There's A Generation Of 'Cocooned' Children. We Need To Help Them Become Butterflies

For neurodivergent children, simply existing in a neurotypical world can be exhausting beyond measure.

When overwhelm happens repeatedly, day after day, the mask that allows them to function eventually slips, and burnout becomes inevitable. The operating systems stop working.

Burnout is very real, and very dangerous. And what often follows burnout is cocooning.

For an autistic child, every interaction requires constant decoding: tone, facial expression, body language, unspoken rules. What costs a neurotypical child minimal effort can take one hundred times more energy from a neurodivergent child.

For a child with ADHD, the experience may look different but feel just as overwhelming: all information arrives at once, unfiltered, unprioritised, relentless. The brain floods, processing becomes impossible, and the system simply cannot keep up.

Neurodivergent children living in an unforgiving neurotypical world do not need “more resilience”. They need understanding and support much earlier – not just from parents, but from schools, society, and government systems as a whole.

When that support is delayed or denied – when school adaptations are withheld, when understanding from family, peers, and education systems is absent – stress builds incrementally.

The ‘overwhelm train’ has already left the station, and parents and carers are left desperately trying to stop a runaway force to prevent the inevitable crash of burnout.

Clinicians often describe this as the Coke bottle effect: small shakes every day that seem manageable on their own, until one final shake causes an explosion. Once the lid is screwed back on and the bottle is shaken again, another explosion follows. Each time there is less energy left to cope, less capacity to mask, less “coke” in the bottle.

Eventually, the bottle is empty.

This is burnout.

Burnout is traumatic. It strips children of their ability to cope, to engage, to function beyond survival. At this stage; rest, retreat, and protection are not indulgences, they are necessities.

Withdrawal from school into the safety of home is often exactly what a child needs simply to breathe. In my clinic, for the vast majority of families, school-based trauma has been the trigger for burnout.

Recovery takes months, sometimes years. Rebuilding the bottle drop by drop takes time – and burnout does not affect only the child; it changes the life of the entire family. Someone must always be home, terrified their child may hurt themselves, or in case they come downstairs to say ‘hello’.

According to Learning Disability Today, two in five parents of children with SEND are forced to give up work completely. Family trips fade away. Even supermarkets become impossible.

What we see too often is this: burnout resolves, but the cocoon remains. The child is no longer overloaded, yet reintegration into the world feels impossible. The cocoon becomes the norm.

Parents, understandably, are exhausted and traumatised too. Many have fought schools for months or years over attendance, only to be told, “Once they’re in, they’re fine,” or pressured with targets that ignore reality.

Parents become anxious about their child’s anxiety – a completely human response. Once a child is finally “safe”, no one wants to rock the boat. Why would you? You have been to hell and back.

At this point, one of two things usually happens: either demands increase too quickly, too neurotypically, and burnout returns (what clinicians call the ‘burnout loop’), or demands do not increase at all, and the cocoon stays firmly in place.

Inside the cocoon, fear of burnout stops boundaries being tested. Discomfort is avoided. The outside world begins to feel pointless and overwhelming. Purpose, joy, and fun – foundations of executive function – are slowly eroded. Motivation collapses.

Parents feel they are forcing children to do things they don’t want to do, yet beneath the fear, many of these children desperately want to re-engage with life. They have simply lost trust that this time will be different.

So, what if we offered families a third option?

Scaffolded parenting helps gently support butterflies to emerge – unique butterflies who will fly their own paths. This is the moment the parental role must carefully shift.

I know how hard this sounds. The key difference is between asking a child to do something traumatic and asking them to do something difficult. Forcing a return to school or a family gathering may be traumatic. Asking for a tiny step – “Can you collect your food from the kitchen instead of us bringing it to you?” – may be difficult, but it is not traumatic.

I once worked with a young person we’ll call Mia. After two years of burnout, she was “recovered” but cocooned in her bedroom. She spent most of her time on her phone, rarely showered, rarely came downstairs.

Yet when I asked, “If I had a magic wand, what would you want life to look like?” she told me she wanted to rejoin family life, go to the cinema, see a friend.

In her cocoon, she had everything she needed – at least a false version of it. Social media provided stimulation and a sense of connection, but it also fed anxiety: they can do this. I can’t. So I’ll stay here. The cocoon felt safe, but it kept her stuck.

At this stage, understanding alone is no longer enough. Parents must offer therapeutic leadership within the cocoon – careful, attuned support that helps a child feel safe enough to take tiny risks again. Sitting at the breakfast table. Coming downstairs for five minutes. These are the steps that lead to emergence, not as neurotypical children, but as their authentic selves.

And once again, this enormous task falls to parents.

The tragedy is this: cocooned children are not the result of parental failure. Every parent I have worked with is fighting for their child within systems that too often fight back. I have seen children turned away from urgent mental health support despite suicidal thoughts because they were deemed “not critical enough”.

If society, health services, and education systems were proactive rather than reactive – if support came early, thoughtfully, and with understanding at its core – burnout would not become inevitable. Children would not need to retreat to bedrooms to recover from a world that failed to meet them halfway. And parents would not be left gently trying to coax their children back out of cocoons after the damage has already been done.

If we truly invested early, fewer children would ever need to cocoon at all.

Gee Eltringham, SEN psychotherapist, and founder of SEN family support platform twigged.