What is masking, exactly?
Masking is a form of camouflaging where an individual hides or suppresses certain traits to avoid judgment, often replacing them with more ‘typical’ behaviors. For autistic people, that can mean forcing eye contact that feels uncomfortable, scripting conversations in advance, suppressing the urge to stim, or mirroring other people’s facial expressions instead of using their own. Researchers Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose, both autistic, describe it as an understandable response to a lifetime of being told, directly or indirectly, that the autistic way of being is the wrong one (Pearson & Rose, 2021).
Is masking something only autistic people do?
No. Everyone adjusts across contexts. You edit yourself in a job interview. Teenagers act differently around parents than around peers. Bilingual and bicultural speakers may switch language, posture, and humor depending on the room. Speech-language pathologists have started using the term code-switching for this kind of everyday adjustment, and the comparison to autistic camouflaging has become part of an active conversation inside that field — including a recent forum on ableism in school-based speech-language services and the responses it drew (Gerlach-Houck & DeThorne, 2023). The difference for autistic people isn’t that they mask and other people don’t. It’s how much effort it takes, how constant it is, and how much it costs them.
What does “high-masking” autism mean?
“High masking” describes autistic people who suppress their traits so thoroughly, and so consistently, that other people, including teachers, doctors, and sometimes their own parents, don’t recognize them as autistic. A high-masking child might hold it together all day at school, following every rule and copying classmates’ behavior down to the smallest gesture, and then fall apart the moment they get home. The gap between the “school version” and the “home version” is one of the more common things parents describe, and it’s also part of why high-masking kids so often get diagnosed late or missed entirely (Pearson & Rose, 2021).
Pearson and Rose make a point worth sitting with: masking is often described as a choice, something a person decides to do, but for many autistic people it starts so early and becomes so automatic that it stops feeling like a decision at all. They call this the “illusion of choice.”
What do autistic people say masking actually feels like?
Much of what’s written about masking comes from outside observers. In one of the foundational studies on camouflaging, autistic adults described it in their own words as a kind of constant performance: monitoring every interaction in real time, rehearsing responses before saying them out loud, and feeling like they were putting on their “best normal” for an audience that never stopped watching (Hull et al., 2017).
Kieran Rose, who writes as The Autistic Advocate and co-created the #TakeTheMaskOff campaign, has spent years pushing back on the idea that masking is simply good manners or social skill. He describes it instead as a survival strategy built out of years of being told, in ways big and small, that who he actually was needed correcting (theautisticadvocate.com). That framing shows up again and again in autistic-led writing on this topic: masking isn’t a skill to be proud of teaching a child. It’s a cost some children learn to pay because the alternative feels unsafe.
Why does high masking lead to burnout?
Sustained masking can take a measurable toll, and can lead to burnout, which is a distinct, recognizable state, not just ordinary tiredness. In the study that first defined it using autistic people’s own accounts, autistic burnout appeared as chronic exhaustion lasting weeks or months, a loss of skills the person used to have, like independent hygiene routines or the ability to speak in full sentences, and a sharp drop in tolerance for noise, light, and other sensory input. Masking was named as a large contributor.(Raymaker et al., 2020).
The stakes go further than exhaustion. Research on suicidality in autistic adults has identified camouflaging as one of several risk markers worth taking seriously, alongside factors like unmet support needs and a late diagnosis (Cassidy et al., 2018). Researcher Monique Botha’s work applying minority stress models to autistic mental health points to a similar pattern: it’s not autism itself driving these outcomes, it’s the chronic stress of hiding it (Botha & Frost, 2020).
Signs a child’s masking may be tipping into burnout
Signs a child’s masking may be tipping into burnout, rather than just an ordinary hard week, include:
- Meltdowns or shutdowns that reliably happen right after school or other high-demand settings, even when the day itself seemed to go fine.
- Losing skills they’d already mastered, like getting dressed independently or managing transitions they used to handle without a problem.
- A noticeable drop in tolerance for things that didn’t used to bother them as much, like noise, lights, or textures.
- Withdrawing from things they usually enjoy, not because they lost interest, but because they don’t have anything left to bring to them.
- Saying, in whatever words they have, that they feel like they have to “perform” or “be someone else” to get through the day.
If this pattern sounds familiar — the fine-at-school, falling-apart-at-home cycle — our guide to supporting masking fatigue goes deeper on why it happens and what actually helps in the moment it’s happening.
How can parents support a child without asking them to mask more?
Start by treating home as the place masking gets to come off. That means making room for stimming, scripted or repeated speech, and a flatter affect at the end of the day without treating it as a problem to fix. It also means resisting the urge to praise a child specifically for “holding it together” or “acting normal” in public. That praise, however well-intentioned, teaches a child that the masked version is the one that earns approval.
It helps to talk about masking directly, in age-appropriate language, as something real and common rather than something to be ashamed of. A child who understands that they’re allowed to unmask at home, and that doing so isn’t a failure, is in a much better position to notice their own burnout signs before they escalate. If a school or provider is pushing hard for eye contact, stillness, or other surface-level “typical” behavior as a goal in itself, it’s worth asking what that goal is actually for, and whether the same underlying need (attention, comfort, communication) can be met without asking a child to suppress who they are to get there.
Frequently asked questions about masking
Is masking the same thing as good social skills?
Not really. Ordinary social skills involve reading a room and adjusting naturally. Masking, especially for autistic people, usually involves active, effortful suppression of instincts that would otherwise show up, which is a very different and more costly process.
Can adults be high-masking too, not just kids?
Yes. Many autistic adults, especially those diagnosed later in life, describe decades of high masking, often without realizing that’s what they were doing until they had language for it.
Does unmasking mean a child should never adapt their behavior at all?
No. The goal isn’t zero adaptation, since everyone adapts to context. The goal is making sure a child has real space, somewhere in their life, where they don’t have to.
How do I tell the difference between burnout and a child just being tired?
Ordinary tiredness usually resolves with rest. Burnout tends to persist even after rest, often comes with skill loss or a drop in sensory tolerance, and doesn’t lift the way a good night’s sleep would normally fix things.
Sources
- Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A conceptual analysis of autistic masking: Understanding the narrative of stigma and the illusion of choice. Autism in Adulthood, 3(1), 52-60. Liebert Pub
- Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M. C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519-2534. Autism Research Centre
- Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132-143. SAGE Journals
- Cassidy, S., Bradley, L., Shaw, R., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Risk markers for suicidality in autistic adults. Molecular Autism, 9, Article 42. Molecular Autism
- Botha, M., & Frost, D. M. (2020). Extending the minority stress model to understand mental health problems experienced by the autistic population. Society and Mental Health, 10(1), 20-34. SAGE Journals
- Gerlach-Houck, H., & DeThorne, L. (2023). Resisting ableism: A personal response to complex questions. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. ASHA Publications
- Rose, K., The Autistic Advocate. We are not OK. theautisticadvocate.com
