When I was ten years old, my family was helping start a new church. This is something we did often when I was a kid. The church had a pastor and many of the other staff members needed to run a church, but it had no building. We were renting or borrowing a building from … Read more
One way that I sometimes explain the concept of neurodivergence — that autism, or ADHD* are different wirings of the brain, without being something “wrong” with the brain — to children (or sometimes to their adults!) is by making an analogy to operating systems: for example, an iPhone versus an Android. Many kids above a … Read more
Two stories about power and powerlessness. A child and an adult were entering a classroom, together, one on one. The child skipped ahead of the adult through the open door of the classroom, zigzagged to the left and the right, saw the mini trampoline in the room and beelined toward that, did a single jump … Read more
Okay, after my last post, you might be asking, how do we give kids power and autonomy? Honestly, a different way to ask this same question might be, how do we protect their right to their own power and autonomy? Because in the absence of adult interference, kids will find the ways that they want … Read more
There’s a quote that I’ve seen on the internet that goes like this. “Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like a person’, and sometimes they use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like an authority’. So sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say, ‘If you won’t respect me, I … Read more
A couple of weeks ago my son, who’s 5, needed to have dental work done for the first time in his life. It wasn’t extensive and there wasn’t any drilling, but just the process of having to go to a scary place and have someone put their hands and tools in his mouth was hard … Read more
One of the most asked questions that I ever get—both in comment form, and in email form. I finally took the time to really write out a very long post answering it. Q: How can I help my child when they’re already at the crisis point—the point of melting down, hitting, kicking, throwing, etc? Assuming … Read more
On my Facebook page, I asked adults to share something that their child had been doing that was frustrating or upsetting to them. I then invited people in the comments (myself included) to respond, from the perspective of the child…what the child might be thinking or learning or trying or not-trying and how it’s getting … Read more
My friend Jessica, who runs the page Once Upon an Upset, once wrote: “So many of us are afraid of getting taken advantage of that we forget the option of offering grace.” It’s strange that this is true of adults and children, but it is, nevertheless, true in my experience. I think it has to … Read more
Communicating is not always speaking. It can be easy to write off neurodivergent people’s voices because they don’t always sound like neurotypical people’s voices. Imagine finally taking the effort and time to explain something that has happened to you, only for the person listening to not even engage with the content of what you’re saying, … Read more