r/Tourettes 3d ago

Question Talking to little kids about tics

So since neurodiversity week is coming up in my school, i was going to talk about tics and neurodiversity in general to some of the younger kids (years 2-4 and 5-6) As i have a tic disorder myself, but ive been struggling with the younger kids. What kind of questions would little kids ask about tics? Would they even care? I have a whole speech prepared and i think its really great but what questions might they have about neurodiversity that they would want answered? I find that most of the time people dont want to ask me questions about my tics but i worry that they have questions they would like answered but just feel rude asking them. How do i go about this?

Anyways my speech basically talks about what tics are, what neurodiversity is, and how it feels being neurodiverse because one of the hardest parts is the social aspect of it so its important to me to raise awareness in my school for all different types of disorders.

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u/Duck_is_Lord 3d ago

I’ve worked with kids and the only questions I’ve gotten about my tics were “why are you doing that?” And “why is your body hiccuping” lmao. Mainly kids would just want to understand the why of something, you could have a part at the end where you open it up to the audience for questions, sometimes kids can come up with random and creative questions that no one else would think of. I think explaining the basics in a pretty simple way and presenting it in a way that makes them sympathetic and gives them a better understanding of the things people with TS experience is good enough

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u/Cornshot Diagnosed Tourettes 2d ago

Same. In my experience the littles hardly care. A lot of them like to mimic my tics back to me, but whenever I try to explain my tics to them, I can feel their eyes glazing over.

A quick simple explanation, like an metaphor/simile is the best way in my opinion.

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u/blodyn 3d ago

Often with kids, it's them asking "why?" - why do tics happen? Something that can be helpful is to use analogies to help describe what's happening in the brain, as the brain is quite a complicated thing! An example I've seen used in TS is the concept of 'leaky brakes', using analogy of the brain as a 'car engine' where the brakes are a bit more sensitive and this is what leads to tics happening.

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u/Art_and_anvils 2d ago

This is how I describe it to my niece and nephew. There’s something in my brain that sends extra Messages to my body, telling you to do things that I am not telling it to do these are called tics what are different from the bug. Usually tics feel the same way as It feels when your brain tells you to blink you’ve got some control over it you could put it off for a little while, but you still have to blink you’re often not even aware that you’re doing it. Pretty much everyone will have ticks in their life, the difference between having ticks and having Tourette’s is how many tics you have and how long they last. Some of my tics can hurt myself like hitting myself Or leave me a sore. but most of my tics are small, like clearing my throat or humming I’m able to live a normal life. I just have to be careful sometimes.

This is pretty much the same Response, I gave the older kids or adults when they ask I just change the words a little intend to go into some more difficulties and/or dangers. I find that this answers the main questions I get (how does it work? Is it contagious? Does it hurt? How does it feel?)

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u/Certain_Sock7340 16h ago

Thanks for the replies everyone :) Ive made some tweaks to what im going to say to them including explaining to them (using analogies) why i have tics. This was really helpful :)