"Sometimes They Can Be Aggressive": What Back-to-School Night Taught Me About Assumptions
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over you when someone says something about your child that you weren't expecting. Not a dramatic, movie-moment quiet — just a small internal pause. A beat where your brain works to catch up to what you heard.
I had one of those beats a few weeks ago, and I want to tell you about it. Not because it was a disaster (it wasn't), but because it was so ordinary, so well-intentioned, and so revealing — and because I suspect many of you have lived some version of it too.
I'm writing this wearing both of my hats. I'm a child psychologist who spends my professional life doing testing and assessment. And I'm the mom of a wonderful, funny, five-year-old who happens to be autistic. Usually those two roles live in separate rooms of my mind. That night, they sat down at the same tiny kindergarten table together.
The moment
It was back-to-school night. We met my daughter's teacher, who was genuinely sweet — warm, kind, clearly someone who loves her students. After introductions, she stepped away and then came back to tell us that she had spoken with the special education teacher and that she knew "all the things" and "everything that's going on."
And then she stopped.
I waited for her to say more. She didn't. It was awkward, and honestly, it rubbed me the wrong way. We left. But it stayed with me, so we came back, because I wanted to clear the air. I asked her, gently, whether she had any questions.
She did. She told me she had been "curious" to meet my daughter, because kids like her "can sometimes be aggressive."
There was my pause.
What I felt as a mom
I felt protective. I felt a flash of that old, familiar worry: is my kid walking into a classroom already wearing a label she didn't choose? I wanted to say, "You haven't even met her yet." Because the truth is, my daughter's hard moments don't look like aggression at all. When she's dysregulated, she tends to shut down and go quiet. She turns inward. She gets still and hard to reach, not loud and hard to contain. The picture in that teacher's mind and the child I tuck in at night were two different people.
What I knew as a psychologist
Here's the part that softened me, even in the moment. That teacher wasn't being unkind. She was being honest — and she was repeating something the culture handed her.
The belief that autistic people are aggressive or dangerous is one of the most common and well-documented myths about autism. When researchers actually sit people down and ask what they believe about autism, "autistic people are aggressive or dangerous" reliably surfaces as a recurring theme, held even by people with some exposure to autism (John et al., 2018). Studies of preschool and mainstream teachers show that many carry outdated or inaccurate frameworks — for instance, defaulting to labels like "hyperactive" or misreading autistic behavior entirely — largely because they were never trained (Mohammed Taresh et al., 2020).
So the teacher wasn't describing my daughter. She was describing a stereotype. And that is a really important distinction, because you respond to those two things very differently.
What the evidence actually says about aggression
This matters, so I want to be precise. Aggression is not a core feature of autism. It is not part of the diagnostic definition. The American Academy of Pediatrics is explicit that behaviors like aggression, self-injury, and tantrums are co-occurring challenges, not defining traits — and that when they do happen, they are usually communication: a way to escape a demand, a reaction to sensory overload, pain, or an unmet need (Hyman et al., 2020).
And crucially, aggression is far from universal. Depending on how strictly you define it, estimates of aggressive behavior in autistic children range enormously — one review cites anywhere from 8% to 68% — and it tends to cluster with other factors like sleep problems, anxiety, and lower adaptive skills, not with autism by itself (Hyman et al., 2020). In other words, there is no such thing as "the aggressive autistic kid." There is a child, in a context, communicating something.
The shutdown nobody warns you about
What I told the teacher — and what I want to tell you — is that so many autistic kids, including a lot of autistic girls, don't externalize their distress at all. They internalize it. Instead of a meltdown you can see, you get a shutdown you can miss: withdrawal, inattention, going quiet, seeming to "tune out."
This is well described in the research. Autism is associated with real differences in sensory processing and attention, and classrooms are sensory minefields — noise, lights, transitions, social demands stacked on top of each other. Those differences can look like inattention or disengagement, when what's really happening is a child being overwhelmed and pulling inward to cope (Mallory and Keehn, 2021). Even what people call a "meltdown" is increasingly understood as the visible tip of chronic sensory hypervigilance and overload — a stress response, not a behavior problem or a character flaw (Soden et al., 2025).
Here's why this is more than semantics: the child who shuts down quietly is the child most likely to be overlooked. She's not disruptive, so she doesn't get flagged. A teacher primed to watch for "aggression" may be scanning for the exact wrong signal — and completely miss the quiet kid who is drowning. Naming my daughter's real profile wasn't me being defensive. It was me handing her teacher a better map.
The positive twist (and it's a real one)
Here's where both of my hats agree, and where the hope lives.
That teacher asked. She was curious. She came from a place of wanting to be ready. And a teacher who is willing to ask questions is a teacher who is willing to learn — which turns out to be one of the most changeable things in this whole equation. Teacher knowledge and confidence about neurodivergent kids are not fixed traits. When educators actually receive good training, their knowledge and their self-efficacy measurably improve (Beck et al., 2026). Assumptions are updatable. That's the whole game.
And the single most powerful tool I have as a parent isn't correcting anyone — it's partnering with them. When parents and teachers align their approaches across home and school, kids do better, and research consistently points to one ingredient as the linchpin of that alignment: communication (Azad et al., 2021). The AAP frames this the same way, emphasizing that support should be built around the individual child's needs in their actual setting, not around a diagnostic label (Hyman et al., 2020). My going back into that classroom to "clear the air" wasn't me being difficult. It was, quite literally, the evidence-based move.
So the interaction that rubbed me the wrong way became one of the best things that could have happened. Because now this teacher doesn't have "all the things." She has the actual thing: a real picture of my real daughter — a kid who withdraws rather than lashes out, who needs a soft landing when she's overwhelmed, and who is going to bring something wonderful to that classroom.
If you're a parent heading into these conversations
A few things I try to hold onto, as both a clinician and a mom:
Assume good intent, and correct the information anyway. Most teachers are kind people working from an incomplete script. You can honor the kindness and still rewrite the script.
Describe your child, not the diagnosis. "Her dysregulation looks like shutting down and going quiet, not acting out" tells a teacher more than any label ever will.
Go back if something sits wrong. That awkward second conversation is often the one that changes the year.
Frame it as a partnership. You are not adversaries. You are two people who both want the same thing, working from different halves of the picture.
Give it a warm, specific "what helps." Teachers can act on "she needs a quiet corner and a heads-up before transitions" far more easily than on a warning.
My daughter walked into kindergarten as a full, complicated, delightful person — not a stereotype, not a warning, not "all the things." And her teacher, bless her, is going to get to meet that person.
That's the bright side. It usually is.
Warmly,
Kandice Benallie, PhD
Founder & Psychologist
Bright Futures Neurodevelopment
References
Azad, G. F., Minton, K. E., Mandell, D. S., & Landa, R. J. (2021). Partners in School: An implementation strategy to promote alignment of evidence-based practices across home and school for children with autism spectrum disorder. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research.
Beck, K. B., Ionadi, A., Wagner, T., et al. (2026). The Schools Unified in Neurodiversity Collaborative: Co-designing a program to enhance educator knowledge and efficacy supporting children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Autism.
Hyman, S. L., Levy, S. E., Myers, S. M., Council on Children with Disabilities, & Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. (2020). Identification, evaluation, and management of children with autism spectrum disorder. Pediatrics. American Academy of Pediatrics.
Hyman, S. L., Levy, S. E., Myers, S. M., Council on Children with Disabilities, & Section on Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. (2020). Executive summary: Identification, evaluation, and management of children with autism spectrum disorder. Pediatrics. American Academy of Pediatrics.
John, R. P., Knott, F. J., & Harvey, K. N. (2018). Myths about autism: An exploratory study using focus groups. Autism. PMID: 28778133
Mallory, C., & Keehn, B. (2021). Implications of sensory processing and attentional differences associated with autism in academic settings: An integrative review. Frontiers in Psychiatry. PMID: 34512416
Mohammed Taresh, S., Aniza Ahmad, N., Roslan, S., Ma'rof, A. M., & Mohammed Zaid, S. (2020). Mainstream preschool teachers' skills at identifying and referring children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. PMID: 32560042
Soden, P. A., Bhat, A., Anderson, A. K., & Friston, K. (2025). The meltdown pathway: A multidisciplinary account of autistic meltdowns. Psychological Review.
