Last Airbender episodes. The pediatrician ran every test—checked for food allergies, ulcers, even a hernia—and found nothing wrong. It wasn’t until our occupational therapist leaned across the table and said, “This is masking. His body is holding so much tension to fit in, it’s making itself sick” that it clicked.
I went home that night and flipped through old first-grade photos. Every picture shows Eli sitting up straight, hands folded neatly in his lap, smile tight enough to make his cheeks ache. He came home every day and yelled at his 4-year-old sister over a misplaced toy, fell asleep face-down in his spaghetti at 6 p.m. I wrote it off as first-grade burnout. I didn’t know he was practicing being “normal” so hard his brain didn’t have space left for anything else. Masking isn’t just faking a smile to make other people comfortable, I’ve learned. It’s memorizing how much eye contact is “just enough” so no one calls you rude. It’s holding stims in for seven straight hours of class. It’s forcing words out of your mouth when your brain goes fully mute and you can’t even remember your own name, just because the teacher called on you. For Eli, it was tucking his hands under his thighs until his nails left half-moon marks in his skin, just so no one would whisper about the “weird kid.”
Then his body went on strike. The stomach aches got bad enough that he missed four days of school in one month, and we decided we’d stop pushing him to pretend. We talked to his teacher, mapped out small accommodations, and told Eli he didn’t have to hide any part of himself for anyone anymore, as long as he wasn’t hurting someone else. At first, it was messy. Last month, we were in the grocery store when a blaring fire drill announcement cut through the store, and Eli just sat down on the linoleum right in the middle of the cereal aisle and covered his ears. He wouldn’t stand up for 10 minutes, even when I told him we could leave immediately and get ice cream on the way home. A couple of other shoppers sighed and stepped around us like we were a broken shopping cart blocking the way. I used to be mortified. I’d yank him up, mumble apologies, and speed out of the store crying. This time, I just leaned against the Cheerios display, pulled out my phone, and waited.
The things that have worked for us are small, I tell other parents who ask. We don’t do any fancy programs. We made a masking menu, just a sheet of printer paper taped to Eli’s bedroom door, that lists what he can do no questions asked in different spaces. For example: at family dinner, he can stand next to his chair instead of sitting the whole time. At a friend’s birthday party, he can reset in the car for 10 minutes whenever he needs. At school, he can stim however he wants as long as he doesn’t tap his pencil loud enough to distract the kid next to him. We don’t force him to hide anything, but we give him clear choices for when he does want to dial things down for other people’s comfort, if that’s what he wants.
I also stopped forcing the unspoken rules of politeness that drained him most. If he doesn’t want to say hi to someone we run into, he can just wave. If he doesn’t want to hug a relative at Christmas, he can do a silly air hug instead. No lectures about being nice, no pushing him to do something that makes his skin crawl. Those tiny, daily acts of forcing himself to perform added up to more tension than I realized. The stomach aches dropped from three times a week to maybe once a month, usually when he has a big standardized test and pushes himself to sit still longer than he should.
Back at the school pickup, when the PTA mom asks if everything is okay, I just say “Yeah, he’s been holding it together all week. This is just him letting it out.” She nods, a little confused, and turns to wave at her own kid. Eli runs up to me, still flapping, and yells “We got extra recess today! Extra recess means we don’t have to finish math homework!” He jumps up and down so hard my iced coffee sloshes over the rim onto my hand. I don’t tell him to quiet down. I just wipe my hand on my jeans and say that’s awesome, let’s go get that ice cream.
We still have hard days. Two weeks ago, we had to leave the community movie night early because the sound was too loud, and a teen behind us booed. Eli still gets self-conscious sometimes when the same group of boys teases him about his hand-flapping. I still catch myself tensing up when we walk into a new restaurant, old habits die hard. But I’m proud of him. His body didn’t go on strike to be difficult. It went on strike to stop carrying the weight of other people’s ideas of what normal looks like. It’s not my job to ask him to pick that weight back up. For now, we’re just taking it one day at a time, and letting his body tell us what it needs.
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