We ran an errand today, and my kids, 7 and 6, had a lovely cheerful moment on the way there. “Summer, you have so many ideas because you have a DHD brain,” my son Apollo enthused, somewhat out of nowhere, with his iteration of the vocabulary we’ve been explaining and discussing over and over lately. … Read more
One of my kids who does not like to write and feels particularly threatened by writing, really does like to have some kind of transition object to hold in the hallway while we walk from their class to my therapy gym. We have experimented with lots of different options. A couple of months ago I … Read more
I want you to imagine for a moment that…everything is really good right now. Imagine that all the things on your to-do list that feel like “have to”s (instead of “get to”s) are taken care of. Someone is going to bring you dinner and it’s food you love and your body is hungry for it. … Read more
If you are pursuing diagnosis for your neurodivergent child, it’s okay to take your neuro-affirming lens back “off” in order to talk to the doctor about your child. What I mean is that you are not a bad parent or you don’t love your child less if you play the system by its own rules. … Read more
Many neurodivergent people (not just Autistic people, but including Autistic people) have skills that fluctuate from day to day. This comes up so often in IEP meetings that I’m sitting in. People will say of the child in their class, or of the child that they’re the parent of: “I know he knows how to … Read more
Let me tell you a fable. Once upon a time, an expert doctor was studying a child who ran away from rooms that had air-conditioners in them. Air-conditioners had only recently been invented, and it took some doing to figure out exactly what the child was running away from, but without a doubt, if he … Read more
Autism and ADHD. Autism and OCD. Autism and anxiety. Autism and Tourette’s. Autism and trauma. Autism (as a diagnosis) very commonly accompanies other diagnoses as well, which typically fall into different categories: some of them are mental health-related, some of them are physical (especially gut/digestion, vision/hearing, joint, or coordination related), and some of them are … Read more
“Sensory” is one of those buzzwords these days in parenting groups, on Pinterest, and in relation to different diagnoses. I’ve seen people use it to mean pretty much everything. When I talk about sensory processing, I am not talking about kids playing with rice or shaving cream in a bin. 😊 There are a few … 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
Low attention is not a moral failure. The picture I got from talking to the teacher about the boy was very different from the picture I got when I worked with him. “He leaves things blank on worksheets,” his teacher, a stern “old-school” older gentleman, told me. “No matter how many times I tell him … Read more