When my daughter was first diagnosed as autistic, I did what I’m sure many parents do: I delved far too deeply into the online rabbit hole of misinformation, anecdotal stories and personal accounts from autistic people and other parents in our situation.
I wanted to know everything I could. I wanted to start planning for anything and everything that might happen.
For anyone considering this particular avenue of research, it is a terrible idea.
Not only is every social media platform I use now full of “you might like” posts and suggested products designed to soothe, calm or otherwise manage behaviours adults find difficult—none of which work—but I have also created a remarkably personal doom-scrolling experience. My For You page now appears determined to predict every possible way my child’s future could go wrong.
According to the algorithm, she will grow up to have poor relationships, terrible mental health and a dependence on questionable coping mechanisms.
In short, I have inadvertently created my own online hell, with algorithms specifically designed to play on my worst fears.
Go me.
The internet now spends endless hours trying to convince me that my daughter will grow up with poor self-esteem, multiple forms of depression and an obsession with collecting cats as though they’re Pokémon.
None of this does anything helpful for my own anxiety, depression or current cat collection.
The only thing that eases me away from the nearest adoption shelter—and prevents an emergency trip to Costco to bulk-buy kitty litter—is listening to my daughter as she narrates absolutely everything she is doing.
She tells me about the house she is building in Minecraft. It’s purple.
She tells me about the videos she is watching on YouTube Kids, which are mostly about how to build better houses in Minecraft.
She tells me why mashed potato should be served in cubes.
I still don’t entirely understand the logic behind that one. Surely, once mashed potato has become structurally sound enough to be cut into cubes, it has ceased to fulfil the basic requirements of mashed potato.
This is apparently irrelevant.
I’m blaming Minecraft.
During one of these narrations, she informed me that she was “Minecraft rich” and that “being rich is a good thing”.
She then announced that she intended to become rich in real life as well—a goal I vehemently approve of.
On another occasion, she happily planted an entire collection of flowers while telling me that she was “the most beautiful girl in the world and so deserves flowers”.
I didn’t argue.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with her self-confidence.
This is a child who assumes she is beautiful, intelligent and destined for considerable financial success. She doesn’t think she needs to earn flowers through good behaviour, academic achievement or by making herself smaller and more convenient for other people. She deserves flowers because she is wonderful and flowers are nice.
Frankly, I’m taking notes.
The internet keeps warning me that autistic girls are particularly vulnerable to low self-esteem—that years of being misunderstood, corrected, excluded or encouraged to hide the parts of themselves that other people find inconvenient can gradually teach them that they are somehow wrong.
I don’t dismiss that risk. I understand why so many autistic adults speak about masking, burnout, anxiety and the lasting damage caused by spending years trying to perform an acceptable version of themselves.
But those accounts are not prophecies.
They are not a script my daughter is destined to follow simply because she shares a diagnosis with the people whose experiences I am reading.
Right now, I am not looking at a child who believes she is less than anyone else. I am looking at a child who expects the world to recognise her magnificence and is mildly surprised whenever it fails to do so.
Perhaps my job isn’t to build her self-confidence from scratch.
Perhaps it is to protect what is already there.
That doesn’t mean convincing her that she will never struggle or pretending the world will always treat her fairly. It means ensuring she knows that finding something difficult does not make her a failure. Needing support does not make her a burden. Communicating differently does not mean she has nothing worth saying.
It means teaching her that there is a difference between being asked to learn and being told to become someone else.
It means listening when she tells me that something hurts, overwhelms her or simply doesn’t make sense. It means resisting the pressure to measure her against children whose minds and bodies work differently from hers. It means making sure that home remains somewhere she does not have to perform.
It doesn’t mean stopping her from failing. She needs to learn how to pick herself up after losing a game, how to struggle and how to keep going. Every child needs resilience, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stand beside them, offering encouragement and cheering their effort.
Frankly, watching the mental gymnastics she performs to convince me that she actually won at chess or Connect Four is far more entertaining than simply handing her the victory.
Most importantly, it means paying more attention to the child in front of me than to the endless procession of strangers selected for me by an algorithm.
The internet knows that I have an autistic daughter.
It knows that I worry about her future. It knows which frightening stories will make me stop scrolling, which products I might buy at two in the morning and which fears will keep me clicking through to the next video.
What it does not know is her.
It doesn’t know about the purple Minecraft house, the cubed mashed potato or the flowers she planted in tribute to her own beauty.
It doesn’t hear her plans for becoming rich.
It doesn’t see a little girl who knows exactly who she is and currently sees no reason why the rest of the world shouldn’t be delighted by her.
The algorithm may have built me a personalised vision of hell, but my daughter is busy building something else entirely.
Hers is purple, full of flowers and, judging by the number of diamonds she has collected, extremely well funded.
My husband has just informed me that she is playing in something called Creative mode, so she has literally infinite resources.
Sounds even better.
Raising the Modern Fae 