I often see social media posts and educational resource websites that like to use SEN characteristics as a way to spark discussion. They list a series of traits and then tell parents: If you notice the following characteristics, you should pay attention to whether your child might have ASD, ADHD, or even other more serious conditions.
To be honest, I don’t think characteristics should be used this way.
Rather than using characteristics to define what a child is “diagnosed with,” I believe their real purpose is to help the adults around the child better understand what is actually happening to them.
Let me give an example.
There is a child who has a short attention span and displays impulsive behaviors. Eventually, the child is diagnosed with ASD. The psychiatrist provides a report to the parents stating that their child has ASD, and this report is then shared with the teacher. Based on the report, the teacher knows that the child has ASD.
However, what you may notice is that neither the parents nor the teacher truly understands why the child was diagnosed with ASD. In other words, even after receiving the diagnosis, they do not know how to help the child improve their difficulties. They lack sufficient understanding of the underlying reasons that led to the ASD diagnosis in the first place. In this situation, how are they supposed to help the child?
There is another common scenario.
A child may have a short attention span, show aggressive behaviors, lack eye contact, and be unable to communicate using spoken language. As a result, the child may be diagnosed with ASD, ADHD, and even language delay. Many labels are given, yet none of these labels truly help the people closest to the child understand what the child is actually experiencing. Then, what is the meaning of these labels?
If labels such as ASD or ADHD could directly help parents and teachers understand a child’s situation—like a clear instruction manual that identifies the child’s difficulties and provides standardized training approaches that reliably lead to improvement—then these labels would be meaningful.
But based on real-world experience, these labels are largely unhelpful. Children who receive the same label are never identical. Every child has their own unique challenges and areas that need support.
That is why, for me, characteristics matter.
Characteristics allow us to understand a child’s current situation and help us provide targeted support or intervention. However, characteristics should not be used to categorize children into fixed groups or labels, because doing so does not genuinely help them.
I hope that parents and teachers can learn to shift their focus away from labels and instead pay attention to a child’s individual characteristics. Supporting those characteristics is already enough.
