Under the best of circumstances, many of us who are neurodivergent don’t get recognized as such until adulthood. For those of us raised in American conservative Christianity’s homeschooling community, it can be harder to notice the signs, and even when the signs are present, it’s hard to know how to interpret them.
I’m lucky enough to have gotten an ADHD diagnosis around my seventeenth birthday, which is later than I would have liked, but only four years after I started attending school. Had I attended school from kindergarten onward, getting accommodations four years in would have made a world of difference, and that might have been possible.
In school, there’s a basis for comparison. Teachers and students alike know when someone in the classroom is different from the rest, even if they misunderstand why. This can eventually lead to a diagnosis – when you’re surrounded by people with opinions about you, someone’s is bound to be right eventually. When homeschooled, however, depending on your family’s involvement in homeschool co-ops, you likely have only one teacher most of the time, and you’re pretty isolated.
The upside is that you might get to have your environment and classes tailored to your needs. To a point, this was true for me, so I guess I lucked out that way. On the other hand, I had such difficulty focusing that my school day would often run long, sometimes past dinner, and there was no structure in place to determine what should be done about that. No kid should have school gobble up their whole life, especially if “school” means sitting alone in the dining room all day.
Given the inherent boredom of the situation, all homeschoolers get fidgety, and we all learn to find ways to entertain ourselves with whatever’s around and distract ourselves from the monotony. Homeschoolers rely heavily on imagination for escape, as there is no other choice. This means that an ADHDer among homeschoolers doesn’t exactly look like a unicorn among horses – just a horse of a different color, at most.
In fact, for many parents of ADHDers who are struggling in school, homeschooling might look like a good or necessary alternative, so I would expect ADHDers to be overrepresented in the homeschooling population. A quick search on Google scholar reveals… nothing, actually – I’m not sure anyone’s bothered to gather accurate statistics on how ADHDers are getting their education or what homeschoolers’ neurotypes are. I’d like to see research on this, especially for the autistic community.
At least with ADHD we can tell something’s up when the student starts attending school, but with masked autism, it can be a heck of a lot more complicated. Suppose everyone thinks you’re socially awkward. Why wouldn’t you be when you haven’t been in school to develop social instincts? Suppose you take the rules more seriously and seem more mature or intellectual than other students. Homeschoolers are known for their sense of responsibility! Suppose you’re very much consumed by your own unusual interests to the point that it’s hard to connect with everyone else. I mean, when you haven’t been a participant in a society and were instead left to your own devices, is this not inevitable?
Neurotypical folks, it seems to me, are products of their environment. If they do not have an environment, only themselves, I would expect them to become products of themselves – in their own worlds. If their only sense of community is in a crowd of fellow homeschoolers who are just as idiosyncratic, either for this same reason or because of possible overrepresentation of neurodivergent kids as suggested above, we should expect them to be products of, for all intents and purposes, autistic culture. Perhaps neurotypicality can be masked.
For me, the most painful part of all this was how it left little old me, a “rules and logic” type of autistic kid, without the evidence to show that my experiences were meaningful. To be clear, I had no autism diagnosis in childhood. I technically don’t have one now, but there’s a story there that I’ll have to circle back to another time. What I’ll say for now is that many of the questions in autism and ADHD questionnaires don’t apply to me since they ask about what life was like as a child in school, which I wasn’t. Experiences that do apply often have another explanation, which ensured that my feeling of being an imposter would linger as I spent many months struggling to sort out how much of my life experience has been defined by my being homeschooled for so long and how much is more likely autism, or an intersection of the two experiences. This task is not easy, and I may have to spend the rest of my life working to figure it out.
It’s a good thing everything hurts my body. Otherwise I might never have learned who I am.
Join the conversation in the comments below if you think homeschooling implies that the home itself is being educated!
by J.D. Hansel
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