What It Means When Your Neurodivergent Child’s Body Goes On Strike (And Why I’m Proud Mine Stopped Masking)
Last Tuesday, I stood by our front door, keys in hand, watching my 11-year-old, Leo, lower himself onto the scuffed rubber doormat, backpack slipping off one shoulder. His sneakers were on the wrong feet, his lunch box was leaking apple juice onto the entryway rug, and we were already 12 minutes late for middle school. “C’mon, bud,” I said, like I had a hundred times before. “You’ve got that group project today. Just get up, we’ll go.” He looked up at me, his face tight with a tension I now recognize, and said, “My body won’t let me. It’s on strike.”
For eight years, Leo masked. He forced his eyes to meet yours when you talked to him, even when he later told me it felt like staring straight into the sun. He ignored the scratch of sock seams, the roar of the cafeteria, the way sitting still in a desk made his skin crawl, because that’s what good kids do. I praised him for it. I told him how proud I was that he “fit in so well” that “no one even notices” he’s autistic and ADHD. I thought that was a win. I thought that was what I was supposed to do as a parent, prepare him for the real world by teaching him to adapt.
It started falling apart last winter, when his regular teacher went on medical leave and they got a long-term sub who rewrote every routine Leo relied on. Leo kept it together. He didn’t complain. He came home every day, did his homework, ate dinner, went to bed. Three weeks in, he woke up in the middle of the night throwing up, and the doctor said it was unmanaged stress. Two weeks after that, he refused to go to the school holiday assembly, sat in the empty hallway the whole time, and the principal emailed me to say he was being uncooperative. That’s when I started connecting the dots: every little “just push through” I’d encouraged, every small adjustment he made to his own needs to please the rest of us, it was piling up, until his nervous system couldn’t push anymore. The strike wasn’t bad behavior. It was a shutdown, a refusal to keep ignoring itself.
It’s not just big dramatic meltdowns, these strikes. Some days it’s refusing to wear the required uniform button-down, even when it means a detention. Some days it’s leaving the table in the middle of dinner because the overhead lights are too bright. It’s Leo telling me he doesn’t care if the other kids think he’s weird for bringing his noise-canceling headphones to lunch. For years, he’d leave them in his backpack because he didn’t want to stand out. Now he wears them no matter what.
I used to think letting him skip the thing, let his body lead, would mean he never learns to handle hard things. I’ve since changed that, and it’s not some big grand philosophy, it’s just small, low-friction changes we made that work. When he says his body can’t do something right now, I don’t ask him to push through for 10 more minutes. I just say, “What does your body need right now?” That’s the first thing I changed, swapping my default “c’mon you can do it” for that one simple question. We keep an emergency bag in the car with extra seamless socks, a fidget cube, a bottle of cold water, and a granola bar, so if he hits a strike halfway out the door we don’t have to scramble through the house to sort it out. I worked with his current teacher to get a no-questions-asked break pass: he can leave the classroom any time he needs, walk around the gym for 5 minutes, and no one nags him about it or asks for an explanation. After school, we don’t touch homework for the first hour. He just lays on the couch, twists his Rubik’s cube, and watches silly TikTok videos about prehistoric fish. No expectations, no reminders that his math is due tomorrow.
Last month, my mom said to me at a family barbecue, “Aren’t you worried he’s just getting used to getting his way all the time? He needs to learn how the world works.” I get where she’s coming from. I thought the same thing once. But I remembered three years ago, when I was stuck in that office job that made me miserable, I had migraines every weekend, I cried in my car every night on the way home. That was my body on strike. I finally quit, and everyone told me I was being reckless, but it was the only thing that made me feel like myself again. A strike isn’t laziness. It’s self-preservation.
It’s not always easy. Some days we miss half a day of school, and I have to send that email to the attendance office, and I feel that old twist of guilt, like I’m failing at this parenting thing. Some days other kids stare at him when he wears his noise-canceling headphones or sits on the floor of the library instead of a chair. But Leo says he doesn’t care anymore. He used to go to bed exhausted every night just from being the person everyone else wanted him to be. Now he goes to bed tired from playing soccer and drawing and arguing with me about screen time, the kind of tired a kid should be.
We’re still figuring it out. There’s no neat solution here, no perfect ending to the story. Some days the strike still catches me off guard, and I slip back into old habits of asking him to push through. But I’m proud of him. He’s learning to listen to his body long before most of us learn that skill. And that matters more than any perfect attendance award, any good behavior note, any expectation that he should be someone he’s not.
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