The Understory
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish
Summer 2026 | Issue 31
Why teaching our kids to fit in can quietly teach them to disappear
This issue continues in full on the blog. [Read it here →]
Kara always thought she was the socially adept one in the family.
Her mother was shy, painfully so, in a way that confused Kara as a kid. So without ever deciding to, Kara built herself a different way of being: confident, polite, easy to talk to, able to connect with nearly anyone. She had a genuinely huge heart for it. But she also noticed, quietly, that her formula didn't hold at the edges. With the highly anxious, or the effortlessly cool, she always felt a half step off. And there was a deeper, less nameable feeling underneath it all: if people got too close for too long, they'd eventually find something odd about her. She didn't know what. She just worked harder.
It worked, mostly, until she had children of her own, and watched them try to learn the same unspoken rules she had, with far less success.
One child pushed through, with mixed results. The other simply withdrew. Kara was baffled, and the harder she tried to fix it from the outside, the more she had to face something she'd never quite let herself see: she wasn't actually relaxed inside her own performance. She never had been.
This is where Kara's real work began, and it's the story at the heart of this issue.
Masking has a cost, and the research backs it up, whether the wiring underneath is autism, ADHD, or another learning difference. Teaching a child to read a room is wise. Teaching a child that their natural self is a liability they must hide is something else entirely, and the line between the two is easy to cross without noticing. Researchers studying autistic adults have tied chronic masking to exhaustion, anxiety, and what's now recognized as autistic burnout. A newer wave of research finds the same pattern in adults with ADHD: in one recent study, over 90% reported camouflaging their traits, with the same costs showing up: exhaustion, strained relationships, and a shaky sense of identity.
In the full article, I dig into:
- Why masking and ordinary social skill building aren't the same thing
- What the research says happens when masking becomes constant, across autism, ADHD, and learning differences
- How Kara's children showed her two very different versions of the same struggle
- Practical ways to build your child's social toolkit without teaching them their real self is dangerous
[Read the full story →]
A note before you go: if any of this is landing close to home, masking and nervous system dysregulation are deeply connected. A child who's masking hard is often a child whose nervous system is working overtime just to look calm. That's exactly what we dig into in my upcoming live course, Beyond Behavior: The Regulation Roadmap, a 6 week cohort starting soon. We go beneath the behavior (and the mask) to what your child's nervous system is actually communicating, and we do the same work for yours. [Save your seat →]
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