The Crisis We’re Still Not Naming: Neurodivergent Girls and Puberty
Walk into any Year 5 or 6 classroom and look carefully at the girls who are “coping.”
The quiet one who never puts her hand up.
The chatty one who is always “too much.”
The girl who melts down the minute she gets home.
These are often the girls we are losing as they head into puberty – especially if they are autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent. And we are losing them not because they are broken, but because the world they are growing up in was never designed with their brains, bodies or sensory systems in mind.
Research from the Children’s Commissioner for England (2021) shows a huge hidden cohort of girls masking their struggles in school while unravelling emotionally at home.
‘Maya’ at the school gate
A few years ago, I was mentoring a mother who was filled with foreboding at pickup every school day. At 3:30pm, her 11-year-old daughter – I’ll call her Maya – would climb into the car and break down, sobbing, screaming, and kicking the seat.
At school Maya was “fine.” Quiet, polite, high marks, no behaviour issues. Teachers said she was “a pleasure to teach.” Maya held it together until the car door shut…
Maya is autistic and has ADHD. Nobody spotted it until puberty stirred everything up.
And she is not unusual. The National Autistic Society’s “Girls and Autism” report (2018) shows girls are consistently underdiagnosed, partly because they learn to mask – copying, camouflaging and compensating to appear socially “typical.” This is echoed by UK research on social camouflaging which found that autistic girls mask significantly more than boys and begin doing so intensely between ages 11–14 (Hull et al., 2017).
So just as puberty hits – new body, new smells, new social rules, new risks – many neurodiverse girls are expending enormous energy pretending they’re fine.
It’s a perfect storm.
Puberty and neurodivergence: why it hits so hard
For any girl, puberty is a lot.
For neurodivergent girls, it can be brutal.
- Autistic girls often face sensory overload from new body sensations, periods, bras, deodorant, crowded changing rooms, noisy classrooms. UK research shows autistic girls experience heightened sensory sensitivityand greater distress around puberty changes (Whitlock & Rodgers, 2020).
- Girls with ADHD typically struggle with emotional regulation, and hormonal shifts amplify impulsivity, mood swings and rejection sensitivity – a pattern highlighted in UK SEND research (Education Policy Institute, 2021).
On top of that, both autism and ADHD are linked with higher risks of school absence and self-harm in adolescence (NHS Digital, 2022), especially when support is thin on the ground.
So no, she is not “overreacting” to her PE kit, her timetable, the lunch hall, the group chat or the sudden change of routine. Her nervous system is running a marathon every day while the adults around her are saying, “Come on, it’s only a mile.”
The controversial bit: the problem is not in the girl
This is where it gets confronting.
Too often the conversation goes:
“How do we help this girl cope better with school / puberty / life?”
But the real question should be:
“How do we change the environments that are overwhelming her – and then blaming her for being overwhelmed?”
UK policy reviews confirm what neurodivergent women and girls have been saying for decades: systems designed around boys’ presentations of autism and ADHD are missing girls entirely (Department for Education, 2023).
Books like Divergent Mind and The Spectrum Girl’s Survival Guide back this up – that neurodivergent girls are not rare, not broken, and not “male-pattern autism done badly.” They are people whose strengths and struggles have been systematically misunderstood.
What neurodiverse girls need from parents
- Believe what you see at home
If school says she’s fine but she falls apart with you, trust your eyes.
Masking all day and unravelling at home is a classic pattern for neurodivergent girls (National Autistic Society, 2018).
- Translate the world, don’t gaslight her reality
Instead of: “Everyone finds that hard.”
Try:
• “Yes, that lunch hall really is loud.”
• “I can see changing for PE is awful for you. Let’s adapt it.”
You aren’t feeding avoidance – you are validating sensory truth.
- Get concrete about puberty
Many neurodivergent girls need explicit, step-by-step guidance about body changes, periods, privacy, consent and online life.
Schools may cover it once.
She may need it ten times, calmly and visually.
- Protect rest and ‘no-mask’ time
This may mean:
• one club instead of three
• quiet weekends
• space after school before talking
Rest is not laziness – it is sensory physiotherapy.
- Respect special interests
What looks like “obsession” is often self-regulation.
Her deep dive into horses, anime, coding or crochet may be the place she breathes.
What neurodiverse girls need from school
If we are serious about keeping these girls in education, schools must change more than the girls must.
- Sensory-aware environments
- Quiet spaces at break
• Flexible uniform policies
• Alternative PE changing arrangements
These are not luxuries. They are accessibility.
- Teachers trained in how neurodivergence presents in girls
Autistic and ADHD girls internalise far more than they externalise (Education Endowment Foundation, 2022).
Look for:
• stomach aches
• sudden drops in attendance
• immaculate work with low confidence
• silence instead of questions
These girls don’t shout for help. They disappear.
- Real flexibility in assessment
Standard exam conditions disadvantage neurodivergent pupils (Education Policy Institute, 2021).
Adjustments like extra time, smaller rooms, supervised breaks, or alternative formats should be routine, not exceptional.
What needs to change at policy level
Policy feels far away. But it shapes everything.
We need:
• Earlier, girl-sensitive screening for autism and ADHD (National Autistic Society, 2018; DfE, 2023)
• National standards for assessment waiting times (NHS Digital, 2022)
• Mandatory training for all school staff on masking, sensory overload, self-harm risk (Children’s Commissioner, 2021)
• Curriculum representation so neurodivergent girls see themselves included, not pathologised
None of this is radical. It is simply what justice looks like in a system designed for more than one kind of brain.
How Rites for Girls supports neurodiverse girls
Rites for Girls programmes such as Girls Journeying Together and Girls’ Net are particularly well suited to neurodiverse girls because they offer what mainstream environments often cannot:
- acceptance, no need to change anything to fit in
• sensory-aware facilitation
• explicit social rules
• celebration of differences
As I wrote in From Daughter to Woman (McCabe, 2018), girls flourish when they feel understood, when environments adapt to them rather than expecting them to mask, and when they are given supported rites of passage into puberty.
Neurodiverse girls often tell us that our groups feel like “the first place I don’t have to pretend” – and that sense of safety is the soil confidence grows in.
From the girl’s point of view
When I ask neurodivergent girls what they most want, they do not say:
“Make me more resilient.”
They say things like:
• “I want teachers to believe me when I say it’s too loud.”
• “I’m tired of pretending I’m OK.”
• “I don’t want to be fixed. I want to be understood.”
The recent wave of books written by neurodivergent girls and women shows clearly: these girls are not asking to be normalised. They are asking to be recognised.
This is not all about problems
Let’s not forget what neurodivergent girls bring:
- fierce sense of justice
• creative, sideways thinking
• pattern-spotting brilliance
• deep loyalty
• emotional honesty
Puberty is not just a time of vulnerability.
It can be a time of claiming:
“This is who I am. And this is what I need.”
Where this leaves us
If you are a parent, start small:
• believe what you see
• adjust what you can
• choose your battles wisely
If you are a teacher, notice the girls who are “fine”… until they aren’t.
If you are a policymaker, treat the needs of neurodivergent girls as urgent, not niche.
The costs of ignoring them are far higher than the cost of getting this right.
I have seen again and again what happens when a preteen girl is finally understood: the shoulders drop, the eyes brighten, the mischief returns.
She stops pouring her energy into pretending to be someone else
and starts building a life that fits who she actually is.
That’s what I want for every neurodivergent girl stepping into puberty:
Not to be tidied up,
Not to be normalised,
But to be met, resourced, and celebrated.
And if we get that right for her, we make growing up better for every girl.
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