I'm still trying to sort out HOW to tell stories about talking to my difficult children about the fact that when you turn eighteen, you become a legal adult and on that day the rules officially fundamentally change in many important ways.
But if you have difficult children, regardless of HOW I talked to MY kids about such things, the important piece is that I did, in fact, tell my children that the rules are different for children and as long as they didn't do anything extremely serious, like kill someone or burn a building down, I was their mother and I had parental rights that gave me latitude for how to deal with them.
I made it clear that if they did something extremely serious, law enforcement would get involved and then Mom no longer had final say. But as long as that didn't happen, Mom's decision generally trumped that of their teachers and other adults who maybe thought they were weird and difficult.
One son informed me after he became an adult that he consciously and intentionally "tried" stuff as a kid to figure out what was okay and what was socially acceptable or unacceptable while the stakes were lower.
I would talk to him about social stuff and say "Don't do x because..." and he would promptly do x a few times to see if I was right or not about how people would react to that. He told me I was right about ninety percent of the time but some people reacted differently even if ninety percent of them did exactly like I said they would.
I have heard that the kind of therapy many ASD kids receive to try to help them fit in socially is a form of abusive brainwashing that prioritizes what other people want from them over helping them understand social stuff and effectively navigate it.
Instead of trying to break my kids and MAKE them "behave" in a more socially acceptable fashion, I had lots and LOTS of conversations with them about WHY other people were mad at them or similar and about concepts like:
1. You can't please all of the people all of the time.
2. Because of rule one, above, sometimes you should do the thing you want to do even knowing people won't like it.
3. But you should pick your battles because if you are a jackass routinely without good reason, it will come back to bite you.
I watched a TV show that covered the origin of gangs in Atlanta, Georgia.
They tracked down the original gang members who founded the gangs. If I recall correctly, they tracked it back to just nine Hispanic kids who were being picked on by everyone else, both Black and White, and formed a gang to protect themselves.
In an interview on the show in question, one of the original gang members said they formed the gang because they were always afraid and after forming a gang, others were afraid of them.
Georgia is mostly "Black" or "White" and largely doesn't recognize the concept of mixed race, though if you talk to "Black" people in Georgia enough, you learn a lot of them are part something else. Ethnicities like Hispanic, Asian etc. are generally a tiny minority in most parts of the state and racism in the state tends to dictate ridiculous constraints like "absolutely no interracial dating" and this was historically much worse than the last time I lived there.
I grew up in Georgia and a friend of mine told me once that a Hispanic girl at our high school had a bad reputation because there weren't enough Hispanic boys for her to date only Hispanic boys and she saw no reason to pick either Black or White to date exclusively, so she dated any ethnicity and that alone made her a tramp in the eyes of everyone at school.
So a lot of people are put in impossible no win situations due to this kind of unreasonable social expectation and it's really not rooted in bad behavior per se. This kind of broken social expectation is not limited to race nor to Georgia.
Kids who are different in some way are frequently picked on and mistreated in school by other kids and then they typically get blamed when they misbehave.
I pulled my kids out and homeschooled them, largely because one was regularly coming home in tears. With no longer having to deal with this garbage at school, my children were much more able to behave in a socially acceptable fashion.
I also had them read a number of books to help them understand themselves, including some of the autobiographical works about Temple Grandin. In one, she says that she was transferred to a new school and one of the kids picked on her until Temple hit the kid and this had happened at other schools but this school handled it differently.
Instead of unilaterally punishing Temple Grandin for hitting the kid, they asked her why she did it. When she explained her side of the story, they told the other kid that wasn't acceptable behavior either and with getting protection from being picked on, Template Grandin was able to sort her problems out and stop hitting other kids.
My kids got told it's fine to avoid some things they find difficult and not worth the hassle and that none of us is good at everything and that's not necessarily a disaster. One metaphor I used was that you don't need to be a licensed plumber and electrician to own a home. You can DIY some stuff and call a professional for other stuff.
I generally focused on what they could do instead of what they couldn't do, the opposite of what much of the world does to special needs kids.
My kids got what I used to call on TAGMAX "a humanities education in learning to live with the inconvenient, inescapable reality of their own humanity and that of other people."