Understanding Stigma: What My Neurodivergent Kids Are Teaching Me About Society's Unwritten Rules:

Yesterday I had one of those conversations that follows you home. You know the kind. You're sitting with a flat white that went cold forty minutes ago, the southeaster is doing its best to relocate your house to False Bay, and suddenly you're talking about the real stuff.

🎖️ My colleague and I got onto the subject of standards. Specifically, the ridiculous, unattainable, Olympic-level standards we both hold ourselves to.Neither of us ever quite feels up to par. We could run a marathon, cure a small illness, and sort out the Friday afternoon traffic on the N1, and somewhere in the back of our minds a little voice would ask, "Yes, but did you do it well?"
Here's where our stories split.

🧱 Same Wall, Different Outcomes
For me, that voice is fuel. It's annoying fuel, like the petrol price, but it keeps me going. When I feel I'm not good enough, I push harder. I write another article, take on another client, reread an email eleven times before sending it. Is that healthy? Debatable. My therapist and I are working on it. But it moves me forward.

🧠 For my colleague, who has PDA, it does the opposite. That same crushing sense of "not good enough" doesn't push him forward. It pins him to the floor. The standard becomes a demand, the demand triggers the threat response, and the threat response says absolutely not. He described it as paralysis, and he meant it literally. He cannot function. The task sits there, the expectation sits on top of it, and his nervous system simply shuts the door.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Two people, same unrealistic expectations, completely different results. One of us gets a slightly unhealthy work ethic; the other gets frozen in place.And if you've ever parented a PDA child, you'll recognise that freeze. It's not laziness. It's not defiance. It's a nervous system that has learned the world is full of demands it can't safely meet.

👀 The Things That Don't Bother Us (But Really Bother Everyone Else)
Naturally, as two people who spend our lives around neurodivergent young people, the conversation wandered to our kids. And we started listing the things our children do that don't bother us in the slightest, but seem to cause mild cardiac events in the general public.

My eldest, for example, is always sticking their hands in their mouth. Always. In the car, at the dinner table, in the queue at Woolies while someone stares at us like we've just let a Jack Russel loose in the bakery section.Does it bother me? Honestly, no. It's sensory. It's regulating. It's harmless.
The only real problem with it is that other people have decided it's a problem.And that's the thing. So much of what we call "inappropriate" isn't harmful. It's just unfamiliar. It breaks a script nobody ever actually wrote down.

📕 👖 Stigma: The Hand-Me-Down Nobody Asked For

My colleague and I got onto how we were both taught stigma growing up. Not formally, of course. Nobody sat us down with a whiteboard and a lesson plan titled "Who To Judge."
It came through the side door. A raised eyebrow here. A "shame, what's wrong with him?" there. A hushed "don't stare" that somehow taught us exactly who deserved staring at.
We absorbed it the way children absorb everything: completely, and without consent.

💄 Prim, Proper, and Pouring the Drinks

For me, the lessons came with a very specific dress code.I was raised to be prim and proper. Never cause a scene. Sit nicely, speak nicely, and for heaven's sake, don't make anyone uncomfortable. If a man told you that you were pretty, you said thank you. Graciously. Whether you knew him, liked him, or had asked for his opinion was entirely beside the point.

At family gatherings, I knew my role before I could spell it. Somebody's glass was empty? Fill it. The men were out at the braai discussing the Springboks with the intensity of a UN summit? Take out the eats.  Cheese, biltong, , chips in the good bowl, the milk tart someone's aunt insisted on bringing.

Then clear the plates, do the dishes, and smile while doing it, because a sulky helper is apparently worse than no helper at all.And heaven help you if you arrived around my mother without makeup, or in something comfortable. That wasn't a sensory choice or a personal preference. That was "not making an effort." You weren't showing up the way you should. Your appearance was a courtesy you owed everyone else, like bringing a plate to a bring-and-braai.
Some of this was not said cruelly. That's what makes it so sticky. It was love, delivered in the form of rules. And I followed them beautifully. I was very, very good at being good.
Which is perhaps why that little voice telling me I'm never quite up to par has such a well-rehearsed script. It had decades of practice.

So when I watch my eldest arrive somewhere in a hoodie, hands in their mouth, greeting nobody, answering in a British accent, and entirely unbothered, there's a part of me that understands why people flinch. The part that was trained to organise the drinks. And then there's the part of me that thinks: good for you. You're not performing for anyone. You're just being yourself. I didn't know that was an option until I was well into my fourties.

🧩 Doing It Differently
So now I'm consciously trying to do the opposite. I'm okay with my eldest being non-binary. I'm okay with my child wearing whatever clothing makes them feel like themselves, whether that's a floor-length skirt with hiking boots or a hoodie in thirty-degree Cape Town heat (sensory needs are not seasonal, apparently).

I'm okay with my child speaking in accents. Sometimes British, sometimes vaguely Australian, occasionally a character from a series I've never watched. Yes, it earns us some strange looks at Table Bay Mall and the pharmacy but we (my kids and I) have made our peace with that.

What I'm not okay with is my children learning the stigma I grew up with. I don't want them turning that lens outward and judging the kid flapping on the Sea Point promenade. And I definitely don't want them turning it inward and deciding there's something wrong with them.

I'm working damn hard at that. Some days I nail it. Other days I catch myself mid-cringe when my child does something "odd" in public, and I have to remind myself that the cringe is mine, not theirs. It's the leftover programming. The software update I'm still installing.

✍️ The Problem With Invisible Scripts

But man, it's hard. Especially here.South Africa is a country of beautifully complicated social rules. We have a greeting script (you will ask how someone is before asking for anything, or you'll be deemed rude for life).

We have an auntie script, an uncle-at-the-braai script, a "just now" versus "now now" script that confuses even neurotypical foreigners. We have rules about respect, eye contact, and how to address elders that vary across cultures, languages, and neighbourhoods, sometimes within the same street.

Our neurodivergent kids are expected to read all of these fluently. The problem is, many of them simply can't see the script. It's written in invisible ink, and everyone around them is reading it effortlessly, and then acting shocked when our kids don't.
So when my child doesn't greet the security guard before asking where the bathroom is, or answers an aunt's question with brutal honesty ("Yes, your perfume is very strong"), the judgment lands on them. Or on me. Usually on me, to be fair, because apparently it takes a village to raise a child, but only one mother to blame.

What We're Actually Teaching

Here's what I keep coming back to. Our Constitution explicitly protects people from unfair discrimination based on disability, gender, and sexual orientation, among other things.

On paper, we are one of the most inclusive countries in the world. In practice? We're still working on the bit where a teenager can chew their fingers in a Checkers queue without the entire aisle having opinions.

Laws change what's allowed. Parents change what's normal.
So that's my job now. Not to make my children, or the children who I work with, fit the script, but to make sure they never believe they're broken for failing to read it. To show them that different isn't dangerous. That the kid who stims, speaks in accents, wears the "wrong" clothes, skips the makeup, or identifies outside the boxes they were handed at birth is not a problem to be solved.

And to my colleague, frozen by standards nobody could meet: maybe that's the same lesson. Nobody should have to earn their worth by passing a test they can't see.
I'm still learning. I'm still unlearning. I still reread my emails eleven times, and yes, I still instinctively check if everyone's glass is full. But I'm getting there.

Andrea Grant is a SACE-accredited Neurodiversity Facilitator, Autism Coach, and parent of three based in Cape Town. She runs Parenting on the Spectrum.#UnlearningStigma #PDAParenting #NeurodiversityAffirming #www.parentingonthespectrum.co.za