Alone among other parents

Autistic Mirror (inside view)

Loneliness among other parents does not come from a lack of contact, but from a lack of resonance. That difference has neurological roots.

Conversations between parents at the playground or at a parents' evening mostly run on phatic communication, language that does not exchange information but creates social safety and belonging: small talk about the weather, school bags, shared everyday life. This channel is convention-based and implicit. It works through shared processing assumptions about what is "normal", what you say, how deep you go and when you stop. An autistic attention profile is monotropic and referential, which means language is processed mainly for its informational content. When the informational content is low, the conversation offers nothing for the monotropic tunnel to attach to. The result is not boredom but a kind of cognitive noise: processing runs at full speed without finding anything to grip.

At the same time the Double Empathy Problem applies. Two different processing styles meet. This is not a one-sided difficulty on your side but a mutual gap in fit. The other parents send signals in a format that is transparent to their processing model. Your model receives those signals, but part of the implicit layer of meaning gets lost in translation, and the same is true the other way round. Both sides leave the conversation feeling that they did not quite arrive. The difference: for the neurotypical majority this happens rarely, for you it is the standard format of these encounters.

What turns this into loneliness is this specific context. You are there because you share the same parenting role. There is a real common denominator. And still no connection forms that feels like connection. That is sharper than loneliness among strangers, because the expectation is there and still goes unmet.

There is also a sensory layer that hits especially hard in group settings such as parents' evenings or playgrounds: noise, parallel conversations, physical closeness, no control over the level of stimulation. The sensory budget is already taken before the first conversation begins. Capacity that would be needed for the cognitively demanding phatic processing is already tied up in filtering stimuli.

So the loneliness is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is the expected consequence of a format mismatch in an environment that is also sensorially demanding.

Autistic Mirror (inside view)

Two things are happening at the same time here, and they have nothing to do with each other: the depth of your care for your child, and the neurological cost of this specific conversational situation.

Monotropism explains the core. Attention bundles like a tunnel onto one channel instead of spreading widely. Small talk about sleep times and baby food runs in a frequency range that does not open a real tunnel: no depth, no problem that wants solving, no topic that genuinely pulls you in. Your brain still tries to join in politely and spends prefrontal capacity on something that feels like idling. That is exhausting in a specific way.

Masking comes in as a precondition. You are probably registering facial expressions, tone of voice and the social expectations in the room all at once, and steering your own reaction so that it fits the group format. That runs as a dual task alongside what you process in terms of content. From the outside it looks as if you are simply taking part in the conversation. The energy it takes is considerably higher than it would be for someone with different processing.

The Double Empathy Problem adds a third layer. The conversational formats that connect other parents are built on a neurotypical communication pattern: short exchanges, social signals as glue, content as an occasion. For you, connection is coded differently: depth, relevance, a real exchange about something that matters. Neither side is doing anything wrong. But the mismatch leaves you feeling somehow in the wrong conversation, even when you say everything that ought to be said.

The exhaustion you describe is not ambivalence about being a parent. It is the result of three processes running at the same time in a conversational format that is neurologically expensive.

Autistic Mirror (inside view)

The difference lies not in the choice of topic, but in the fact that the conversation itself creates no translation effort.

When two autistic people communicate, both use the same prediction model for social signals. Predictive coding means that the brain constantly checks what will come next. In conversations with non-autistic people, friction arises at exactly this point all the time: the expected reaction does not come, the expression you chose is read as too direct or not empathetic enough, or you interpret a pause as rejection when it was meant as thinking. That is the Double Empathy Problem, the mutual gap in understanding that arises when two different processing styles meet. Both sides leave the conversation feeling that the other person was unclear. The deficit lies in neither person.

With another autistic mother, your prediction model meets a matching counterpart. The reaction comes the way you expected it, not because you know each other, but because your ways of processing are compatible. You do not have to keep correcting, reconstruct afterwards whether something landed wrongly, or run facial expression and emphasis as an extra channel to secure the content.

The second element is co-regulation, the bodily attunement of affect between two people. Breathing rhythm, speaking pace and tone of voice synchronise involuntarily, and the autonomic nervous system reads this synchrony as a signal of safety. In mixed pairs this synchrony is dampened, because both start from different neurological baselines. The regulatory load then stays one-sided with you. With another autistic person this synchrony forms more easily, because the baselines are more similar.

So the "easy" is not a feeling and not a coincidence. It is the absence of two kinds of effort at once: the cognitive work of translation and the autonomic regulatory load.