Growing up

Post Reply New Topic

I highly suspect that our 12 year old daughter has AS. One of the problems we're having with her right now is she has a HUGE problem with turning from a child into a woman. She has jumped to a bigger size in clothing fairly fast. She thinks she needs to lose weight because she has outgrown her clothes and she is getting hips and breasts. She is NOT fat at all. She is thin but is beginning to get the appearance of a young teenager instead of a young girl. She is not happy about this at all.

She says she does not want to grow up... wants to stay a little girl. If anyone mentions to her that she is "growing", "getting bigger", "getting taller", "filling out", "becoming a teenager", "getting older now", etc. she starts screaming on the top of her lungs "I am not!! !" and has a meltdown. If you try to talk to her about puberty she does the same thing... she just freaks out. She just falls onto the floor into a heaping sobbing mess.

I read online today that this is a common problem with girls and AS. (I think it was a section from the book "Asperger's and Girls" by Tony Attwood, that I got a glimpse of on an internet site) So I thought I'd run it by you all here to see what YOU think and what your personal experience has been. I myself personally remember being excited about filling out and getting taller because I was always trying to emulate my mom and my sister. I couldn't wait until my feet were the size of their feet. Couldn't wait till I could wear bras like them (now I hate them! lol) I wanted to get bigger and taller and filled out, but yet I wasn't looking forward to being a woman and giving up my childhood. I never wanted to give up swinging on swings and playing in general. Adults never seemed to have the same fun as kids. But I never had a meltdown over it. For those of you who don't know, I am pretty sure I have AS, too.

I would love to hear of your experiences and if you have any suggestions on how we should handle this with our daughter. My husband and I have tried to talk to her, as well her grandma and her older sister who she is very close to. We've all tried to tell her the good positive things about growing and getting older but it's not helping. We've tried asking her what it is about becoming older or bigger bothers her and she screams "It just does, okay???"

Listen. dont rush anything! 12 is still a kid, i really wished i would have been more of a kid sometimes than an adult when i was little

It's not that we're rushing her on growing up. She still swings on her backyard tree swing and I've told her she isn't too old to play with her dolls. It's just that she freaks out when someone tells her how she is growing and becoming a young lady. Like well meaning relatives that haven't seen her in a couple months. My husband and my son and I even forget sometimes and make comments that make her have meltdowns.

I have AS and am 16 and female. When I was first starting to go through puberty I hated it also. I hated the fact that I was going to have to wear bras, get more body hair, have a menstrual cycle...that one freaked me out the most I would have to say.
Basically I hated everything about it. I was starting puberty at the age of 9 though so a bit younger than your daughter.

All the advice I can give really is to reasure her that things will be ok. You can't stop her from worrying about it as it's a completely normal thing, even though in AS individuals the worry can sometimes be enhanced.
Maybe hire a book from the library about girls and puberty and when shes in a calm mood offer her the book, if she doesn't want to read it then don't force her to.
At her age though, I would suspect that at school (if she is not home-schooled) she will be soon be starting to have classroom lessons about puberty.

Good luck with this.

My daughter was 12 when she started her cycle, which lasted an entire month ! Both girls have a bleeding disorder called von will brand... she hates it, but takes plenty of vitamins to help her....she loathes bras, and would go w/o one, even though she really needed one. So, I gave her camisoles and soft tank tops to wear instead.. This all is very difficult on her, but she handles it like a trooper..She is now 18, and I still allow her to ride her scooter in the driveway and swing to her heart's content, it calms her and i see her truly happy then...she is mentally about 9, so i know how fragile puberty is for them.. we recently looked into a surgical procedure that would permanently cease her cycles, but the obgyn refused, saying she was too young, and not enough studies have been done for the future risks.......it is tough to be a young lady.....

FWIW, this is common in the NT world, too. The problem was everyone else, who called these girls tomboys. The tomboys didn't care about the label, as long as they were left alone. It was the parents, older siblings, teachers and grandparents that couldn't stand it. I grew up w/ a couple of tomboys in our neighborhood - we probably all did. When I reflect on these late budding ladies, that is exactly what they became, late budding ladies. I can't think of one tomboy that remained in the "boy" mode beyond their teens. And what is peculiar (or maybe a result of their training), most of these girls were superior athletes and trained hard. Their monthly menses were delayed.

I guess what I am trying to say is, respect your daughter's wishes and accommodate her, help her, where you can on her choice of a delay. She will have a lifetime to grow and better accept the coming changes and your support will stay with her for the rest of her life. It would be so much easier being a tomboy today with so much individual style.....If she is developing and that is an issue, there are so many great sports bras and bra tanks. Tomboys of my generation were so obviously out of place and we had no where near today's sporting apparel.

Trust me (yeah, I know, a perfect stranger, but of this I am certain).....she will blossom on her own calendar, but it has to be at her own pace. And, she will probably have more fun than the other girls her age.

SD
(mom of a 20 yo on the spectrum, and another suspected on the spectrum at 14 - both boys)

I had the exact same problem.

Wow.

You said you still encourage her to play; well keep letting her do that. If she's anything like me, she'll enjoy it all her life. But after about age 15, my mom started making patronizing remarks to me about how I was nearly an adult, and adults just didn't play with legos.

Well I still do, so there.

One thing that helped me was instilling a directive among my family members not to use the word "breast." That word was really what sent me over the top. Instead, my family responded by calling them "mammary glands." It helped a lot.

Also, instead of bras per say, try her out on sports bras. I still wear them a lot to this day and they work for me. I wear real bras for dress up occasions, but that's just about it. And also, the whole shave your legs/pits thing is entirely social. I don't shave my legs to this day, and as a result, can distinguish real friends from fake friends as a result.

Good luck to her. I started my period at 11 and thought there was something dreadfully wrong with me; so in my embarrassment/fear, I didn't tell anyone for a couple of months about it.

When was11/12 , in last year at primary, before going to a girls grammar, i thought my first AA bra was super fun. Amusing. I showed boys my bra, and practised "french kissing" ( it wasn't ) with one boy in front of group of other children. It was the route to the power of adulthood. It had nothing to do with "me", but were signs of increased status. At girls grammar school it was soon clear to me that i was a failure at it!!
During a dissection class in A-level Biology , aged 18, i incorrectly identified a female rat as male. I genuinely thought the various bits were male but shrunken in death !!I also didn't use tampons cos i "couldn't find anywhere" to put them.
When i got pregnant from one out of the dozen times i had unprotected sex in first year at uni and had an abortion i underwent almost a change of personality. I had finally gathered that i was what is known as a woman. Up till then it was just labels. (I hadn't believed that it, being "a woman", had any basis in reality; an impressively precocious understanding from a teeenager ! ! It's the stuff of advanced feminist deconstruction etc!! )
Having a boyfriend, ( first "real" one) when i was 18, provoked such gems as my wondering aloud to him whether i was supposed to talk about anything serious with him. Whether politics was inappropriate.

I think gender acquisition is such a massively artificial part of human development that it can be the straw that breaks the camels back for those aspie girls who've been tomboying and inventing and creating happily, suddenly expected to exhibit a whole new set of behaviours and social skills. My sister avoided it; she carried on dressing in anything practical, interested in science, serious, odd. I tried to do the conventional successful feminine thing and it took too much of my energy. I became a copy.
Radical feminism ( stumbled upon at age 25, 19 years ago now!!) released me from this, by saying essentially that femininity is oppressive etc. It rationalised my own experience of it as an intolerable and nonsensical burden destroying my life and creativity.
Gender is not natural. It is a social construct. It is another set of social skills. It is hard work if aspie. It is like corsets and bound feet for an aspie, to add to the already difficult set of social skills for all humans.
Tell her she has the choice of what kind of adult to be, don't use the word "woman" as if it were just a biological given, ( if she has an intelligent aspies sensitivity to systems she will be well aware of the discriminations, restrictions, deprivations, abuses and sillinesses the state of "womanhood" often entails, and consequently the prospect might look, quite reasonably, like hell !) and tell people to stop talking about "young ladies" . It is an awful expression. Even as 44 year old woman i think i'd have meltdowns too if someone referred to me as a lady!! !

I remember the first few times that I've started my cycle. I would have horrendous meltdowns. The thing that made it worse, was that my cycle started every 21 days, at the time. I didn't want to become a woman. I didn't want to stop playing with my cars and my Lego. I didn't want to wear a bra, and I didn't want to be reminded that I'm female, every 21 days. I was only completely out of diapers 24/7, for seven years, at the time, and I had to wear pads that reminded me of the sensation of diapers. I've also believed that a tomboy who was only out of her nighttime diapers for seven years, shouldn't have to deal with changing sanitary napkins, drenched with womanly blood. There's a part of me that has never grown up, as a result. That part who's favourite movies of all time, are 'Flushed Away' and Mary Poppins, who is always wanting to buy toy Routemaster replicas, who enjoys doing art work, as a form of play.

If she doesn't want it mentioned, why mention it? She'll get used to it when she wishes to (there's not much else she can do), there's no point forcing the words to the issue that's forcing itself. If she's not naive, can help herself and she understands boundaries (so she's not taken advantage of), I don't see a problem with wanting to stay how one has been for twelve years; childhood is all she has known. The unknown can be scary.

I'm a six years old [autistic] boy in the body of a 26 years old man.

I never had experiences like this, I slipped into puberty almost without me noticing. On the other hand, I can see how this can be tramitizing to some girls, and not just aspies. The idea that you're losing a precious part of your life forever is terrifying, and it's not playtime. Peer pressure, boys, responcibilities, and looming social faux paus that are bound to occure would leave anyone feeling a little shaken. Childhood is easy, but adulthood is hard.

My advice, let her set her own pace for right now.

Puberty was a horrible, traumatizing experience for me. Certainly my family environment didn't help, but that would be getting tangental. I am still coping with puberty/the effects of puberty and I am nearly 25 years old. Fortunately I didn't have much in the way of sexual feelings, because that would have made it far more difficult. I tried to stunt my growth by refusing to eat, and it might have worked a bit, because I'm much smaller than my family in just about every way. I would try to avoid saying anything remotely sentimental on the topic of "growing up" and don't even talk about practical issues regarding it unless she asks or it's very necessary (for instance, if she doesn't know something she needs to know about menstruation, but if she knows the basics, don't press it or try and reinstate it). I just used my mother's pads once I started my period until I went off to college, and I had my period from my parents for like 7 months. I hated when anyone would make any comment about my "growing up." It might be good if you could even give others a polite warning not to say things like that to your daughter because they upset her, in addition for her immediate family to not make off-hand remarks about her development. It's wonderful you are encouraging her to still enjoy the same activities she's always liked. Maybe that will help her have a feeling of stability. For me the worst thing was when people would say things in a way where I felt they were implying a drastic change/a change in who I was as a person. I didn't mentally accept menstruation until I was 18, and not sexuality until I was 21 (in any form). But that was okay, and certainly I would be worse adjusted now if others pressured me more than they did or would force me to address certain issues unnecessarily.

When I was going through puberty, I was exactly the same way. I started wearing large t-shirts and I hunched my shoulders so that no one could see my developing chest. I'm comfortable with my womanly body now though. Just give her time to transition and grow comfortable with herself.

I think to answer your question, yes the fact that she doesn't want to become an adult can be a symptom of Aspergers. I am male and I had the same problem as a child. I would often make the comment that I didn't want to grow up. So yes, this is a symptom but not deciding factor.

WOW! I once did some work for a company and they had a number of art pieces. One had a caption that said something like "We spend half our life wanting to grow up, and the other half wishing we never did."!

I can certainly understand why someone would want to stay young. I don't remember really being a kid from say 5 on. I think I was a bit on the mature side. I even refused to call my mother and father by title, but called them by name. I DO remember acting like a kid before 5, and my mother said one thing she remembered me saying at 14months, where I referred to my father as "daddy"! YIKES!

Still, I guess the ONLY reason I wanted to grow up was to be respected more, and not be bullied. Oh well, I AM respected more. Otherwise, I liked it better as a kid. In some ways, I kind of feel like that kid, and want to get some of the abilities and personality back. I used to LOVE the slide, the teeter totter, swings, etc.... I actually felt depressed when I realized I wasn't really able to do it anymore. HECK, the teeter totter required another person, so I ALWAYS had trouble there. I even liked the kicking type stim. About the only place I can really do it now is in the doctors office, when nobody is there. I am just too tall to do it anyplace else.

Still, it is amazing that people like beautifuloblivion want to hide the fact that they are growing up, etc... Is it that you can't really enjoy the same old things without ridicule, or play with the younger kids? Is it because of all the guys that hit on you? Since you tried to cover them up in such a clumsy manner, I doubt it is anything other than others perception.

Still, I agree with others. Explain to her about the changes. Unfortunately, females DO need more fat, etc... She should accept and even EMBRACE her new shape. Let her do what she wants.

I started wearing a bra in seventh grade, although I probably needed one earlier. I was tired of wearing an undershirt. Now, I don't wear standard bras because I find them uncomfortable. I now wear a sports type bra.

I got my period in eighth grade. I got horrible cramps until I took antiseizure medication, which also has a blood thinning effect. Currently, my cycle is every 25 days and lasts four days, down from six when I started.

At 43, I am both much younger and much older than my chronological age. My interests are those of a person much older. I like people from the 50s and 60s (Roger Bannister, The Beatles, etc.) I am younger in that I get carried away like a child when I see a cat or other animal. I collect cat-related items. The maturity test said I averaged out at 28 the first time and 32 the second time. I think that is based mainly on my level of educational attainment and is no indicator of my maturity in other areas. I still need to get my driver's license and attain full time employment, although my current job does involve a lot of organization and general knowledge skills.