 But what was like the sort of the point where you were like, oh, hey, actually, we might actually have to go and get in a diagnosis and what held you back from doing it before? Okay, so I think maybe I was quite naive. I think it originally because I thought that because we were able to modify and kind of make adjustments, you make adjustments, you know, make sure that everything, your world was okay, that everybody would. Yeah. And does that stand, primary school did, but maintaining friendship was really hard for you. So we would have to do a lot of kind of support when friends came around with structured activities and things like that. You struggled to just free play because you were quite possessive over your toys as well. Yeah, I remember that, especially my brother. Really hard to share because of course it's a social skill and we had to do quite a lot of work on that. So I think the key thing for me was when you went up the year five, year six in junior school and you had a teacher who was quite sarcastic and a lot of teachers, you know, do you sarcastic? We all use sarcastic through you. And it's a good thing to learn, but actually because you were quite literal in your thinking and in your language, you really struggled with that. And it kind of made you remember the teacher describing you as the class clown. Oh yeah, I remember that. The class clown, that doesn't kind of work for me. It's not who to us, it's really. It was like I wonder why that's happening, you know. Friends. So actually what Tom was doing was friends were pushing him in a position where he would do what they told him to do and he would get the repercussion and he would make a fool of himself. Sorry. No, no, no. I remember that like, especially like at parties and things like that or at school. You would get the blame. You went to a party and your friends told you to call this girl a name and you ran around shouting this name and then didn't realise what the repercussions were. We had a lot of incidents like that where people were kind of, I'm not saying you were perfect. No, no. Your kid is perfect. A lot of situations where the social skills just weren't kicking in and then obviously hormones were kicking in. The friendships became more complex and you were kind of being left behind. You were a couple of years behind your peers in terms of your social skills. So it started to get a bit of bullying, creeping in. There was a little bit of tussle with friendships and actually you started to withdraw a little bit and your behaviours became more rigid and sorry, I'm just going to have a drink. It's alright. I do, I do. Because I kind of, in my head I felt like I was kind of more my sort of genuine self when I was a lot younger. Like I felt a lot more free and loving and expressive when I was younger but I remember going around that sort of age, going into secondary school or perhaps the end of prime school that I felt, I guess a little bit, I don't know, I just became sort of withdrawn in myself and I was questioning a lot like my interactions with other people and I found it very hard to grasp exactly what was going on in situations. Yeah I mean I think you were being sucked down a tunnel really. I think it's like one of those psychedelic tunnels where you just like everything's going on around you and you kind of didn't know where you fitted. Yeah. And I think when you start to move back through that tunnel it kind of became more withdrawn, which you never had been before and partly not reportedly the school were not understanding and I kind of got a very negative response at that point and I went in with the Zenkona practice and I was told there was nothing that could be done for you because you were very academic. And I hear this a lot and a lot of parents hear this, that actually their child is okay at school and doing well and coping and actually it's not okay to just cope. No it's not. Coping means you're on the edge and you're kind of teetering, actually you need to be supported and progressed and feel comfortable and not just cope because that leads to mental health difficulties. It's not just about the academic side as well as school. There's a big heavy social element of developing that social-emotional side it's quite important around that kind of formative years. It's absolutely huge if you don't have a connection with how you feel and you can't name it and know what's going on in your body and how do you form relationships with other people and kind of progress with that? I think with boundaries as well, like saying boundaries was really... It's only something that I really understood when I got into sort of late teens, early adulthood. I didn't really understand... I thought that being difficult or putting boundaries in place or getting upset at people was inherently just a bad thing. I felt very strongly that any show of anger or dismissal was like a bad thing in every single circumstance. So it's kind of like I didn't allow myself to be upset with friends, I guess, as much. We're quite passive, a passive human man and you always sort of pick up on different sort of tones. You can't be with me at the moment. If my voice changed, you always thought it was because I was angry with you. So it kind of went the other way as I didn't notice it and then I did notice it but I didn't know how to exactly what to do about that or understanding it in the whole picture of the context of it, I guess. I think sort of moving to the other side as well. Kind of looking after yourself. You struggled to kind of know the routines of how to shower so that exact devotion inside. So we spent probably about a year, year and a half kind of having routines in place for you to be able to shower because if we changed the shampoo, you thought it was a different... it wasn't shampoo anymore. If we kind of realised that visual pictures didn't work for you but actually lists that you could go and take off and mine doesn't visual. And visuals really worked and then it just became embedded and then you do it. So that worked really well and it was a friend that said to me, you do realise that everybody does this, don't you? And I thought, oh, actually I know they don't. And I think, you know, a discussion obviously between Tom's dad, he was very supportive and I think the lead up to the diagnosis was mainly because I knew you were coping and I thought actually moving into secondary is a lot of our parents, I know too. As the child is moving into secondary, you kind of want... you know, it's a bigger problem and you know there's going to be lots of teachers with you in different ways. It's a very complex social interaction. I thought actually I need a piece of paper to let people know what is formally that you need and what is what's happening. There was also a side of me that felt really guilty. I thought, is it something I've done as a parent? And you're sort of blaming yourself for the struggles that I had. Huge girls, I know you doubted as well, thinking that actually something was wrong, I didn't do something, I wasn't loving enough. I wasn't... Actually I knew I was a loving parent and I knew that we were warm parents. That whole stigma around like the refrigerator mother hypothesis. I can't remember. It's total nonsense. If you don't know what refrigerator parents, I think it was like a hypothesis that someone came up with that people ran with whereby autism was not like, as we know, like a neurodevelopmental thing. It was more if your parents didn't show you love or interact with you or engaging like physical contact and stuff with you that it would cause children to become withdrawn and more autistic. It's completely, it's a complete bollocks spot. So if there's any mum's out there feeling guilty or dad's, don't because this is not your fault. And that's a really big thing to take away and you're doing a great job. I always think the best children, the children that need the most come to the right people and the right parents. So just keep doing what you're doing. And, you know, I was saying about before, before we sort of got into talking, I mean, one of the sort of key sort of stages in my life or key moments in my life was when you told me that I was autistic. Like, did you know that when you were going to get the diagnosis that you'd tell me by a certain age? And like, how did you go about sort of framing it because I do remember that it was kind of framed more as like a neutral thing, rather than something inherently negative or inherently positive. Like, how did you, how were you, what were your thoughts around like telling me that? I think I've got the diagnosis. I was quite teary and quite really selfishly quite relieved that it wasn't me that had caused that. You've got that stigma around. It was something that was happening or had happened and it was who you are, you know, who you are. And we had to learn and grow with that. And it was okay, but we just had to make other people aware of it. Yeah. In retrospect, that probably would have done more work around it. Knowing what I know today, I would have done a better job at supporting you with the diagnosis. But that's in hindsight. So we decided as soon as you got the diagnosis we would go and tell you immediately. So we took you to McDonald's. Yeah. I took you to McDonald's. She can never stop emailing. Yeah. So we sat down and we talked about, you know, why we'd have the meetings, why you can't see this lady and blah, blah, blah. I'd say you've got something called autism, which makes you think a little bit differently and you feel differently and maybe you see it's the world through different classes almost. And you just have a lot that doesn't smile and you're like, oh, that's why. That's why I feel differently and that's why I do the things that I do. And you just kind of took a big sigh, you know, almost. It was like a weight was lifted off your shoulders. It was like something you just clicked into place and you were just like, okay. I'm good. I'm okay with that. I did recognise even at that time that I was different, just from my interactions with other kids. I don't know. It's just kind of a feeling of just being like a bit of an alien. It was very hard for me to put on exactly why, but I remember just feeling completely overwhelmed and everything that was happening around me was just so complex. Even with kids my age, it was hard for me to have any sort of clarity on what was happening to me. I felt a little bit like I was in a different universe. Hey, YouTube. Hope you have enjoyed this podcast clip so far. And if you have, why not check out the full episode, which you can find on my YouTube channel or on other streaming services like Google, Apple, Spotify. You can find it pretty much anywhere you want to. If you have enjoyed this, make sure to like, subscribe, drop a comment down below, even if it's something simple like sending me a heart or an emoji. It really, really does help me with the algorithm. All of my links to my socials, like my daily Instagram blog posts are down in the description. But other than that, I hope you enjoy the rest of this clip. Definitely. And I think other parents were all so saying things like, oh, Tom gave a tea and he sat on the table at the dinner table. That's very odd. But I kind of went with it and it was like, well, he doesn't like that opposite with the icon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was all too much, too much social at the table and noise, but we had some parents that were really supportive and supportive friends and others that were just like, you know, move away, don't be his friend, kind of thing, which is... Yeah, social exclusion. I was saying quite frankly, some of the things that I know a lot of the parents come across really, and it's hard. It's really hard. That's a big thing, isn't it? The willingness of parents to kind of integrate. Like, there's a lot of social exclusion, a lot from other kids, but also, like, from parents as well, who parents of neurotypical children. I think... It would really look good because you're a lovely little boy and you've always got invited to the parties and so forth. The network of mums were really good. But I hear of, you know, if you could do one thing, just invite that little person who is sort of seeming like that. A fish house of water in the playground, just invite them to a party. They may not be able to cope. They may not come, but just invite them. Yeah. You know, make them feel more included. And the parents as well, they will probably go through a really tough time. So it's just to have that thought, really, isn't it? And just, I don't know, that just sinks off. I think a lot of parents, they get a bit... I mean, humans in general, just from any type of discrimination, it's a lot of it's based on not understanding and not being scared, or, you know... It's sort of ignorant, so... but it's so damaging. It's so damaging. It really can. It really, really can. I'm very sad and it's not great. But the special school that I work at at the moment, if I look at our amazing new people, I don't just think they're so vulnerable. You know, it's to be a community. We need to be a community supporting each other, not just kind of pushing out the people that we don't want. You know, we're all different. I think the thing that's a big issue is, but especially sort of in modern times, with the advent of social media and online things, like communities are becoming very atomised. Like, people are becoming more seeing themselves as individuals rather than parts of the community. Like, you go to smaller communities around, and perhaps they have a lot more... Like, they have, like, weekly church, like, meetings and stuff, where they invite all the members of the community to talk and chat and build that community up. But I don't really see that a lot of that. Nowadays, it seems to be very broken up. Like... It is, and... I think that support is really important, particularly for parents, to just have a chat, to just know you're not isolated and that other people are going through the same thing as you are. And that's okay, and it's just a different way of life. It's a different way of living ahead, and your children are amazing, and you just want to share that, you know, because I am people and our children do amazing things, and, you know, Tom's proof of that, really, for me. Drought mum moments, I'm afraid.