I’m a dad to five kids (although recently my youngest, my 22-year-old daughter, asked me to stop referring to her and her siblings as “kids,” so we’ve settled on offspring). Parenting, as many reading this piece will know, is full of wonderful, life-affirming challenges, and in many ways, as a parent, you grow with your kids. One of the challenges we faced was raising a neurodiverse kid.

One thing I need to say upfront is that I am not in any way, shape, or form an expert on this topic. I’m going to be talking from a personal perspective as a parent. Although I feel that working as a Senior Emergency Mental Health Clinician gave me a unique perspective, as I was already well aware of just how complex the brain is and how much we still don’t know or understand about it, so that made me very open to embracing the idea of neurodiversity.

Let’s start by defining the word neurodiverse. Neurodiverse “describes the natural neurological variation in humans. While it’s usually used to describe a person who is autistic, or has ADHD or a specific learning disorder (SLD) such as dyslexia, dyscalculia or dysgraphia, it can encompass many conditions. ‘Neurodivergent’ best describes an individual in terms of their traits, behaviours and thinking styles.” ¹

Or, in simpler terms, “Neurodiversity is the idea that there’s natural variation in how people’s brains work and how people experience, understand and interact with the world. This means there are natural differences in the way people learn and communicate.” ²

On our journey of raising a neurodiverse child, we discovered five incredibly important things that would help our son to thrive that we needed to do:

1. Firstly, we had to educate ourselves
2. Secondly, we had to use a different parenting style
3. Thirdly, we had to use a different teaching approach
4. Fourthly, we had to educate others, and
5. We had to advocate for our child.

We had to educate ourselves

I’m fairly confident that pretty much every parent wants their child to be “normal.”

Menno van de Land speaks about one of the most paradoxical aspects of human behaviour: our desire to be free to be an individual, to be yourself, yet at the same time, we are drawn to fit in, to be ‘normal like everyone else’ ³. This can create tension within us that can then lead us to struggle to find our place in the world.

If you are neurodivergent, then it’s very likely that you already don’t fit in. You may feel it, and as a parent, you certainly see it. Much of our emotional energy is poured into protecting our kids from experiencing a life that is not necessarily considered “normal.”

Our response to this was not to try to make our son fit in or be normal, instead, we embraced his neurodiversity. In fact, we did more than that; we honoured, supported, loved and even celebrated this unique young human. From our perspective, he had something really special and rather amazing to bring into this world.

“Embracing neurodiversity is about accepting, including, celebrating and supporting neurodivergent children. Their differences are part of natural variation and don’t need to be treated or changed.” ⁴

We had to use a different parenting style

Our journey into the world of parenting was just as chaotic and stressful as most parents with their first child. A long, difficult labour for my wife and an experience that no birthing class or video would ever come close to preparing you for. Then the sleepless nights, the constant crying, the reflux, the feeding, the nappies, the chaos, basically the wild and scary journey of being first-time parents.

But that’s where any kind of “normal” parenting journey ended for us. Life after our first child would never be the same. Our second child came along and just as quickly departed this world in tragic circumstances. Then the third, hot on the heels of our loss, because we knew we needed, “to get back on the horse,” so to speak, before the anxiety and fear pushed us away from the idea of taking the risk of facing losing another child (a very real fear once you’ve lost a child). And if you’ve lost a child, you’ll know that it’s not unusual for your relationship with the next child to be uniquely anxiety-inducing and challenging as you desperately cling on to the hope that this one will be okay.

And then comes along number four, our neurodiverse child. Parents are incredibly intuitive with their own children, and before we even knew what the word “neurodiverse” meant, we knew that there was something special and unique about this child. And as the chaos of raising a young family tossed us around like lost souls in the ocean, we very quickly learned that we were facing another challenge, and we had to parent this one quite differently from his two older siblings. And this is where you discover that your best friend in this life is to be open-minded and willing to learn and unlearn for the benefit of this young soul.

We very quickly learned that the parenting strategies we had used for our first two surviving children rarely worked for our neurodiverse child, and this, not surprisingly, can lead to self-doubt, frustration, and comparison to other parents and children. You’re constantly adjusting how you approach parenting this child, trying to remain intuitive to their emotional needs, and feeling helpless and overwhelmed when something as simple as a trip to the shops turns into an emotional roller coaster road that consumes the rest of your day until you finally get them off to bed. ⁵

We discovered that one of our son’s needs was that he had to know what to expect, so our yearly holiday ended up being so incredibly and carefully planned. Prior to hitting the road, we would hand our son a book that we had literally put together for him so he could look ahead and see what each day would look like. And it was incredibly detailed, right down to what time we would leave, what route we would take, where we would be staying, and sightseeing options on the way. Once he had that, it provided him with a semblance of control and predictability so he could emotionally regulate himself and talk to us about what to expect.

“Children with neurodiversity can become more engaged with learning in the context of an environment that is characterised by structure and predictability, and that is scaffolded by visual supports and simplified adult-child interactions.” ⁶

Use a different teaching approach

This is where our journey moves away from the traditional approach to education. Due to some unique circumstances, we found ourselves homeschooling our third son for what was meant to be a period of twelve months only. However, it became very clear to us that our neurodivergent son would greatly benefit from being homeschooled, and well, he was basically joining in anyway.

He was the most curious, thoughtful and reflective child but due to his neurodiversity, could come across as what one might perceive as blunt or even rude (I’ll come back to this later) and we were terrified, given that this was back in the early two-thousands and there wasn’t the same recognition of neurodiversity and supports available for the child in the public schooling system that there are now, so we decided to continue on after the twelve months and ended up home schooling all of our four surviving children.

Home schooling provided us with a unique opportunity to teach our son in a way that would play to his strengths. It allowed us to be as flexible as we needed to be to ensure that he had the best opportunity to flourish. A strength-based approach works tremendously well for a neurodiverse child and draws your attention away from how they may not be " normal” like the other kids.

“When we focus on strengths-based approaches, we reflect on the skills and areas students are successful with or already interested in to drive their learning and support. While strengths-based approaches should always reflect an individual’s specific strengths and needs, some general strengths that might apply to many Autistic students include visual processing, focusing on passionate student interests, implementing explicit learning and explicit instruction and honing in on attention to details.” ⁷

What was so wonderful about homeschooling our son was that we had the time and flexibility to look beyond his behaviours and try to understand them in the context of his neurodiversity.

“If there’s one thing Dr. Martin wants to impress upon teachers, educators, and school staff, it’s to ask them to look beyond a kid’s behaviour. “Behaviour,” she says, “is just the tip of the iceberg.” That’s especially true if a child is acting out at school. “Neurodivergent kids process information differently from their peers, which can mean language, sensory stimuli, emotions, and how they adapt to change.” ⁸

Educate others

We had to educate others to ensure our son wasn’t treated poorly, bullied, disrespected and the victim of ignorant and hurtful comments, often from other parents. I recall a time when another parent gave an instruction to our son, and his response was, “Why?” The parent perceived that as him being insubordinate and essentially felt affronted that this child would dare question them. But as the parent of this beautiful neurodivergent child, we knew that when he says, “why?” to you, he’s not being insubordinate, he genuinely wants to understand why he is being asked to do something and rarely would he disagree with you once he knew what your logic, as the parent was.

I also recall a funny moment when he was playing table tennis with his younger sister, and he hit the ball particularly hard in her direction. She missed hitting it with the bat, and it hit her in the eye. She was upset and crying about this, and I said to him, “It might be nice to say sorry to your sister,” and he looked quite blankly at me and said, “Why? I didn’t deliberately try to hurt her; it was an accident.” I took a few moments to explain to him that it’s not that he did anything with intent, but rather it’s just a kind thing to do when an accident happens. His response was then, “Oh, okay,” and he turned to his sister and said Sorry.

It was extremely challenging helping other parents to try to perceive how he related to adults, as him not intentionally being disrespectful or insubordinate, but rather that he was incredibly curious and he thrived on understanding the reasoning behind our actions as human beings. Even as I am typing this, I’m smiling because now, at twenty-four years of age, he always greets me in the most unusual way. We will catch up, and he walks up to me, gives me a big hug and says, “Hello father,” to which I respond, “Hello son.” We have greeted each other this way for more years than I can recall, and it reminds me just how unique and wonderfully beautiful he is.

Advocacy

Finally, we had to advocate on his behalf, to be his biggest ally in this scary world that he often found hard to navigate.

In an article written by John Sharry ⁹, he has some great suggestions for how to advocate for your child and be a good ally:

• Understanding your child and communicating their perspective when they are misunderstood.
• Focusing on changing your child’s world rather than changing your child in the world.
• Explaining your child’s needs to others in a way that creates understanding.
• Collaborating with schools to create a learning environment that meets your child’s needs.
• Anticipating challenges so as to minimise any disadvantage your child experiences.
• Teaching your child how to advocate for themselves and to ask for what they need.