They Were Telling the Truth
On what it costs a neurodivergent child when you decide otherwise
Photo by Getty Images for Unsplash+
Dear Childhood Educator,
When a child says “my brain is tired” or “this is too hard,” and you say “stop making excuses,” I want you to consider a possibility.
What if they were telling the truth?
Now, let’s be honest with each other. Sometimes children do avoid hard things. Sometimes “this is too hard” is less about capacity and more about preference. That is real, and you are not wrong to notice it. But “stop making excuses” is a blanket response. It cannot tell the difference. And when it lands on a child who was telling the truth, the cost is not just a dismissed moment.
For a neurodivergent child, that cost compounds across a lifetime.
Here is what that child may have been doing before they said that to you:
They walked into your building and immediately began filtering. Fluorescent lights. Floor wax. Thirty bodies with thirty different temperatures and sounds and smells. The hum of the HVAC. The squeak of a chair three rows back. Their nervous system was already working, hard, before they sat down.
Then they began translating. Not the subject matter. Themselves. How to hold their face. Whether their response to your question would land the way they meant it. Whether the way they are sitting looks right. Whether the thing they want to say is the thing they are allowed to say, in the way they are allowed to say it. In real time. Every minute. While also trying to learn.
By the time they told you their brain was tired, they may have been reporting from a system that had been running at capacity, or past it, for hours.
And you told them that report was an excuse.
So they learned something. Not the lesson you intended, but a lesson nonetheless. They learned that what they feel inside does not match what is acceptable to say out loud. They learned to doubt the signal. They learned to override it, dismiss it, argue themselves out of it. They learned to call their own experience an excuse before anyone else could.
That is not resilience. That is the beginning of a lifelong argument with themselves that many neurodivergent adults are still having. The inability to trust their own internal state. The reflex to push through when they should stop. The confusion about whether what they are experiencing is real or whether they are just, as they were told, making excuses.
You may have planted that seed.
When you dismiss that signal in order to keep your day running smoothly and your goals on target, even with the best intentions, even without realizing it, you are gaslighting them. You are telling them that what they know about themselves is not real. And they will believe you, because you are the adult, and because children are wired to trust the people who hold authority over them. They will take that lesson home. They will take it into adulthood. They will use it on themselves for years.
Do not ask them to doubt their own knowing in order to keep going.
Instead, name it honestly before asking them to continue. Something as simple as: “I hear you. This is hard. Can you give me five more minutes? I believe in you.” That is not an endorsement of avoidance. That is a child learning that their internal experience is real, that adults can be trusted to receive it, and that they can push through something without having to first convince themselves that what they felt was not true.
I watched my daughter spend a week at home during spring break and become, fully, herself. The difference was stark enough that I am already dreading the transition back tomorrow. Not because school is bad. Because the cost of school, for her, is invisible to almost everyone there. And she has learned, as so many of these children have, to carry that cost quietly.
Until she cannot.
When a child tells you their brain is tired, you can choose to receive the signal, honor the message within it, and then use your discernment. Honoring the message works even if it turns out to be an excuse. A child who feels heard will trust you more, not less. A child who learns that their internal experience is worth naming will develop the very self-awareness you are hoping to cultivate in them.
I don’t see a downside here.
Sincerely,
A Neurodivergent Parent of a Neurodivergent Child
To the parents who are reading this, exhausted, having spent years watching your child come home depleted in ways no one at school seems to notice:
You are not imagining it. And neither are they.
Every time your child tells you their brain is tired and you say, “I know, that makes sense,” you are doing repair work. Quiet, unglamorous, necessary repair. You are overwriting a lesson that gets reinforced every time the world fails to receive their signal accurately.
What happened in that classroom has a name. It is gaslighting, even when it is unintentional, even when the teacher meant well, even when your child’s education was the primary goal. Your child was told that what they knew about themselves was not real. And they believed it, because that is what children do.
Your job, as many times as you can manage it, is to tell them the truth: you were reading yourself correctly. I believe you. That was real.
They may never hear that in every classroom they sit in. That is a real loss, and it is allowed to be hard. But at home, every time you receive their signal without question, you are giving them something that will outlast the damage.
It matters more than you know.