The Things Professionals Miss: What “Fine in School” and One-Hour Assessments Will Never Tell You

Every parent of a neurodivergent child learns this truth early: the system often responds to what it sees, not what it understands. And far too often, what professionals think they’re seeing isn’t the full picture.

You hear the same phrases repeatedly:

“Once they’re in school, they’re fine.”
“They hold it together really well in class.”
“They just need to build resilience.”

They’re delivered with confidence, as though they settle the matter. But they never do, because parents know what comes next. As soon as the front door closes — within minutes, sometimes seconds — the real story emerges: the shutdown, the meltdown, the silence, the rage, the exhaustion that comes from hours of holding themselves together so tightly it almost hurts.

A child who appears “fine” in school is often running on fumes. What looks like resilience is usually survival mode. What looks like progress can be pain dressed up as compliance. Masking is not a sign that a child is coping — it’s a sign that they don’t feel safe enough not to. And the moment they are finally somewhere safe, the effort spills out.

The misunderstanding isn’t a minor issue — it’s the root of so many delays, missed opportunities, and escalating crises. Because when the system misinterprets performance as wellbeing, it pushes support further out of reach. Children are praised for managing up until the point they simply can’t anymore.

Professionals, through no fault of their own, often build their conclusions on an extremely narrow slice of data. So much of SEND decision-making rests on short observations and one-hour assessments: a single appointment, a controlled environment, a child doing everything in their power to keep up the act because adults are watching. A professional sees the moment. A parent sees the year.

That’s why it is not only acceptable for parents to question professional reports — it is necessary. A report can be clinically precise and still fundamentally inaccurate because it doesn’t hold the context. You see your child across days, weeks, months. You see the patterns that don’t compress neatly into an observational timeframe. You see the exhaustion after the appointment, the dysregulation that only appears at home, the recovery that takes hours or days. You see what the report simply cannot.

And you are allowed to say so.
You can ask for clarification.
You can correct inaccuracies.
You can submit your own written response.
You can request that your insight is included within the evidence base.

This isn’t being difficult — it’s being accurate. An assessment that excludes the family’s lived experience is an incomplete assessment.

Yet in this system, the children who mask most effectively are the ones believed last. They are praised for coping until they collapse, while families feel the deterioration long before any professional registers that something is wrong. Not because those professionals don’t care, but because they’ve been trained to trust the observable moment over the relational pattern; the hour over the year; the report over the reality.

But home is where the truth shows itself first. Home is the control group. It is the only place a child doesn’t have to perform.

Professionals bring training, clinical knowledge, and structure. Parents bring a longitudinal study. You carry the nuance, the day-to-day evidence, the before-and-after, the moments that reveal what is actually going on beneath the surface. When you speak, you’re not offering an opinion — you’re supplying the missing data that turns information into understanding.

If professionals genuinely want to understand a child, they have to be willing to listen to the part of the story that happens off-stage — the part that unfolds in cars, kitchens, hallways, bedrooms; the part that no observation ever captures; the part that only parents witness.

That is the part that tells the truth.

Every parent of a neurodivergent child learns this truth early: the system often responds to what it sees, not what it understands. And far too often, what professionals think they’re seeing isn’t the full picture.

You hear the same phrases repeatedly:

“Once they’re in school, they’re fine.”
“They hold it together really well in class.”
“They just need to build resilience.”

They’re delivered with confidence, as though they settle the matter. But they never do, because parents know what comes next. As soon as the front door closes — within minutes, sometimes seconds — the real story emerges: the shutdown, the meltdown, the silence, the rage, the exhaustion that comes from hours of holding themselves together so tightly it almost hurts.

A child who appears “fine” in school is often running on fumes. What looks like resilience is usually survival mode. What looks like progress can be pain dressed up as compliance. Masking is not a sign that a child is coping — it’s a sign that they don’t feel safe enough not to. And the moment they are finally somewhere safe, the effort spills out.

The misunderstanding isn’t a minor issue — it’s the root of so many delays, missed opportunities, and escalating crises. Because when the system misinterprets performance as wellbeing, it pushes support further out of reach. Children are praised for managing up until the point they simply can’t anymore.

Professionals, through no fault of their own, often build their conclusions on an extremely narrow slice of data. So much of SEND decision-making rests on short observations and one-hour assessments: a single appointment, a controlled environment, a child doing everything in their power to keep up the act because adults are watching. A professional sees the moment. A parent sees the year.

That’s why it is not only acceptable for parents to question professional reports — it is necessary. A report can be clinically precise and still fundamentally inaccurate because it doesn’t hold the context. You see your child across days, weeks, months. You see the patterns that don’t compress neatly into an observational timeframe. You see the exhaustion after the appointment, the dysregulation that only appears at home, the recovery that takes hours or days. You see what the report simply cannot.

And you are allowed to say so.
You can ask for clarification.
You can correct inaccuracies.
You can submit your own written response.
You can request that your insight is included within the evidence base.

This isn’t being difficult — it’s being accurate. An assessment that excludes the family’s lived experience is an incomplete assessment.

Yet in this system, the children who mask most effectively are the ones believed last. They are praised for coping until they collapse, while families feel the deterioration long before any professional registers that something is wrong. Not because those professionals don’t care, but because they’ve been trained to trust the observable moment over the relational pattern; the hour over the year; the report over the reality.

But home is where the truth shows itself first. Home is the control group. It is the only place a child doesn’t have to perform.

Professionals bring training, clinical knowledge, and structure. Parents bring a longitudinal study. You carry the nuance, the day-to-day evidence, the before-and-after, the moments that reveal what is actually going on beneath the surface. When you speak, you’re not offering an opinion — you’re supplying the missing data that turns information into understanding.

If professionals genuinely want to understand a child, they have to be willing to listen to the part of the story that happens off-stage — the part that unfolds in cars, kitchens, hallways, bedrooms; the part that no observation ever captures; the part that only parents witness.

That is the part that tells the truth.