Why do young people with autism, ADHD and sensory processing differences find school so hard?

If your child has autism, ADHD or sensory processing differences, you probably already know that school feels really hard, but what's often less clear is why, what's actually driving that anxiety and how does it link to neurodiversity?

There's some very real reasons why these children might be more vulnerable to school anxiety than their neurotypical peers.

Firstly, is the school environment itself. So classrooms can be busy, noisy, and unpredictable. There's lots of transitions, lots of social interactions, and there's not always very much time to process information. And for some children this can feel very overwhelming. Even if they're managing on the outside, it can often take a huge amount of effort and over time this can lead to a buildup of stress.

And this can become even more challenging in secondary school where the environment is typically larger, even less predictable, and involves moving between different classrooms, different teachers and different peer groups, and they're often very different expectations in all of these different situations.

So the second reason is the level of demand. So schools place a huge amount of demands on things like attention, organization, getting started on tasks and managing time, and for children with ADHD and executive functioning differences, this can be really challenging. They might be putting a lot of effort in just to keep up, which can feel exhausting and at times unmanageable.

And the third reason is that these difficulties are often not fully understood. A child might be seen as not trying or avoiding work or being lazy, or just feeling anxious when actually there are things going on underneath, like learning differences, sensory sensitivities, or differences in social communication. And if those underlying needs aren't recognized, then the support in place may not actually match what the child needs. And these things can become much harder over time.

So when you're thinking about school anxiety in these children, it's really important that we don't just focus on the anxiety itself. We need to understand what's driving it, because when we understand that, it's much easier to put the right support in place, and then children feel more able to cope.

If you're interested in finding out more I'm running a free webinar called When School Feels Too Hard, where I'm going to go into this in much more detail to help you make sense of what might be going on for your child and what you can try next. Click here to find out more and to sign up.

I've also got a free handout, the School Anxiety Checklist to help you unpick what might be going on for your young person. You can download it here.