Amy Galpin, LPC-S

08/21/2026

Autism diagnoses in one large US health system rose after 2020. Split the data by s*x and the story changes completely.

Researchers at Saint Louis University tracked 171,134 people who stayed with the same health system from 2016 to 2024. Among males, new diagnoses declined across the whole period. Among females, they rose 19% a year after 2020.

The sharpest increase of all was in teenage girls, up around 22% every year.

In plain numbers, annual diagnoses among females nearly doubled, from 284 in 2016 to 513 in 2024.

The researchers’ own conclusion is the part worth carrying: this isn’t a population-level increase in autism. It’s increased recognition of autistic females who were there the whole time.

Which surprises nobody who has been paying attention. Autism was defined, studied and screened for using boys. Girls who masked, girls who were quiet, girls whose interests looked socially acceptable, they got called anxious, sensitive, shy, difficult, or nothing at all. Then they grew up and wondered why everything felt so hard.

Some honest limits. This is one health system in the Midwest, mostly non-Hispanic White patients, and it counts diagnostic codes rather than assessments. It is not a national prevalence figure.

But the pattern is clear enough. The girls weren’t absent. Nobody was looking for them.

📰 : JAMA Network Open

08/18/2026

Sometimes the behaviour we see is the tip of the iceberg.

When a child cannot walk through the school gates, our instinct is often to focus on attendance. But lasting change rarely comes from pushing harder. It comes from understanding deeper.

School avoidance is often a child’s way of telling us that something feels too overwhelming, too frightening, or too difficult to cope with.

When we shift our question from “How do we get them into school?” to “What is making school feel impossible?”, we move from managing behaviour to understanding need.

Understanding always comes before meaningful support.

If this resonated with you, please consider sharing it. It may help another family feel seen today.

08/17/2026

It’s the biggest question mark in most parents’ minds – how to effectively and fairly discipline their teenager with plenty of love and logic.

“Am I being too harsh or too lenient?”
“What’s a fair consequence when my teen breaks my rules?”
“How do I stand firm when my teen pushes me to cave in, or they engage in a full-blown power struggle?”

First, it’s important to recognize that disciplining your teenager isn’t about “teaching them a lesson” by putting the hammer down every time they mess up. (They’re teenagers. They’re going to mess up… a lot!) It’s about helping them learn, guiding them, standing beside them when they make a poor choice, and helping them steer back to the right path without making them feel critically judged or ridiculed.

In fact, the right consequences hold the power to teach our kids important life lessons, including responsibility, accountability, problem-solving, and respect.

READ MORE IN THE COMMENT BELOW

08/17/2026

When my daughter first received her diagnosis, we were in the thick of daily, life-threatening challenges with nowhere to turn for support. There were endless phone calls to our children’s hospital that led nowhere, all while caring for a newborn after a traumatic birth that I wouldn’t fully process until years later.

That entire period was a blur. We were surviving.

And years later, I learned that some people I knew were mocking me during that time. They weren’t close friends, I always had a sense of who they were, but it still hurt.

It taught me something important: there is a particular kind of cruelty in finding entertainment in someone else’s darkest moments. Some people try to make themselves feel bigger by tearing down those who are already carrying more than anyone can see.

But the people who truly love you don’t critique your survival. They help you find your way back to shore.

08/09/2026

08/07/2026

12 lesser known signs of autistic sensory overload:

▪️Laughing at things that are not funny or at an inappropriate volume.
▪️Crying without tears
▪️Becoming extremely still and quiet
▪️Starting arguments out of nowhere
▪️Losing track of words mid sentence
▪️Unprovoked physical aggression towards others
▪️Difficulty making simple decisions that are normally easy
▪️Responses becoming shorter and less engaged
▪️Avoiding eye contact more than usual
▪️Becoming irritable or snappy with no obvious interpersonal reason
▪️Hyperactivity that looks like excitement but has a sense of urgency
▪️Losing patience with things that are usually tolerable

The trigger for sensory overload and the reaction to it don’t always match.
Early signs sometimes look more like irritability, withdrawal, or hyperactivity.

Most of us won’t tell you when we’re approaching our limits because we don’t even recognize it ourselves.

Learn YOUR signs so you can make adjustments sooner, rather than later 🩷

08/06/2026

Research on adolescents obsessing over their appearance has historically focused on girls, but there is growing recognition among licensed professional counselors that boys face their own challenges. Recently, many adolescent boys are being influenced to pay special attention to their appearance and attractiveness to gain social attention, often using extreme and dangerous methods.

https://bit.ly/4wr9Pd5