Welcome to the Jungle Gym of Acronyms

Monday, May 12, 2025.

In the brave new parenting world of 2025, every meltdown might be ADHD, ASD, PDA, SPD, OCD, ODD, or some alphabet soup so specific it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet but has gone viral on TikTok.

Enter the era of DIY Diagnosis Parenting, where love meets logic, and Google meets maternal instinct.

There’s deep compassion here—an instinctive resistance to labeling kids as “bad,” “lazy,” or “naughty.” But also? A whiff of chaos.

Because some parents now keep spreadsheets with conditional formatting to track the difference between a sensory aversion, a trauma trigger, a hunger crash, or a lunar eclipse.

And for every thoughtful neurodiverse advocate online, there’s a rogue creator claiming that if your toddler stacks blocks in color order, he’s not playing—he’s masking autistic burnout while spiritually dissociating.

TikTok as the New DSM

Social media has democratized mental health language—and that’s a double-edged screen.

On the one hand, we’re naming what once shamed us, and making space for kids who don’t fit the neurotypical mold. On the other, we’re drifting into what researchers call “diagnostic overreach.”

“Popular platforms may inadvertently promote the pathologizing of normative behaviors,” warns Dr. Sarah Victor (2022), in her review of TikTok's impact on mental health self-diagnosis.

In other words: yes, your child might have PDA... or they might just be three.

Medicalization Fatigue and the Modern Parent

Parents today are caught in a wild tension:

• Be trauma-informed.

• Be neurodivergence-affirming.

• Be vigilant about early signs.

• Don’t over-pathologize.

• And whatever you do, don’t say “boys will be boys.”

The result is a form of moral hypervigilance, especially in mothers—who are now expected to be part educator, part diagnostician, and part trauma historian.

And for some, this means every moment of misbehavior becomes a Rorschach test of unprocessed lineage trauma.

It's no wonder parents are exhausted.

They’re not just raising kids—they’re writing miniature case studies and curating a child’s “sensory profile” like a Netflix pitch.

The Shadow Side of Solidarity

Neurodivergent adults—especially women and nonbinary folks—have bravely shared their own late-diagnosis journeys, normalizing things that once bred shame. That’s vital.

But when every tantrum becomes a trauma echo, and every annoying habit a “symptom,” we risk reducing our children to diagnostic narratives before they’ve even had a chance to become people.

“We need a new language of complexity that affirms difference without medicalizing the full range of human experience,” writes Dr. Devon Price (2021) in Unmasking Autism.

This is the central paradox: we want to validate neurodivergence without collapsing identity into illness.

When Awareness Replaces Parenting

There’s an old joke: “If everything’s a red flag, you’re just at a parade.” In the parenting version, if everything’s a diagnosis, you’re just... living with a human child.

That child may be spirited, shy, sensory-sensitive, or schedule-resistant.

But here’s the rub: even neurotypical children are wildly dysregulated much of the time. They don’t yet have an orbitofrontal cortex to speak of. What they have is a spongey limbic system on roller skates.

So while a diagnosis may help (and for many, it radically changes lives), it’s also okay to say:

• “He’s overtired.”

• “She’s cranky.”

• “They’re in a growth spurt and feral.”

• “I just need five minutes alone in the bathroom.”

Toward a Post-Diagnostic Parenting Ethos

What would it mean to hold both realities?

• That your child might be autistic, and also a bit of a chaos goblin at bedtime.

• That your kid’s rejection of socks could be sensory aversion—or just fashion tyranny.

• That being open to diagnosis is not the same as assuming it.

A new generation of therapists is advocating for what might be called functional compassion—the view that we validate neurodivergence, but don’t make it the lens through which we interpret every burp and boundary push.

In the words of clinical psychologist Dr. Mona Delahooke (2019):

“Understanding behavior through a brain-based lens doesn’t mean excusing it—it means responding to it with the right tools.”

What’s a Parent to Do?

Here’s a radical suggestion:
You don’t need to be your child’s diagnostician.
You can be their observer, their translator, their advocate, and their safe place.

You can say, “I notice you hate transitions,” without racing to Reddit to see if that’s part of the Highly Sensitive Person profile or a subclinical manifestation of OCD.

You can say, “You seem overwhelmed, let’s take a break,” instead of, “That’s probably your dysregulated amygdala post-trauma response.”

You can be kind. Curious. Boundaried. Playful. Present.

And that might all your kid really needs.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Delahooke, M. (2019). Beyond behaviors: Using brain science and compassion to understand and solve children's behavioral challenges. PESI Publishing & Media.

Price, D. (2021). Unmasking Autism: Discovering the new faces of neurodiversity. Harmony.

Victor, S. E., & Neufeld, S. A. (2022). Social media and mental health symptom self-diagnosis: A call for research. Clinical Psychological Science, 10(5), 899–912. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026221091697