Researchers at Dublin City University set up ten blank smartphones with accounts registered as boys aged sixteen to eighteen, each given ordinary interests. Sport. Video games. Only some were told to go looking for anything troubling.

Every single account was served masculinist, anti-feminist and extremist content within 23 minutes.

The ones that went looking got there faster. The ones that didn’t got there anyway.

It isn’t something he finds. It’s something he is handed.

A Vodafone study of 1,000 parents and boys aged 11 to 14 found the same pattern. Harmful content reaches boys within about half an hour online on average, and for one in ten, inside the first sixty seconds. Roughly fifty-nine percent arrive through innocent searches. How to get stronger. Gaming clips.

Two-thirds of young men in the UK, the US, and Australia now regularly watch masculinity influencers.

What That Actually Means

Exposure is close to universal. It is not a verdict on your parenting, your rules, or how closely you pay attention. What differs between one household and the next isn’t whether it arrives.

It’s what is already there when it does.

And that part is almost entirely yours.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found that 95% of children, whose parents regularly encourage open conversations about their online lives, would come to them if something online made them feel upset or ashamed.

Read that word again. Regularly. Not once, and not afterward. The thing that decides what he does in the worst four minutes of his life is something you were already doing months earlier.

95%. That isn’t a small effect at the edges. That’s the whole game.

Researchers at the University of Kent identified who is most at risk: the boys already dealing with poor mental health, with bullying, or with anxiety about their future. The algorithm’s ideal customer is a boy who is lonely, anxious, and quietly convinced he’s falling behind. If you’re raising a neurodivergent son, you know how often that describes a normal week.

You’re watching the wrong thing

Worrying about toxic masculine content probably isn’t in your top five worries, and that isn’t carelessness. Ask a mum of a neurodivergent son what’s keeping her up and you get the same answers: The emails from school. The homework standoff. The mornings he can’t get out the door. Food battles. The aggression that arrived out of nowhere. The gaming. The screentime.

There isn’t much attention left over. And the online safety advice you were handed years ago was about strangers- don’t talk to people you don’t know, tell me if anyone asks you for a photo- that advice was built for a threat that arrives as a person.

This one arrives as a fitness video.

Which is why, when the subject does come up, in a headline or from a friend or in an article like this one, it doesn’t arrive as urgent. It arrives as one more item on a list that is already impossible. Four thoughts turn up to file it away, and every one is fair.

“He needs some privacy.” He does. Autonomy is protective, and for a PDA nervous system it isn’t optional. Nothing here asks you to take it away.

“My son isn’t like that.” He probably isn’t. Seeing this content and believing it are different things, and most boys who meet it never adopt it.

“Isn’t some of this just banter?” Often, yes. Reading every joke as a symptom will cost you the relationship.

“I don’t think he’s watching that stuff.” This is the one to sit with. You don’t know, and neither does any other mother reading this.

All four assume he had to go looking. He didn’t. It found him in 23 minutes.

It isn’t fair on parents, and nobody else is going to say so.

There’s a void, and the content knows its shape

He isn’t being argued into anything.

He’s being offered something he isn’t getting anywhere else.

Niobe Way spent thirty-five years asking boys about friendship. At eleven, they talk openly about loving their friends. They use that word. By fourteen, they’ve learned it isn’t safe to say so. In 1990, 3% of men reported having no close friends. Now it’s 15%.

For neurodiverse boys, that collapse comes earlier and costs more. Connection was always effortful. There was already more rejection, more getting it wrong without knowing why. The close friendship Way identifies as the single greatest protection against isolation is often already thin by the time the algorithm shows up.

And it has never been this thin.

Harvard’s Making Caring Common project found something more specific. Asked general questions about loneliness, men and women answer much the same. Asked differently, men are markedly more likely to report feeling disconnected or irrelevant.

Irrelevant is the word. And it is precisely what the toxic influencers promise to cure,

through his phone.

When there isn’t anyone to tell him otherwise, the manosphere will.

What they offer is a counterfeit of exactly the thing he lost. Brotherhood. A hierarchy with a place in it. A script for how to be a man that doesn’t require him to read a single social cue. And an explanation for why everything has felt so hard, one that doesn’t ask him to sit inside uncertainty and wait.

For a boy who has been told he’s too much, or not enough, or difficult, since he was small, nothing is wrong with you, you’ve just been lied to is not a small thing to hear. And for a brain that experiences ambiguity as a threat, that certainty isn’t only appealing. It’s sedating.

All of which means the content found a need that was already sitting there. Which changes entirely what you do about it.

Three things to do this week

Everything else can wait. These three change the conditions, and the conditions are what the toxic content is looking for.

1. Make it safe to be him in your house

Not corrected. Not managed. Not difficult, or frustrating, or a problem waiting to be solved. Him. The way in is to lower the demands. Temporarily and deliberately. Just enough to turn the volume down so there’s room to hear what’s underneath the loud behaviors. Because the moment is already there. It might be late at night, or in the car, or halfway through something else entirely. What every version has in common is that he starts it. He decides whether it happens, what gets covered, and when it ends. He gets autonomy and connection at once, which for a PDA nervous system was always the only combination that worked.

You will not see it while you’re still talking.

2. Surround him with men who show him more than one way to be one

Required relationships collapse on contact, whether that’s mandated therapy or an authoritarian teacher, because an assigned relationship is a demand. What works is proximity. Places where competent adults turn up regularly and are glad to be asked what they know. Volunteer organizations, maker spaces, bike repair, a part-time job where somebody notices good work. Look for a male mentor. A cousin, a neighbor, an uncle, a coach, who’s honest about difficulty without performing it. Nothing grand. Just: that was a tough one, I got that wrong, I’m still working it out. When mothers are the only people who talk about feelings, it confirms for him that feelings are a female department.

3. Have at least six conversations a year

The research is specific about the number and silent about the content. So here’s the content. The Family Online Safety Institute, in partnership with Ipsos, found that 89% of children aged 10 to 17 would go to a parent if something online made them feel unsafe. In households having six or more conversations a year about online life, the safety tools already in place actually worked. Here’s what they look like for a boy who experiences a sit-down as an ambush.

The warning signs are a map. You’re the one who knows the ground.

If something feels different about your son and you can’t yet name what it is, that feeling is information. It came from years of watching him closely, and it’s more accurate than any list a stranger could write.

Trust it. Then give it time and watch for a pattern rather than a moment.

I’m running a live masterclass on how to raise our sons Through The Noise on 16 September about what the online masculinity industry actually sells to boys, why our sons in particular are the ideal customer, and how to build a boy it won’t land on. You will leave knowing exactly what to say and what to do next to protect your son from toxic online influencers. Hope to see you there!

Many parents of ND kids struggle with the age old question, “Is it really that he can’t do it or is he manipulating me?”

The answer is simple, but we parents are so overwhelmed with conflicting expert advice and well-intended suggestions from family that it gets blurry in the moment.

ADHD is not a knowing problem. It’s a doing-at-the-moment-of-performance problem. Inconsistency is the diagnostic feature, not the evidence against it. A kid who can empty the dishwasher on a good day but can't do it a few days later isn't proving he could do it all along. He’s showing you a brain whose access to its own skills changes with load. Consistency is the thing that’s impaired.

Manipulation requires planning, sequencing, reading someone else’s mind, and delaying gratification. Those are executive functions. A dysregulated ADHD kid is the least equipped person in that house to run a manipulation. What looks like manipulation is usually the shortest available route out of something that feels unbearable.

Thinking it is binary is a trap. Behavior more complicated. It is always more complicated.

So start with erring on the side of behavior being a capacity issue and resist the temptation to escalate into compliance. Understanding, compassion, and a bit of creativity will be way more effective than judgment and pressure.

Still annoyed?

Ask yourself, “What am I afraid this means?”

It’s answerable in three seconds. We always know, and it is some fear-bait version of: That he’ll be a lazy adult. That he’ll never be able to hold a job. That I’m failing him. That this is my fault.

It also explains the urgency. The reason we parents need to know whether it’s a won’t or can’t problem in the moment is that the two answers carry different verdicts on them.

If he can’t, we give ourselves permission to lower the demand.

If he won’t and I let it go, then I am the parent who isn’t doing good parenting. But the dishwasher is never carrying that weight. Our fear about who this child will become in the future is.

Once we can name the fear out loud, the intensity drops on its own. That’s how we interrupt the spiral that usually turns into a no-win fight and hours of self-flagellation. Nothing about the child has changed, but we are no longer parenting the imagined thirty-year-old loser we are afraid he will turn into. We stay present with the child who is having a real struggle with doing in this moment.

One tip to try today: Stop Talking. As soon as you start to feel frustrated with your child’s lack of compliance- zip your lip and work on reducing your simmer so you don’t boil.

Need more support? Because you don’t have to do this alone- come join us in our weekly Parenting Lab; part support group, part study group- all growth.

I coach parents in crisis.

Not “my six-year-old won’t eat broccoli” crisis. The other kind. The kind where a mother sits in front of me and says the thing she has never said out loud to another human being:

I don’t like my son.

I don’t want to be around her.

I dread him coming home.

And then she waits for me to be horrified.

I’m not horrified. I hear it most weeks. These are good parents. Devoted, exhausted, well-read, compassionate, therapy-going, snack-packing, appointment-booking parents who gave up careers and sleep and their own bodies for these children. But, regardless of all of the above, somewhere between age ten and fifteen the child became a stranger who slams doors, calls them names, tells them nothing, and lives entirely inside a phone and a group chat.

Moms come to me at the bleeding-neck stage. Teen won’t talk. Teen won’t come out of their room. Teen is rude, aggressive, dismissive, insulting, sometimes frightening. Teen lights up like a Christmas tree for friends and goes grey and flat for family.

And I help them unravel the knots created by lack of knowledge, poor support and unhelpful inherited beliefs that are keeping their family in a loop. We can almost always get somewhere. But here is the truth:

It is so much harder at fifteen than it is at five.

So this one is for the parents of the four-to-nine-year-olds. The ones who are currently in the trenches of tantrums and homework battles and someone screaming about their socks. You are not in crisis. You are in the window. And what you do in this window decides almost everything about what happens later.

The thing nobody explained to you

A great book, Hold On to Your Kids, by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté explains this dynamic but since I know you don’t have time to read a chapter much less an entire book, here’s the TL;DR.

Their argument, boiled down: your influence over your child does not come from being their parent. It comes from their attachment to you.

Neufeld calls it the psychological umbilical cord. And when it’s intact, your love and your guidance flow through it. When it’s been cut, or quietly transferred to somebody else (friends or the phone), you can love that child with every cell in your body and it does not reach them.

That’s the part that levels people. All the love in the world can’t get through.

And here’s what’s happening in our culture, at scale, mostly invisibly. Children are transferring that attachment away from adults and onto each other. Neufeld calls it peer orientation. Not peer pressure. That’s a symptom. This is the root: the child’s compass swings away from the parent and locks onto the peer group- before they are actually developmentally ready for it.

It’s not a choice they make. It’s neurological. A brain can’t follow two conflicting sets of directions. If the peer group is the dominant orientation, the parent’s voice doesn’t just get ignored, it gets actively suppressed. Neufeld compares it to how the brain shuts down input from a diverging eye to avoid seeing double. Something has to be the authority. Something else has to be switched off.

So when your fourteen-year-old rolls her eyes and physically recoils from you and lights up for her friends, you’re not watching rebellion. Maté puts it perfectly: what we call healthy teenage rebellion is neither healthy nor rebellion, because genuine rebellion is for freedom, and this child isn’t seeking freedom. She’s seeking somewhere to belong. She is submitting herself completely to a group of other thirteen-year-olds who have no capacity whatsoever to take care of her. You can say she belongs with your words, you can say you respect his feelings with your words, but if your actions don’t actually show it, then that is the silent crack that will grow and they will fall into.

That is a common crisis I see in my groups. And it doesn’t arrive at thirteen. It’s been building for years.

What the window actually looks like

Between four and nine, your child still wants you. Wildly, inconveniently, at 5:40am, wants you. That wanting is the raw material. It is the thing you are either strengthening or spending.

Maté tells a story about parents who come to him and say their child was good until nine and then went bad. And he tells them there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is the child was never “good”. The good news is the child isn’t “bad” now. What actually happened is the child was oriented to them, attached to them, following their lead, and then detached and started following someone else’s.

Nothing about the child changed. The relationship did. But in the coming tween and teen years, hormones and the natural, developmental adolescent push for autonomy will be a change in them that doesn’t come quietly.

Which means the work in these years isn’t behaviour management.

It’s relationship insurance.

The line I want you to write on something and post where you can see it daily

Neufeld says: “The ultimate gift is to make a child feel invited to exist in our presence exactly as he is.”

Exactly as he is. Not the version who did well at school. Not the version who managed the birthday party without falling apart. Not the version who is finally, mercifully, easy to be around. Not the one who nicely said yes to all your requests today.

This is the same ground my mentor Dr. Shefali stands on, and it’s why her work and Neufeld’s fit together so well. The child does not have to earn presence. Presence is the baseline, and everything else is built on top of it.

And Neufeld is very clear that this gets communicated most powerfully in the moments when something has come between you. When the values have been violated. When they have been awful. When you have been awful. That’s when the message actually lands: none of this is going to come between us.

He talks about a moment with his own six-year-old, who told him “Daddy stop hitting me.” Neufeld said he doesn’t hit him. The boy said: you just hit me again with your words. And Neufeld said sorry, told him the frustration wasn’t about him but he got hit by it anyway. The boy’s answer: “It’s okay Daddy. I can remember now that you love me even when you’re mad at me.”

That’s the whole job. Building a child who can hold onto the relationship even during the rupture. You do that by repairing. Over and over, unglamorously, for years.

So why is it so hard to do

Because you are not a robot with a parenting manual. You are a person, and two things are standing between you and this.

The first is your own childhood.

Maté names it directly: many parents carry unresolved traumas of abandonment and rejection from their own early years. And when your child pushes you away, those old imprints wake up. You don’t experience it as a seven-year-old having a bad afternoon. You experience it as being rejected. Which brings up pain and resentment and a very strong urge to withdraw.

That’s the inner child at the wheel. And she is not a good driver. She is negotiating with a nine-year-old for evidence that she is loved.

Your child cannot be responsible for how you feel. Not at nine, not at nineteen. That’s yours to carry, and it’s the single most useful piece of work you can do for your family.

The second is everything you were taught about how children should be.

Kids should be respectful. Kids should be grateful. Kids should say thank you and look adults in the eye and not embarrass you in Sainsbury’s. So when yours doesn’t, you don’t just feel frustrated. You feel exposed. You feel like everyone can see you failing.

And that’s when we get cold. Maté describes it exactly: the warmth that comes automatically with a new baby gets shut down as they start pushing away, and instead of triggering our warmth they trigger our coldness, and then we decide something is wrong with them. We haven’t noticed we’ve lost a relationship.

I’ve done it. When my child is rude, I go icy and my primal “Oh no you did not!” mama boils up. But, because I have done so much work (trained like a first responder), I know what to do- which is usually to not respond, walk away and come back to it later when emotions aren’t so high.

What to do tonight

Small. Specific. Tonight.

Collect before you direct. This is Neufeld’s phrase and it mirrors my very clear directive about the importance of connection - early and often. Get their eyes, get a smile, get a nod, before you ask for anything. We do this instinctively with friends and colleagues. We would never walk up to a friend and open with “put your shoes away.” We parent cold on default. Warm up first, ask second. Here is a cheat sheet with 30 more ways to build the connection . Print it and put it on the fridge. This is not one and done. It’s a practice to repeat every day.

Feed them something they love. Maté and Neufeld both go here and it sounds absurdly simple until you try it. Remember what your child loves. Make it. Eat it together, at a table, without a screen. Or simply, quietly place it next to them as they game. Food is a delivery system for care.

Stop using what they love against them. Confiscating the thing they care about teaches them one lesson: be careful what you get attached to, because it will be used as leverage. Neufeld calls this the most cynical kind of parenting, and then we’re surprised when they stop caring about anything. If you need tips on what else to do read What Actually Works

Repair one old thing. Something from last week that you never went back to. “I was really short with you on Tuesday and that wasn’t about you.” You don’t need them to accept it graciously or even respond. You just need to model that ruptures get mended in this family.

Deal with the phone before it deals with you. All experts are unambiguous. Devices are engineered to be addictive and they form attachments that compete directly with you. Delay. Limit. Keep it in shared spaces, in the presence of adults. Once a child is hooked, pulling them off is like separating an addict from a supply, and you cannot control when you have no relationship to control it with. Here’s a quick 10-step screentime safety and sanity guide.

Build a pack around them. I talk about this a lot! I have made this a primary objective with my kids since they were little but especially now that they are teens. Grandparents, aunts, coaches, mentors, healthy young adult role models, family friends, neighbours. Neufeld calls it cascading care and he’s right that we’ve dismantled it. A child with a web of adults who love them does not put their entire emotional weight on a group chat of twelve-year-olds. Start now, while they’re still willing to be matchmade.

If there is physical or verbal abuse, read this now!

The bit I say to every parent

You do not have to have the answers. Neufeld says parenting has always been a bluff and it’s better if you know it’s a bluff. You are not required to know what to do. But you are required to be the answer.

There’s a difference between I have the answers and I am the answer, and only one of them is available to you when your teen is screaming about not having the right socks.

Your child is looking for safety and acceptance. They are looking for home- somewhere they matter. That’s what they’re looking for at four, and it’s still what they’re looking for at fourteen, even when they’re being appalling about it.

If you are in the four-to-nine window right now, wading through the meltdowns and the sock seams and the school runs, please hear this: you are not just surviving today. You are building the thing that will hold at fifteen.

And if you’re already past it, if your teen has gone quiet and cold and far away, Neufeld’s line on that is the one I hold onto: it’s never too late with a relationship. It’s not guaranteed. But we are always, always looking for home.

Come find me if you need help handling the now or finding your way back. That’s what I do.

If this was just what you needed to hear, you may also like:

If you are worried about the judgment from your parents.

If you need help getting your partner on board.

If the fights are about school and homework

When you can’t remember how to stay calm in the heat of the moment

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There are ten thousand reels about picky eating, bedtime battles, and screen limits. There is almost nothing about the mother sitting on the floor of a locked bathroom while her child kicks the door, screaming obscenities at her.

Because I offer crisis coaching, moms finally have a safe place to say what they can’t say to anyone else. If you are suffering- fearing- quietly, this one’s for you.

You are not alone.

First, the cycle you’re stuck in

It usually starts small, and it almost always runs the same route.

Impulsivity is a core characteristic of ADHD and AuDHD children. Their nervous system goes to threat faster than their thinking brain gets a vote, and what comes out looks exactly like “bad behavior”. So it gets treated like “bad behavior”. It gets punished.

Punishment lands as rejection and feels to the child like the parent clearly does not understand their big feelings. A child who genuinely didn’t plan it and genuinely can’t stop it cannot make sense of why the person who loves them keeps punishing them for it. What they take away isn’t the lesson you intended. It’s: something is wrong with me.

Rejection thins the connection between parent and child. And a disconnected child gets more aggressive, because the aggression is doing a job. It’s a wall. It’s a way of manufacturing safety. It’s grabbing back some power in a life where they have almost none, in a body they can’t control, in a school day enduring constant stressors. If there’s a PDA profile in the mix, it’s leveling the ground with an adult who feels dangerously more powerful than they are.

Then the aggression triggers more punishment (or, when dressed up in a more morally appropriate word, “discipline”). And round it goes, tightening, for years.

I have watched families do years of this before anybody thinks this isn’t working. Something needs to change. If your child is still young, please read You Need To Know This Before Your Child Becomes A Teen

The part that makes it unbearable

The worse the behavior gets, the harder unconditional love becomes.

That’s the thing nobody will say to you, so I will. When a child hits you in the face in front of your mother, every single system in you fires at once. The wound from your own childhood says I am being rejected, minimized, ignored again. Add in the deep social conditioning that says children should not behave like this and a child that is aggressive must mean I am a bad parent. Your body and mind say I just want to get away from this person.

And the last thing you feel, in that moment, is warm fuzzies.

Plot twist: this is precisely when your child needs you most. Not the version of you performing calm while mentally drafting the consequence. The version who can stay in the room.

Your child does not understand what happened. They can’t narrate it to you. All they know is that they exploded, you went cold, and now they hate themselves. They come to you later with an apology, and you want to use the moment to remind them how horrible they were. Shame doesn’t reduce aggression. It manufactures more of it.

You may not understand what happened either. That’s fine. You do not need to understand the mechanism to deliver the message, and the message is that they are still yours at their absolute worst.

Now the line we won’t blur

Unconditional love does not mean tolerating abuse.

It doesn’t mean absorbing violence indefinitely because he’s dysregulated. It doesn’t mean your other children have to live in a house where they’re frightened. It doesn’t mean you get hurt on a Tuesday and make his packed lunch on Wednesday and never mention it.

You are a person. Your safety counts. And a home where somebody is being hurt isn’t a home where anybody is healing, including the child doing the hurting.

Holding both of these at once is the actual work: I love you unconditionally, and this cannot continue. They’re not in conflict. Most parents just haven’t been given a way to say both in the same breath.

What actually counts as concerning

Some disrespect is developmentally normal. Teenagers argue. They’re rude. They test. Disagreement between a parent and an adolescent is healthy and expected, and if you’re worried about eye-rolling and slammed doors, that’s ordinary growing up and it’s nt what we are talking about here.

What I’m talking about is when it crosses into behaviour that puts a family’s safety at stake:

Verbal and emotional abuse. Insults and name-calling aimed at family members. Constant put-downs. Threats to hurt someone in the family or to destroy their things. Worth taking seriously if it’s frequent or escalating.

Physical violence and property damage. Hitting, shoving, punching, anything around the throat. Smashing things and deliberately destroying an object that matters to someone else, which is its own particular kind of message.

Anything that reshapes how your family lives. Intimidating body language. Any pattern that leaves you or a sibling frightened, walking on eggshells, or changing your behavior to avoid setting them off.

If you read that list and recognized your house, you are not overreacting, and you are not being dramatic. You’re describing something real that has a name and a treatment pathway. Now it’s time to act.

Where the help is not

Before I tell you where to go, let me save you six months- or even years- of stress and anxiety.

It is not in figuring it out yourself. You’ve been trying. It’s not working. That’s not an intelligence problem. It’s not a weakness.

It is not your neighbor with the neurotypical kids who says she’d never let her son speak to her that way. She does not understand. Her advice will make you feel worse and it will not work on your child.

It is not in a Facebook group offering you 36 contradictory theories and suggestions before lunch from strangers who are as frightened- and as unknowing- as you are.

And it is not in a reel. There is no clip buried far enough down the scroll that it’s going to arrive with your answer. Scrolling for it isn’t research. It’s a coping mechanism with a screen attached, and I say that with love because I’ve done it too.

It may be somewhere in the depths of the Google abyss, but will you know it when you find it? WIll you know what to do with it when you find it?

Where the help actually is

Your child needs professionals. Not eventually. Now. This doesn’t mean there is something horribly wrong with them or with you as a parent. It simply is where you are- no judgment.

Look specifically for people with training in family violence and neurodivergence, because generalists often make this worse. A good one will assess what’s actually happening for your child, build a plan that addresses the behaviour, and work on the whole family system rather than handing you a sticker chart and wishing you luck.

If you don’t know where to start, start with your GP and ask for a referral. That opens the door to specialised counselling and youth services, a psychologist, or where appropriate a psychiatrist, social worker or family therapist.

Get on the waitlists. I know they’re obscene. Get on them anyway, today, while you’re still angry enough to make the call.

Getting your child to actually go

Before we get the kids to go, we need to acknowledge that this is a systemic problem and, regardless of how much we have tried, we are co-creating this in some unconscious way. Everything starts with “us”. When you ask for help, you are asking for help for all of you: mom, dad, child, sibling. We aren’t pointing fingers and assuming if we fix him, everything will be better. Coming at is as a “we” problem, not a “you” problem, will instantly help. This matters more than almost anything else you’ll say. It reframes the whole thing from you are the broken one to this family needs help and we’re all getting some.

Some kids will be relieved. Genuinely- a lot of them are exhausted by their own behaviour and have wanted help for a long time without any language for it.

Others will refuse flatly. Here’s what tends to work.

Explain your reasoning honestly. In most cases your child knows their behavior isn’t ok, they just can’t control it. We explain it by saying we know they are a great kid and that they don’t like feeling this out of control. Things have been hard, and someone with the right training might help us work out what’s going on with us. Saying, “A professional can help figure out why I frustrate you so much” takes the heat off of them. Some therapy you will do as a family, some you each will do alone, some you may do as parents together.

If possible, give them a voice in who they see. Forcing someone on them will often backfire. We are looking for buy-in not coersion. If they are cooperative, maybe offer 2 therapists to choose from. If they refuse because they have had a bad experience with a therapist before, try an experienced coach as a first step. If it moves the needle forward, then it’s the right direction.

Tell them this person won’t judge them and won’t hand down orders. Their job is to help find solutions that work for your child.

Be clear that this is not a punishment and you are not doing it because you’re angry. You’re doing it because you want everyone in the house to be okay, including them.

And if they’ll hear it from an aunt, a coach, a grandparent, or a family friend before they’ll hear it from you, use that. Pride is not worth the delay. Use the tribe.

One thing to never do: don’t trick them into it. Don’t say you’re going to the GP and drive them to a psychologist. It feels efficient in the moment and it costs you the exact thing you’re trying to rebuild.

If you take one thing

The behavior is communication. Your child is telling you, in the only language currently available to them, that something is wrong and they can’t fix it alone.

You can’t fix it alone either. That was never a reasonable expectation of an exhausted person with a bottomless feed and a search bar. Find a community that understands, shares in the challenges and the wins, with unconditional love.

Getting professional help isn’t the moment you admit defeat. For most of the families I work with, it’s the first day things start moving in a different direction.

Make the call this week.

If you’re in the thick of this and don’t know what kind of professional you even need, that’s the conversation I have with parents all the time. Come and find me here

I loved the answer so much that I thought it valuable enough to share with other moms who may want the simple answer as well.

“For a 12-year-old, I’d skip most of the philosophy and go straight to the problems Stoicism was trying to solve:

• Someone is unfair.

• Something doesn’t go your way.

• You fail.

• You feel left out.

• You feel scared.

• You want something right now.

• You can’t control what happens next.

The goal isn’t “be stoic.” The goal is “be harder to knock over.”

Day 1: What Can You Control?

5-minute lesson

Draw two circles.

Inside:

• Your actions

• Your effort

• Your words

• Your choices

Outside:

• Other people’s opinions

• Weather

• Game updates

• Whether friends say yes

• Winning

Ask:

“If your Roblox account got hacked, what would be inside the circle and outside the circle?”

Challenge

Every time something annoying happens today, ask:

“Inside my circle or outside my circle?”

Day 2: The Obstacle Is The Training

Tell him:

“Nobody gets stronger by lifting a pencil. Muscles need resistance. So does your brain.”

Examples:

• Laggy internet

• Losing a game

• Waiting in line

• Difficult teammate

Ask:

“If life was a video game, what skill is this challenge training?”

Patience?
Problem solving?
Persistence?
Humor?

Challenge

Find one annoying thing and identify the skill it is training.

Day 3: You Don’t Have To Obey Every Feeling

Ask:

“Have you ever felt like quitting a game and then kept playing anyway?”

He already understands this.

Explain:

Feelings are information.
Not commands.

Examples:

• Angry → doesn’t mean hit.

• Bored → doesn’t mean quit.

• Nervous → doesn’t mean avoid.

Challenge

Catch one feeling today and say:

“Thanks for the information.”

Then choose your action separately.

Day 4: Be The Hero, Not The Weather

Explain:

Some people become whatever happens to them.

Friend rude = rude back.

Lose game = rage.

Bad mood = whole day ruined.

Others decide who they are first.

Ask:

“What kind of person do you want to be when things aren’t going your way?”

Funny?
Calm?
Brave?
Kind?
Determined?

Challenge

Pick one trait and practice it all day.

Day 5: Negative Visualization

This sounds dark but kids often love it.

Ask:

“What if the internet disappeared for 24 hours?”

“What if you lost your favorite game account?”

“What if you couldn’t use electricity for a day?”

Then ask:

“What would you do?”

The point:

You survive more things than your brain thinks.

Challenge

Spend 10 minutes imagining solving a problem instead of avoiding it.

Day 6: Focus On The Next Move

Use gaming language.

Good players don’t spend the whole match complaining about the last mistake.

They ask:

“What’s my next move?”

Ask:

“When things go wrong, what usually happens first?”

Then:

“What is the smallest useful next move?”

Challenge

Use the phrase:

“What’s my next move?”

three times today.

Day 7: Build Your Personal Code

Tell him that ancient Stoics had principles.

Knights had codes.

Jedi had codes.

Good gamers have rules.

Create his own.

Examples:

• I can do hard things.

• I don’t control everything.

• I learn from mistakes.

• I finish before I quit.

• I treat people with respect.

• I focus on the next move.

• I don’t let one bad moment ruin the day.

Let him choose 3–5.

Write them on a card.

If I were building this specifically for Dashiel, I’d probably frame the entire week as:

“Mental Skills for Adventurers”

Each day unlocks a new skill tree:

• Circle of Control

• Obstacle XP

• Emotion Radar

• Character Class

• Survival Mode

• Next Move

• Personal Code

Less philosophy class.

More RPG.”

Now… how to actually get them to sit and do this each day… that’s where creativity and maaaaaybe a little reward come in (over a bowl of ice cream 🤔?) .

Humor, as it turns out, is complicated- especially for our neurodivergent kids.

How it started: One mom walked in on her teenage son watching a mainstream Hollywood comedy. Not a dodgy streaming site, a film on Netflix, sitting right there in the “recommended for you” row next to The Office. Somewhere between the comic chaos and mishaps, there was a scene that quietly horrified her: a man explaining to another man how to have sex with a woman, including advice about putting his hand on her throat.

Mom did not find it funny. But she also didn’t quite know what to say about it. It was a comedy, after all. If she had said anything out loud to her teenage son in that moment, he would have become immediately defensive and turned it back on her sensitivity. So she did what any mom would do: she told her husband to address it.

Like many parents, dad wasn’t quite sure how…or when to have ”the talk”. Where exactly do you slip in “oh, and by the way, most women don’t want to be choked during sex”? On the way to school? After passing the salt at dinner? We parents who, decades ago, pre-internet, got our sex education from friends and a magazine found under an older brother’s bed, aren’t sure what to say when choking during sex shows up in a rom-com on the living room television.

This article isn’t actually about how and when to talk about sex with our ND kids- but this one is: The Sex Talk You Keep Putting Off? The Internet Already Had It With Your Kid.

This article is about humor, the complexity of it and when it crosses a line.

It came up that the dad and his son had watched Borat together and they both found it funny. And now he was sitting with the uncomfortable question of how to explain the difference. How do you tell your kid that the scene in the comedy film was wrong, when you were laughing at something arguably just as complicated last weekend?

I said something I believe: “I draw the line at humour that comes at the expense of another person’s suffering.”

The group nodded. We moved on.

But then a few days later, I went to see a children’s film with my boys. At one point, one character punched another squarely in the groin. The characters laughed. My tween laughed. I laughed. It was, objectively, a quintessential comedic bit that has been replayed hundreds of times across a hundred different screens.

And I sat there thinking: well…that was at someone’s expense. There goes my clean rule.

The rule I said is not quite the rule I meant

So I did what I always do when I am unsure of an answer: I draft my way to clarity.

The problem with “funny at someone’s expense” as a principle is that almost all comedy is at someone’s expense. Slapstick gets its name from a literal two-slat wooden prop used in 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, designed to make a dramatic smacking sound without actually hurting anyone. All the impact, none of the damage. Mildly staged violence has always been part of the comedic playbook. Generations of children watched Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, and the Three Stooges without developing a philosophy of violence.

So I’ll admit my rule needed refinement. Because there is something genuinely different between a groin punch in a children’s film and a disturbing scene that lands in a comedy movie.

For a neurodivergent teen brain especially, that distinction matters enormously. Clarity is not optional.

So what is actually different?

The groin punch is universal. Anyone can be the groin. The joke works because physical consequence is exaggerated into absurdity, and everyone in that world is equally vulnerable to it. Nobody is being targeted for who they are.

The sex coaching scene is a different category entirely. Adults watching a scene like that have something the teenager does not: a reference point. They know, from experience or education or enough exposure to real intimacy, that what is being shown is not how it actually works. So the scene lands as an absurd caricature of male bravado, and the laugh is at the character’s cluelessness, not an endorsement of his technique.

The teenager without that reference point is watching the same scene and receiving something completely different. They do not have the counter-narrative that makes the absurdity visible. What reads as satire to an adult may read as information to a teen. Not because the child is naive or foolish but because the joke requires knowledge the child does not yet have in order to land correctly.

Even when it is dressed as comedy, it is teaching something. It is our job to make sure our voice gets there too.

With a teenager, keep it short, simple, non-judgmental, and neutral — more like a thought dropped into the air than a conversation requiring a response. Something like: “Hmmm…I don’t think that’s something to joke about. I don’t know any woman who would want that.”

Then walk away. You are not looking for agreement. You are not opening a debate. You are simply making sure your voice carries more weight than the actor’s.

So what about Borat?

Borat is genuinely complicated, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretending it resolves cleanly.

Parts of it are doing exactly what the best satire does: exposing the prejudice of people who should know better. The scenes where ordinary Americans reveal themselves to be casually racist when given permission by an outsider are pointed, effective, and uncomfortable in exactly the right way. The joke is on them. They are the punchline.

Other parts are less defensible. Some of the humour relies on the idea that people who are different are inherently funny- not because any hypocrisy is being exposed, but simply because they are different. That is punching down. And hopefully we all hold the same value that that humor is not ok.

The dad who watched it with his son was not wrong to laugh at parts of it. He was also not wrong to feel uncertain when confronted with the question of how to explain the difference to a fourteen-year-old. Both things are true simultaneously, and sitting with that is part of the work.

This is the messy reality of comedy. It is not a clean category. Some of what makes us laugh is defensible. Some of it is us laughing at something we probably should not be laughing at (and we know it even as we laugh). Most adults hold both of those realities at once without too much difficulty.

The question for parents of neurodivergent children is whether our kids can do the same. And the honest answer is: often, not yet. So instead of teaching them rules, we start teaching them to track their own reactions.

The nuance problem

Here is what makes this harder for our families specifically.

Most people eventually develop the capacity to hold two frames at once- to understand that Borat’s character is the joke, not his fictional country; that the scene is satirising American prejudice, not endorsing anything. This requires holding what is being said and what is actually meant simultaneously. It requires reading the irony underneath the surface content.

Many neurodivergent children develop that capacity later, differently, or only partially. A literal processor watching Borat may not be watching satire at all. They may simply be watching a man say things about women, or about other countries, or about gay people, that go entirely unchallenged by anyone in the scene.

They are not watching the same film as the adult sitting beside them. And they do not have the processing available to know that.

This is not a reason to ban complicated comedy. It is a reason to be present for it. To watch alongside rather than monitor from a distance. To occasionally name what is happening. Not as a lecture, not with the remote paused and a speech prepared, but as a thought said casually out loud:

“That joke lands because it’s exposing how prejudiced those people are. Did you catch that?”

Or, when you’re less sure: “That made me laugh, and I’m not entirely sure it should have. What did you think?”

Not a verdict. A thought. Done well, our responsibility is modelling the process of thinking about what we consume, rather than simply consuming it. Which is, ultimately, the only media literacy lesson that actually sticks.

So what do we actually tell them?

Here is the clearest version of the rule I can land on. Simple enough to say to a teenager, honest enough to hold up under examination:

“Here’s the test. If you’d laugh at it happening to anyone, including yourself, it’s probably just comedy. If the only reason it’s funny is because of who the other person is, what they look like, or what category they fall into- you’re not laughing at a joke. You’re laughing at a person. And those are different things.”

The thing I didn’t say to the group that I’m saying now

I told that dad: humour stops being funny when it is at someone’s expense. Then I laughed at the groin punch and realised my rule wasn’t holding up.

What I should have said is this: comedy has always been provocative because it can do so much: release tension, create permission, test boundaries, expose what we are all secretly thinking. At its best, it makes us laugh at power, at hypocrisy, at the absurdity of the human condition and our own experience. At its worst, it makes us laugh at people for being who they are, and then tells us it was just a joke.

The difference is worth knowing. Our children are not just watching and laughing. They are learning what is normal, what is acceptable, and what the adults in their lives are willing to let slide.

What this conversation did- which is exactly why I do this work- is lift the veil on something we usually take for granted. We were not looking for right or wrong. We were looking for awareness. We acknowledge the complication and the power of parenting, and allowe ourselves to hold something complex without resolving it neatly.

Because the goal is not to raise children with perfect taste, perfect humour, or perfect understanding.

It is to raise children who notice. Who ask the question. Who feel the difference between laughing with and laughing at- even when the line is blurry.

Because life is blurry. And the moments that teach our children the most are rarely the ones we planned. They are the ones we stumbled into, examined out loud, and refused to pretend were simpler than they were.

I coach parents of neurodivergent children through weekly group sessions and one-to-one work. This question came from a real conversation in real time. Most of the best questions do.

You can join the conversation here: The ND Parenting Lab

Your child is twelve. Maybe thirteen. Maybe eight. They are sitting in their bedroom, door closed, headphones in, bathed in the blue glow of a screen you gave them. You are in the kitchen, congratulating yourself on having had a very productive conversation about the importance of brushing teeth.

Meanwhile, the internet is showing sex to your child. In detail. With demonstrations. Not healthy or even realistic ones.

Congratulations. The Talk has been had. Just not by you.

Here is what we know, and it is uncomfortable…

The average age a child first encounters pornography online is eleven. Not seventeen. Not fifteen. Eleven. And if that is the average then there are lots of kids seeing it younger. Because it arrives via a link, a group chat, a YouTube suggestion, a pop-up on a gaming site, a picture on a friend’s phone. These are not the good old days when we had to search for a 2D magazine in someone’s dad’s closet. Now it appears, in all its completely unrealistic, often aggressive, deeply unhelpful-as-an-educational-resource glory. And you don’t even know when.

By the time most parents sit down to have The Talk, their child has already been exposed. Not educated. Exposed. Without context, without integrity, without values or ethos attached. Not the way you intended.

The research is consistent on this: children who receive accurate, age-appropriate information about sex from a trusted adult are more likely to delay sexual activity, more likely to use protection when they do become sexually active, and more likely to come to that same trusted adult when something confusing or concerning happens. The information does not accelerate anything. It protects against everything.

And yet. The conversation remains, for most of us, genuinely very uncomfortable.

Why we avoid it even when we know we should

Most parents did not have a good version of this conversation themselves. Some kids- not me btw- got some education at school where the teacher said the word fallopian tube and the entire class collapsed. Some got a very brief and mortifying five minutes with a parent who looked like they would rather be anywhere else on earth. Any hint of sex or puberty or body parts was taboo in my house so I genuinely thought I was dying when I got my period. I got a booklet on my bed the next day. So I am forcing myself to work through this in real time with you.

So we are winging it, with limited language, significant personal discomfort, and a child who already knows more than we think they do and is now watching us squirm.

We know the content they are absorbing is shaping their understanding of what intimacy looks like, what bodies should look like, what is normal, what is expected, and what they are allowed to want. And we also know most of it is wrong and very damaging.

When to start?

Yesterday. The answer is yesterday.

The conversation is not one conversation. It is dozens of small ones, starting earlier than feels comfortable and continuing well past the moment you think you are done.

Comprehensive sex education experts recommend beginning age-appropriate body conversations as early as three or four (I can hear the collective cry “oh my god we are already too late!”); using correct anatomical names, bodily autonomy. By eight or nine, children should have a basic understanding of puberty before it begins, so it is not a surprise when it arrives. By ten or eleven, the internet safety conversation needs to happen alongside the sex conversation, because the two are now inseparable.

How to actually start the conversation when you have been avoiding it

We’ve established our own lack of knowledge, skill and comfort. And if your kids are anything like my children, even the slightest hint that I am going to bring up the topic, sends fingers into ears and children running out of the room. So how do we do this?

First: lower the bar. The perfect comprehensive sex talk does not exist- nobody is giving it and nobody wants it. What exists is an imperfect ongoing series of short conversations usually inspired by some situation, tv episode, movie scene, magazine cover, something overheard. Some of which go well and some of which end with a child saying “oh my god, stop” and leaving the room. Both count.

Second: name your own discomfort. “I find this a bit awkward to talk about, because nobody really talked to me about it when I was your age, and I’m making it up as I go. But I’d rather be awkward with you than have you find out about this stuff from the internet.” That sentence does several things at once. It is honest. It normalises the awkwardness. It opens a door without forcing anyone through it.

Third: use the resources. Start here: An Interview with Cindy Pierce: Talking With Your Kids About Sex Like A Champ. Cindy Pierce is an author, educator, and speaker who has spent years researching how young people (particularly boys) are shaped by pornography and hookup culture. Her work is frank, funny, deeply researched, and profoundly useful for parents who want to understand what their children are actually navigating. Her book Sex, College, and Social Media is excellent. What she will tell you, among other things:

Most boys are not learning about sex from pornography because they want to. They are learning from it because nothing else got there first.

And what pornography teaches about bodies, about women, about what sex is supposed to look like, is almost entirely wrong, and it is shaping them in ways they do not even know to question. Take the time to listen to her and get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Another easy-to-use resource is AMAZE.org, a free online resource that produces age-appropriate, medically accurate videos about puberty, sex, relationships, and bodies for children and teenagers. The content covers topics in a way that is clear, non-judgmental, and actually designed for the age group rather than for the adult who is uncomfortable. Think of it as the pamphlet, but updated for the current century and not mortifying. The videos are short enough that a child will actually watch them, and specific enough that they answer the questions children actually have rather than the ones we think they have. Put an AMAZE video on the shared iPad and say “I saw this and thought it was interesting.” You do not need a prepared speech. You need one sentence that opens a crack.

Fourth: make it clear that the conversation is always open and safe. Not that you will always bring it up (that is a threat, not an invitation). But that if they ever have a question, a confusion, something they saw or heard that did not make sense, you are the person to bring it to. And then, when they do bring something to you: do not react. Whatever your internal response- surprise, alarm, relief, horror- your external response is always curiosity. “Tell me more about that.” Because the moment you react, the door closes. And you want the door to stay open for the next ten years.

Information is not dangerous. Silence is. Children who understand what is actually happening in their own bodies, who have accurate language for consent, who know what healthy relationships look like, are safer. Full stop.

Let’s take a minute to talk about consent.

Because it isn’t a simple “yes or no”- especially for ND kids. A lot of parents think “the consent conversation” starts somewhere around puberty. But for many neurodivergent kids, especially kids with ADHD or ASD, the groundwork definitely needs to begin much earlier and much more concretely than most adults realize.

Consent is not just a moral concept. It is also a nervous system skill. A social timing skill. A cue-reading skill. An impulse-control skill. And many ND kids are already working harder in those areas from the start.

The ADHD toddler may genuinely understand kindness and still act before thinking which looks like:

• sensory-seeking crashing into people because their body is moving faster than their awareness.

• affectionate impulsive hugs before checking whether the other person wants physical contact.

• grabbing someone’s toy the second they see it because the wanting happened before the thinking.

• holding a pet longer than it wants to be held

• continuing an action because everyone laughed the first time and they missed the moment it stopped being fun.

• the roughhousing goes too far. The joke keeps going past the point the other child stopped enjoying it. The texting becomes repetitive. The excitement overrides noticing.

The autistic child may deeply value fairness and honesty while still missing subtle social signals entirely. They may not recognize forced laughter, discomfort, polite withdrawal, hesitation, sarcasm, or the invisible social “soft no” most people communicate indirectly. They hear words louder and miss tone, facial expression, pacing and body position.

None of these children are “bad kids.” They simply need explicit, unmistakable coaching on how to read consensual signs. They need it repeatedly and often. They need support and scaffolding. I wouldn’t let me boys wrestle without supervision when they were young (or even now as they are teens) because I knew my ADHD kiddo couldn’t tell when it was too much. So I shadowed and let him know, gently, “Your brother is telling you that’s too much”, “You are bigger than him but can’t feel that strength right now”, “It’s time to stop.” We taught his brother to use clear words like “stop”, “that’s too much” and “I don’t like that”. And still- after years of this in-the- moment-coaching, that particular neurual pathway still has potholes.

This teaching starts as early as we see it because that neural pathway takes a long time to pave. It starts with every day moments where impulse and lack of self-regulation show up: Touching. Volume. Jokes. Texting. Posting. Teasing siblings.

We make invisible social information more visible:

“Look at his face right now.”
“She laughed the first time, but not the second.”
“Your body got so excited you missed the pause.”
“He moved back a little. He’s telling you he needs body space.”

Not shame. Simply observation.

And parents often underestimate how vulnerable ND kids on the other side of this. A child who struggles to read cues may also struggle to recognize manipulation, coercion, performative friendliness, online grooming, group pressure, or sexualized humor that quietly crosses their boundaries. Consent education becomes protective in both directions.

The thing our kids actually need from us

They do not need us to be sex education experts, to have perfect language or to have resolved our own complicated feelings about sex and bodies before we are allowed to speak.

They need us to be the person who didn’t shy away from one of the most important jobs we have because we were uncomfortable or unprepared. Because the internet will keep talking to them. Their friends will keep talking to them. The group chat will keep talking to them.

The question is whether our voice is in that conversation too.

I hope you read this one too:

I work with parents of neurodivergent children through group coaching and one-to-one sessions. This article came out of a real group conversation about a film scene that nobody could quite explain why it was not funny. The best articles usually do.

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I just finished reading “The Death of the University Degree.” This is one of those articles that ignites my insatiable need to explain for my parents of neurodiverse kids why this is so validating!

Hendrick describes that the old contract of work hard, earn the grades, get the credential, secure the future is wobbling. Not broken… exactly…yet. But no longer the load-bearing wall it once was.

For most of living memory, we have trusted the broader promise underneath it, even when we found the education-to-career system imperfect. School might not suit your child perfectly. It might frustrate, bore, even wound, but it was still the path, the agreed-upon sorting mechanism. The place where hard work and intelligence was, theoretically, identified and rewarded.

Now that artificial intelligence has arrived, that premise is no longer a promise.

Students can now produce polished essays without reading the books. They can submit finished assignments without engaging with the material at all. Employers are beginning to notice and are disregarding resumes and looking beyond degrees. Universities are scrambling to respond. The credential is becoming harder to verify because the relationship between completed work and actual understanding has been badly frayed.

The author’s conclusion at the end of his article feels bleak:

“I think about this often, because I have three daughters. They are growing up in a world where the social contract we inherited; “work hard in school, earn your degree, build a future” may no longer hold. The credentials we received certified not just domain knowledge but cognitive capacity: the ability to read difficult texts, synthesise arguments, solve complex problems, and produce coherent work under our own power. If they choose to do one, what will their degrees certify?

The deal worked, often enough, for enough people, that an entire civic and economic order was built on the assumption that it would continue to. I am no longer confident it will. I do not yet know what to tell them.”

But I know this isn’t bleak.

We parents of neurodiverse kids have long been navigating educational schisms because our children push back against the norm in so many ways. They were already struggling inside this structure before AI exposed its contradictions between test scores and knowing.

We have been trying to right educational disparities for years with the ADHD, PDA, Autistic child whose intelligence was consistently underestimated because it did not present itself in standardized ways. The child who looked unmotivated or erratic inside a system that, on closer inspection, rewarded compliance more reliably than it rewarded curiosity.

For years, the advice to parents of neurodiverse children has been a variation on the same instruction: just get them through. Help them fit the structure. Keep them on track.

But now AI is shaking the foundation beneath everyone else who hasn’t been feeling the tremors we have felt all along.

Degrees and school and structure may still matter to some extent. I am not arguing that in this article. I am just turning up the volume that they are no longer sufficient preparation for what is coming.

What do we tell our kids

The truth. The certainty of an education and degree leading to a good career is not the guarantee it used to be. So what’s a parent to do? Put your money on the skill that will genuinely differentiate people in the years ahead. The skill that is considerably harder to fake, outsource, or generate on demand. It’s the one I have coached my parents to focus on when simply pushing their kids through an incompatible school system is not a viable option.

The most important job we have as parents is to enable* our kids to learn critical thinking.

*I used the word “enable” intentionally instead of “teach.”

Because teaching implies a transfer of knowledge moving from someone who has it to someone who doesn’t. And that model, however useful in certain contexts, breaks down entirely when the subject is thinking itself. You cannot transfer judgment. You cannot lecture someone into frustration tolerance. You cannot hand a child the internal experience of sitting with uncertainty long enough for an original thought to surface.

You can only create the conditions in which those things become possible.

The even harder truth

The much needed competencies are not primarily built in classrooms. They are built in the small, grinding, unremarkable- usually painful- moments that every parent tries to get through as quickly as possible.

Breakfast. Shoes. Homework. Brushing teeth. Sibling rivalry. Swearing. Chores. Big Emotions. Screens.

The moments we rush to manage as “behavior problems” are often the exact moments where critical thinking is trying to develop.

Consider breakfast. Your child cannot decide what to eat and you are already late. Everything in you wants to take over and scream, “just eat the toast”. But stopping to support their thought processing in real time is exactly what they need to build this skill. Predicting how a choice will affect your body later in the day is critical thinking. Learning to tolerate disappointment when the preferred option is unavailable is part of critical thinking.

Drip, don’t flood! Small, precise prompts to open the space for objective analysis, evaluation, questioning assumptions, analyzing evidence is more effective than forcing a long lecture.

“How did you feel yesterday when you didn’t have breakfast before you left?”

“How do you think you will feel later if you have ice cream for breakfast?” (They will say “fine” so allow them the chance to find out. Experience is where the best learning happens.) That is metacognition happening at the kitchen counter. Not in a classroom. Not on a worksheet.

The same logic applies to getting out the door in the morning. Many neurodivergent children struggle with task initiation, sensory discomfort, transitions, time blindness, or what researchers call demand sensitivity. The adult nervous system reads lags as defiance because the tasks- get your bag, eat some oatmeal and put your shoes on- look simple. So the adult escalates. More reminders. More pressure. More explaining. More panic.

But the more useful question is rarely “why won’t he just do it?”

It is: what conditions would allow him to think through this challenge, rather than merely comply?

Sometimes that means laying out two shoe options the night before. Sometimes it means letting a child experience the discomfort of being late. Sometimes it means allowing soft reality to function as the teacher instead of casting yourself in that role.

Homework is where this gets most fraught, especially in neurodivergent homes. I argue neither that homework is irrelevant nor that it is critical. I do assert that forced compliance is not the same thing as learning, and that parents, especially those of ND kids in particular, often spend years in nightly battles; requesting, begging, reminding, bribing, threatening, hovering. In the end, the homework gets done but something else quietly erodes underneath- something more valuable than any worksheet, equation or essay- the relationship. The connection between the parent and child has been sacrificed at the altar of the God of homework. Be wary of false Gods. That’s why I wrote this article: Why Is Everything Around School So Hard On Everyone

Screens present the same dynamic and they may be the most misunderstood learning opportunity we have in front of us. The standard advice to control, restrict, confiscate screens traps parents and kids in power struggles that produce mutual resentment and teach nothing durable.

A different approach- one that values critical thinking over blind compliance- asks different questions:

Not “can’t you see you are addicted to this?” but “what is your plan for tonight?”

Not “you have been on there for six hours” but “what do you notice about your mood after six hours online?”

Let them make a plan. Let them test that plan. Let them fail safely and adjust, try again. That process that is iterative, self-directed and reflective is the actual skill. Temporary obedience produced entirely by external pressure is not.

Having said that, I am not ignorant to the fact that Big Tech has deliberately created products that are mostly impossible for young brains and nervous systems to regulate and navigate safely on their own. I have written extensively on how to manage screens, while allowing for critical thinking, in these articles: If You Think It’s OK To Give Kids “Their Privacy” On Screens- You Don’t Understand This One Critical- Often Overlooked- Fact and Screentime Is Not The Enemy Series and The Number One, Most Powerful Tool You Can Use To Reduce Your Kids Screentime

Note: when prompts trigger escalation, that’s the flare gun signal that the nervous system has tipped past learning and into overwhelm. We back off. Not forever. Just for now. We accommodate instead of activate, then try again later in smaller doses. This work is usually built slowly, through repetition and timing, not force.

Where many parents get stuck

Not because we fail to understand the concept, but because it is uncomfortable to see our children uncomfortable, we rush to solve. We rescue. We over-explain, negotiate, force, manage. We eliminate the learning opportunity because the tension has become too uncomfortable for us to sit inside.

Despite knowing that a certain amount of tension is necessary for growth, it can be unbearable. We know too little and the child never has to think. But we also know very well that too much and the child melts down and it seems nothing is learned and nothing is gained. The work is finding the space between the tension and the turmoil. It is a constant calibration, not a formula. That’s why I wrote: Am I Asking Too Much or Too Little of My Kid?

Now let’s get back to the original trigger for this article: artificial intelligence itself.

Because I unschool, I don’t subscribe to the same fears that traditional schooling parents face: that AI = cheating, lower intelligence and laziness. If we all agree that AI does bypass some effortful thinking but also that it is here to stay, the argument isn’t about whether we use it but how can we use it and still build critical thinking and cognitive reasoning skills.

I encourage my kids to use and understand AI now- in the safety of my home, with my oversight. If we welcome these tools into the conversation rather than treating them as forbidden, we can actually teach metacognition in real time. How do we know this answer is accurate? What feels incomplete here? What did it miss? What happens if we ask the question differently? Did working with this help you think more carefully, or did it let you avoid thinking altogether? How can I use it to improve my life and the lives of others?

Those questions are the skill.

I use AI every day. Not to replace my thinking, but to gather, organize, and stress-test information faster than my ADHD brain otherwise could. But the work does not end when the answer appears. That is, in fact, where my work begins. I have to read it carefully. Question it. Check the sources and verify facts. Look for hallucinations. Notice what seems too tidy. Look for what is missing. Test different directions. Aggregate the expansive knowledge and find the overlaps and the inconsistencies.

And then I do the most irreducibly human part: translate it into something that an exhausted parent, reading at midnight after a homework meltdown, mealtime battle and a 45 minute teeth brushing negotiation, can actually hear and use.

AI can gather information at a scale no individual could match. But it cannot feel what that parent is feeling like I can. It can not know where the sweet spot between healthy tension and disastrous turmoil will be. It cannot feel the difference between information that is technically accurate and information that is actually usable. It cannot always identify when a fact is wrong, when a claim is overconfident, or when a clean answer will fall apart inside the moment when the child simply can’t vs won’t.

That discernment is what I want my children to develop. Not “AI will make you lazy and dumber.” Rather how will I use it to do more, faster, better. And how to question it. Notice when it makes you passive. Notice when it makes you sharper. Learn the difference. How will you know when it is right? Through evaluating, analyzing, reflection, inference and interpretation. You know what those are? Critical thinking skills.

And here, I think, is the genuine irony of this moment: many neurodivergent children may be unusually well-positioned for what is coming. If we stop forcing them into outdated measures of intelligence long enough to help them build what actually lies underneath.

Where does that leave education

The intention of education has always been to learn, to sit with a subject long enough to understand it, and it has and always will be important. It is valuable whether the subject is the life cycle of a plant or the origins of a war. The curiosity it builds, the capacity to follow an idea somewhere, to discover that the world is more complex and more interesting than it first appeared- that is not nothing. That is how we evolve.

But somewhere along the way, school muddied that. The goal quietly shifted from the process to the proof. From an active learning journey to a fixed reward for retention. From understanding to performance. The test became the point, and the point- the actual encounter between a curious mind and an interesting idea- got subordinated to it. We have spent generations confusing the receipt with the meal.

School was well-intentioned. It still is. But systems under pressure tend to measure what is measurable, and what is measurable tends to be the least interesting part of what we were actually hoping for.

And now AI has made the measurable part nearly effortless. The essay, the answer, the demonstration of retention. All of it is available on demand, produced without the process that was supposed to generate it.

Which means we are left, somewhat unexpectedly, with the thing that always mattered most.

The process itself.

The friction. The confusion. The slow accumulation of understanding. The moment a child realizes they actually can work through a problem because someone gave them the time and space and support to work through the process of learning.

That was always the point.

We just got distracted from it for a while.

So What Now?

The shift isn’t from higher education degrees to no need for degrees. I can’t make that prediction. But I do encourage parents to shift focus from the importance of knowing stuff to knowing what’s important. To knowing what to do with it all without needing to know it all. From raw information to earned wisdom.

Wisdom has never been teachable. Not directly. Not through instruction. It accumulates through experience, through failure, through the slow development of knowing how to learn and then relearning it again when circumstances change. It happens at the kitchen table, in the backseat of the car, on the couch between disagreeing siblings, with a toothbrush in hand and at the front door as we are trying to get out on time. It arrives through a thousand small moments of figuring something out and surviving the process.

We end on one last critical skill. Patience. The skill you will need to tolerate the slow, messy, meandering middle where all of this actually happens. And yes, just like critical thinking, the only way to build it is practice. This is exactly what we do every week in our ND Parenting Lab support group. You are invited to join us if you want company or support for that part.

Whether you join us or not — hang in there. You are doing sacred work. If you got to this line, you are already so far ahead.

This is a resource for the article What the Collapse of the College Degree Is Really Telling Us- which is worth a read!

As I mentioned in the article, the most valuable skill we can offer our kids is critical thinking. What does that mean in real life? These are the conditions that best support reflective learning, flexible thinking, integration, and durable growth — especially for ND kids:

• The child feels physically safe. Not just objectively safe. Regulated nervous system first. Everything else second. If the nervous system perceives significant threat, flexible thinking narrows dramatically.

• The child feels emotionally safe. Not that you will never be disappointed. But that your relationship is not contingent on the outcome of this moment. They can be wrong in front of you without it costing them your warmth.

• The stakes are real but survivable. Consequence without catastrophe. Enough reality to make the learning meaningful. Not so much that self-protection becomes the only priority.

• Being wrong is treated as information, not failure. Not shamed for it, not abandoned to it, not endlessly rescued from it. Not celebrated performatively. Not punished quietly. Just part of the process. “Huh. That didn’t work. What do you want to try next?” said with the same energy as “pass the salt.”

• The child has genuine agency over some part of the outcome. Not the illusion of choice. Actual choice. If the decision is already made, don’t ask. Fake agency teaches kids that participation is theater.

• You are more curious than certain. Your questions are real questions, not leading questions in disguise. “What do you think will happen?” only works if you are genuinely willing to find out together.

• The temperature in the room is low enough for thinking. Not every moment qualifies. A child who is flooded, hungry, exhausted, or already in conflict with you is not available for learning. Come back when the window is open.

• You can tolerate their discomfort without fixing it. The pause between the problem and the solution is where the learning lives. If you fill it too quickly, you take it from them. We all need to be able to tolerate the friction of a real problem long enough to work through it. To test a hypothesis, idea, belief, or conclusion against reality. To adjust. To recover. To try again with better information.

• There is enough time. Rushed learning is usually no learning at all. If you only have four minutes, this is not the moment. Know the difference.

And here is the hardest condition of all:

• You leave genuine room for them to be right.

I get a lot of pushback from parents- and even hear experts say, “You are the adult, they are only a child. Adults know better.”

I like to hold safe space for uncertainty, even the idea that they may not be wrong.

Our children will sometimes reach conclusions we are certain are wrong based on our conditioned beliefs, our stories about what being right looks like in our own head. They will make choices we can see, from decades of additional experience, are likely to cost them something. They will hold beliefs that conflict with our own, construct arguments we find flawed, test hypotheses we are fairly sure will fail.

Hold your certainty a little more loosely even if it feels uncomfortable. Even if you feel it could mean they would have a terrible (not life threatening!) consequence like having to repeat a school year or get their heart broken. We don’t know for sure whether that will be the worst thing to ever happen to them. Or the best. We don’t know. Not always. Not even most of the time. But sometimes we do. We often cannot know in advance which times those are.

Our certainty is not the same thing as accuracy. Our experience, as real and hard-won as it is, was gathered in a world that is changing faster than our experience can fully account for.

Having said that, of course our experience and wisdom from our own mistakes and learning, is not nothing. It needs to be part of their learning process, taken into account. So it is also our responsibility to share what we know, give data, evidence and testimony. Influence, yes.

We are allowed to share what we have learned. We are allowed to ask questions that slow a decision down, that invite a second look, that surface a consequence the child may not have considered. We are allowed to be honest about our own experience, including where we got things wrong.

But influence is different from coercion. Coersion builds skill at compliance and then avoidance, depending on the child’s temperament. What it does not build is judgment and how to learn how to learn. And that is the whole point.

The conditions that enable learning look less like instruction and more like accompaniment: An adult who is genuinely curious about how this child will slve a problem. An adult who can tolerate the discomfort of watching someone struggle without immediately rescuing them from it. Who asks more than they tell. Who models, visibly and without performance, their own uncertainty, their own process of testing ideas against reality, finding them wanting, and adjusting.

This part of parenting does not ask you to have it all figured out. But rather asks you to be honest about being a human who is still figuring it out, openly, alongside their child. (Phew! Finally. Take the permission to be imperfect without judgment).

The first thing to understand is that all behavior is communication. Silence is a message.

When a child stops talking to a parent, the parent almost always interprets this as a problem with the child. He is being difficult. She is shutting me out. They are refusing to engage. But every one of us who has spent years in rooms with children and families arrives at the same conclusion: a child who will not talk to a parent is a child who does not yet believe they will be heard.

I promise, that is not a criticism of any parent. It is a description of a pattern that forms quietly, over time, through thousands of small interactions where the child said something and the parent, always with the best of intentions, corrected it, redirected it, added a lesson to it, or used it as a doorway into a conversation about what the child needed to do differently. Eventually the child learns: talking leads to being managed toward a parent-driven agenda.

And so… they stop.

The silence is not the problem. It’s the result.

It is the answer to the problem. And the answer it is giving is this: I do not feel safe enough to say the real thing.

What we get wrong when we try to fix it.

Most parents, when they sense their child pulling away, do the thing that feels most natural: they try harder to get in. They ask more questions. They wait by the door. They find the right moment and attempt the conversation they have been rehearsing, based on what they believe the child should do. And the child, feeling the approach of another coercion cloaked in “conversation”, closes the door a little further.

The instinct to try harder, although loving, is usually driven by fear.

The first fear is the most immediate: if I stop pushing, nothing will happen. This is the fear of inaction. It feels like standing at the edge of a cliff and being told to step back. The pushing feels like the only thing standing between the child and freefall. Stopping feels like letting go (especially if we are being encouraged to push harder by another parent, school, society). So the parent pushes harder, not because it is working, but because stopping holds too much risk.

The second fear is older and quieter: if something goes wrong, it will be my fault. This is the fear of blame. Again, it comes partly from the school, partly from extended family, partly from a culture that holds parents (and mothers especially) personally responsible for every outcome their child produces. The pushing is not just about the child. It is about being able to say: I tried. I did everything I could. I did not give up. It is C.Y.A. dressed as “good parenting”.

The third fear goes deepest: if my child is struggling, it means something about me. This is the fear of reflection. It is a mirror held up to the parent who was told they were not good enough, who grew up in a house where achievement equalled worth, who spent their own childhood trying to meet an impossible standard. That parent cannot easily watch their child disengage from the same system that once defined them. The pushing is partly an attempt to resolve something that was never resolved inside of them. To finally, through this child, get it right.

The fourth fear is the one nobody says out loud: my child is disappearing, and I am losing them. This is the fear of disconnection. It is the most human fear of all. The child who will not talk, who goes straight to their room, who answers every question with silence or a shrug…they feel unreachable. And the parent, rather than sitting with that unbearable feeling of distance, tries to close it by doing more, saying more, reaching harder. The trying harder is love but wrapped in panic.

The painful irony is that fear-driven trying harder produces exactly the outcome the parent is afraid of. The more the parent pushes, the more the child retreats. The more they retreat, the more frightened the parent becomes. The more frightened the parent becomes, the harder they push.

The loop is self-reinforcing and it has nothing to do with anyone being a bad parent or a difficult child. It is two nervous systems responding to threat in the only ways they know how.

Breaking the loop does not require the parent to stop caring but it does ask for them to be different.

What the child is actually experiencing.

We spend so much time asking why our children will not talk to us that we rarely stop to ask a more uncomfortable question: what have they learned about what happens when they do?

The child who goes silent has usually been very loud at some point. They tried, in their own language, to communicate what was happening inside them. They were dysregulated, or overwhelmed, or frightened, or simply certain that the thing being asked of them was too much. And the response they received, even from a caring parent, was correction. Explanation. A lesson. A consequence. Something that communicated, however unintentionally: what you are experiencing is not the point. The point is your behaviour needs to improve.

Over time, this child learns to keep their inner world to themselves. Not because they are being defiant. But because they have learned that their inner world is not as important as the parent’s expectation.

The children who struggle most; the ones who are failing school, shutting down at home, refusing every overture, are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because somewhere along the way, the demands placed on them exceeded their capacity, capability or confidence to meet them, and nobody yet knows exactly where the gap is.

The hard truth that sits underneath all of this is that even when the door is open, many of these children cannot answer the question “what would help?” Not because they are being stubborn or defiant. They genuinely do not know.

A child who has spent years being corrected, redirected, and found wanting does not have easy access to their own inner experience.

The self-knowledge required to say “I feel overwhelmed when I don’t know where to start” is itself a skill that has not yet been built. You cannot ask someone to use a tool they do not yet own. And for the children who have stopped talking entirely, the question never even gets asked because the conditions for asking it do not exist yet.

So the job shifts. It is no longer about asking better questions. It is about becoming a better observer.

Watch without agenda. Notice what produces expansion and what produces shutdown. Track what lights them up versus what makes them disappear. Collect data. Build a working theory of this particular child, in this particular environment, from what they do, day after day, when nobody is trying to get them to do anything in particular.

How do we fix this?

The question to ask yourself is not: how do I get my child to talk?

It is: am I the kind of presence my child feels safe being honest with? If the answer is not yet, then the work that needs to be done is yours, not theirs.

What children need in order to open is the experience of speaking and not being corrected.

That sounds simple. It is genuinely difficult. Because the moment your child says something you disagree with, something that worries you, something that seems wrong or unfair or self-defeating, every instinct you have as a parent mobilizes to respond. To fix. To clarify. To redirect. To defend.

And the child, who came that far, retreats.

The practice is this: when your child says something your first job is to receive it, not respond to it.

Acknowledge what was said. Name what you heard. “I hear you that the school work is really hard and boring.” Not: “Well, it has to be done or you won’t pass. You just have to do the work even if you don’t like it.”

Just: receive it.

Let them feel that what they said was caught, held, looked at closely- before it is instantly lobbed back for improvement.

The most powerful thing a parent can say to a child is also the hardest: “tell me more”.

And mean it.

The child who will not talk to you is not gone. They are watching. They are watching to see whether the dynamic has changed, whether this time it will be different, whether the opening they make will be received or redirected.

The parent’s job is to become the person worth talking to. Not by being more available, more patient, more strategically present.

But by becoming genuinely curious about who their child actually is, as opposed to who they need or want or expect them to be.

Football. Some factoid about the route they took home today. The offhand comment in the car that felt like nothing. These are not small moments. These are the child saying: I am still here. Are you listening this time?

The answer to the question “What do I do when my child won’t talk to me” is not a technique. It is a mindset shift in the parent. It does not need to be dramatic. It just needs to be three little words with no agenda attached:

Tell me more.

If you’ve ever lain awake at 2 a.m. wondering whether you’re ruining your child- or whether they’re ruining you- welcome to parenting (real parenting, not the parenting the baby marketing team sold us!)

There’s a powerful concept from sports science and now psychiatry called “the aggregation of marginal gains.” It means focusing not on big, dramatic overhauls, but on tiny, consistent 1% improvements that, when stacked together, create transformation over time.

Cycling coach Dave Brailsford used it to turn the British team from near-invisible to Olympic legends. A 2024 paper in The British Journal of Psychiatry reframed it for clinicians: instead of chasing one grand fix, aim for small, practical adjustments that cumulatively heal more deeply than any single intervention ever could.

Now, imagine applying that to parenting our neurodiverse dynamos.

Step 1: Let Go of the Big Fix

We constantly live with invisible all-or-nothing, highest-of-stakes checklist:

• They need to learn to self-regulate- it’s now or never

• How will they ever have friends and be happy?

• What if they don’t learn the skills to hold a good job?

Every meltdown, refusal, or missed cue isn’t a drop down the ladder of success. They are micro-moments inviting micro-shifts. There is no fantasy fix, no one holy-grail strategy, no one epic transformation where everything clicks, the child becomes compliant and the house becomes calm and easy until they move out to live your version of their perfect life.

Real change- the kind that prepares them for a well-lived life on their terms- tends to arrive one tiny adjustment at a time.

1% Improvements Look Like This:

1️⃣ One breath longer before reacting.
Each time we regulate first, our child borrows our calm and learns safety by osmosis.

2️⃣ One sentence re-framed.
Instead of “You should know how to do this by now,” rehearse “You’re just not there, yet. How can I help?” Same child, totally different energy.

3️⃣ One evening of connection.
Put down the behavior charts, pick up a game controller or sit beside them in their world. Connection is how we win the long game.

4️⃣ One tiny environment tweak.
The marginal gain might be a visual timer, noise-canceling headphones, or five more minutes of transition time. Small inputs, massive peace dividends.

5️⃣ One ounce of self-grace.
I know you don’t do this enough. You don’t need me to tell you why this is important- you need me to tell you how to do it.

Why It Works

The neurodivergent brain thrives on progress it can see. A 1% improvement feels achievable and rewarding, which feeds motivation instead of shame. For us parents, those micro-wins rebuild confidence, release the all-or-nothing pressure, and remind us that change isn’t an event-it’s a pattern.

Real-Life Magic

Tonight, don’t rewrite your family rulebook and you don’t need a new parenting philosophy. Just notice one moment you handled differently:

One sigh you catch before it becomes a shout.
One expectation you loosened a little.

One small unhelpful belief (usually includes the word “should”) you decide to let go of.
One moment where you stop yourself from correcting them.

One added, intentional moment of connection.

Not a transformation. Just one dial turn. Just a notch.

And then tomorrow… another.

If you improve the environment, your regulation, your understanding, or your child’s skill by even 1% each day, that’s not small. That’s compound growth. And that’s how we raise happier humans in calmer homes, one marginal gain at a time.

Now all you need is practice.The ND Parenting Lab Support Group brings parents of neurodivergent children together through coaching, community, and practical frameworks for rapid change.

“Stacey’s groups are a lifeline! I always learn, unload, share and benefit from the wisdom of the tribe. Each session lights our path - and makes my day! I am so grateful for this priceless resource.” Jen

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In a recent coaching session, a parent said something I hear more than almost anything else:

“I know what I’m supposed to do. I just can’t do it in the moment.”

She understood the pattern. She could name her triggers. She had done real work on herself, including therapy, reading, reflection, and yes even meditation. And yet, when her daughter “came at her” verbally, she froze. She couldn’t remember our drop-the-rope analogy. The words she knew she should say wouldn’t come. The conditioned default response ran faster than a new one could catch up.

It looks like a thinking problem. It isn’t. The system runs first. The mind arrives later.
Under pressure, it always will.

This is one of the most common and most misunderstood problems in parenting work. And for a long time, I was giving the wrong answer to it.

The Wrong Answer

When a parent says “I know it cognitively but can’t do it in the moment,” the instinct is to give them more to think about. More understanding of why they freeze. A deeper look at the past. A visualisation of the future they want. A framework that explains the pattern more clearly.

None of that is wrong. But none of it solves the actual problem.

The problem isn’t understanding or insight. It’s access. The problem is that the nervous system moves faster than the thinking mind and under stress, it always will. And you can have perfect clarity about what’s happening in your nervous system and still find your body doing something completely different. This isn’t a failure of insight. It’s just how humans are built.

What Actually Closes The Gap

The gap between knowing and doing is not a knowledge gap. It’s a practice gap.

The only thing that makes a new response available in a high-stress moment is practicing it enough times in low-stress moments that it becomes faster than the old pattern.

Not visualising it. Not processing the wound underneath it. Repeating the specific behavior until the nervous system knows it before the mind has to decide.

This is what athletes do. It’s what surgeons do. It’s what first responders do. They aren’t learning what to do in the middle of the high stress moment. They practice under conditions that approximate the real situation until the response is automatic. The parent who needs to know how to triage their child’s escalation needs the same thing: reps of if-then scenarios.

What This Looks Like In Practice

The research on behaviour change calls this an implementation intention and the evidence behind it is strong. The brain responds much better to a specific if/then script than to a general intention.

Not: “I want to be less reactive.”

But: “When she says I’m controlling her, I will say: you’re right.” “When he shouts at me, I will walk out of the room.”

That’s the whole thing. One trigger. One response. Practiced out loud, in a calm moment, before the situation arises. Said to a partner. Said in the car. Said in small low-stakes moments where the stakes are low enough to try it.

The window of practice is not in the red zone. You cannot build a new reflex during a crisis. You build it in moments that feel similar but aren’t yet catastrophic, so that when the real moment arrives, the body already knows what to do.

The Thing I Had To Unlearn

I used to think that when a parent understood why they were triggered, the behavior would eventually change. And sometimes it does… a little…. slowly…. over time.

But understanding the roots of a pattern and interrupting the pattern in real time are two completely different skills. The first is therapeutic work; knowing the terrain. The second is behavioral practice; moving your feet. Both matter. However, they are not interchangeable and giving a parent more therapeutic insight when what they need is experience is like explaining the physics of cycling and then expecting them to be able to get on and ride. They need to get on the bike, practice the skills in low stakes environment and fall off a few times.

The inner child work matters. The past matters. But in the three seconds before a dysregulated child escalates, none of that is available. What’s available is whatever you’ve practiced enough times to access automatically.

So The Homework Changed

Instead of sending my client away with frameworks and resources, I sent her away with one instruction:

To prepare for the moment her daughter will call her out on an obvious hypocrisy, she will practice the two-word response, “you’re right” out loud, three times this week, in low-stakes moments. Not when her daughter is escalating. Before. Building the reflex before she needs it enables her to quickly circumvent her default of defensively explaining and rationalizing.

The moment it needs to work is not the moment to hope you remember it.

The ND Parenting Lab supports parents of neurodivergent children through coaching, community, and practical frameworks for the moments that matter.

While billion-dollar apps are literally designed to manipulate their brains and

keep them in the shark-infested waters for as long as possible,

They need more than shark cages and lifeguards.

That’s why I made a free guide called 10 Steps for Online Safety and Sanity.

These are the exact steps I use with my ND kids to keep them safe online.

It includes:

• The red flags you need to watch out for, and I suggest you post this one on your fridge.

• How to set safety rules without a power struggle.

• The hidden manipulation tricks big tech uses.

This is the stuff we were never taught but our kids desperately need.

Click here to get the free download of this quick guide.

Your future self will thank you.

What happens in the support group is change.
Join the room when you want help applying it.

Oh and in case you didn’t realize, yes this video stars my AI clone. She does some of my marketing for me - on the days when I don’t have time to wash my hair and put on make-up or something nicer than my hoodie and pajama bottoms.

I have lots of mantras I rotate through regularly.

“Everything always works out for us.” “Let peace begin with me.” “I trust the Universe.”

Those are the kinds I use when a small trigger has uncomfortably flicked my ear and I want to stay optimistic rather than spiral into a state of victimhood.

Then there are the ones I use with my teen, AuDHD child. The ones I need to talk myself away from buying a one way ticket to Hawaii with a new name and haircut. “Kids do well when they can.” “He’s not giving me a hard time, he’s having a hard time.” “He needs support right now, not more demands.” “He needs accommodating, not activating right now.” “This will pass.”

We talk a lot about co-regulation in our parenting support groups; the idea that kids literally borrow from our calm nervous system to help regulate their own. While their brains are still under construction, they can’t always get there alone. They need us.

Which is beautiful! Really!

Until you realize that presupposes you can always be the needed calm one in the room.

Sometimes I don’t have anymore calm to lend.

Then are those a crime-is-about-to-happen times. The times when a bahavior is a blow torch that just lit my last stick of dynamite. When I’m truly, fight-or-flight escalated because I’ve already mantra’d myself away from 10 other explosions today that included: toast that was too toasted, 20 minutes of “nope this shirt also feels too dry”, rescuing the cat from a bath he didn’t want to take and three rounds of “just 10 more minutes and I promise the video game will be over”,

and now my acai bowl is melted.

The flame is running up the wick faster than any sedative mantra can reach my nervous system. Throw in my fearful, invasive thoughts about him, this behavior, his future and my parenting failures and we have gasoline on the flame. I can literally hear the message “this moment will be exploding in 3…2…”

There is only one mantra for this moment: “Walk away.”

Not stomp away. Not slam-a-door away. Not I-can’t-even-look-at-you-right-now away. Just... walk. away.

Here’s the thing: if my usual mantras can’t get past the guard to tame the amygdala before it reaches Tasmanian devil level, that is a very loud, very clear signal that my capacity has already left the building. The regulated, attuned, “I wrote a parenting book about this” version of me? She’s gone. She is offline and is not available to parent right now.

And if I don’t have any regulation to offer, my child has nothing to borrow.

This happens.

Even when you know all the things, sometimes you can’t access any of them

I want to be honest with you for a second, because I think a lot of insta-parenting content lets us down here.

I know about dysregulation. I coach it confidently in our support group calls. I know his behaviors often reflect lagging skills or a nervous system that’s overwhelmed, not a child who is manipulative or out to get me. I know the breathing exercises. I know the scripts and mantras. I know that being his parent is sacred work .

I know all of that.

And sometimes, when I am done, I cannot reach any of it. It’s like knowing your glasses are in the house but you can’t see well enough to find them. (And then realizing they are on your head)

So instead of pretending I can always access my highest parenting self on demand, I’ve given myself a simpler instruction. One that requires almost no brainpower. One word, even. Well, two: Walk away.

I make sure he’s safe. I make sure there’s another person, or a tool, or a calm enough environment that he isn’t in danger. And then I leave the room. I let my nervous system find it’s way back from the panic room to the library of wisdom. And then, when I can actually feel myself back online again, I come back to begin the recover and repair sequence.

But what if I can’t walk away?

Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes he’s making choices that aren’t safe, and I need to stay present. I can’t physically leave.

For those moments, I have a second mantra.

It is: Shut up.

Because here’s what I know about myself when I’m escalated and stuck: anything I say is going to make it worse. I will say something I don’t mean in a tone I won’t like. I will want to sneak in a righteous lesson.

So if I can’t walk away? Do not speak. Keep breathing. Stay present.

Hold the space. Keep him safe. Let the silence be the thing he has to sit with instead of something I’m going to have to apologize for later.

Note to self: Most of my frustration is never actually about him.

Let me say that again, because it took me a really long time to get it:

My frustration is never actually about him.

It’s about the meaning I’m making about him, his behaviors, his future and my parenting. It’s the mental loop running in the background when he’s wanting less toasted toast or becoming one with a screen, I start questioning everything:

If I can’t control this and get him to do what I want in this moment, what does that mean? It usually spirals into some apocalyptic version of Does this mean he’ll never succeed at anything in life and I have completely failed as a parent?

I had one job!

That’s what’s fueling the fire. Not the toast. It’s just toast. I have more bread.

This IS the self-regulation we keep talking about

Here’s what I want you to take away from this, especially if you’re a parent who feels like every time you lose it, you’ve “failed”:

Walking away IS the skill. Shutting up IS the skill.

We spend so much time talking about teaching our kids to self-regulate, but they learn it by watching us do it. They need to see that when a grown adult who loves them reaches their limit, the response is not explosion — it’s exit. It’s a pause. It’s choosing not to say the thing that won’t help the situation.

That’s not weakness. That’s not abandonment. That’s not “I can’t handle you.”

That’s: I love you enough to not let you absorb what’s happening in me right now, because what’s happening in me has nothing to do with you.

Walk away.

And when you come back — calmer, softer, yourself again — that’s when the real parenting happens.

Save this. Send it to a friend who needs it. Or just repeat it to yourself the next time you start to hear, “this moment will be exploding in 3…2…

Walk away.

(And if you cannot: shut up.) 🤐

And if you need somewhere to go after you walk away, somewhere that understands the toast, the screens, the cat bath, and the melted acai bowl or cold coffee, come join us in The Parenting Lab Support Group

You say something simple.

“Time to turn off the game.” “Please start your homework.” “Bedtime.” Or the always triggering, “You need to get off your phone!”

And within sixty seconds, the house has detonated. Voices up, doors slamming, someone storming off, someone else threatening a consequence they know they won’t actually enforce. Twenty minutes later, everyone is depleted and nothing has changed.

The instinct (and bad advice) is to blame the behavior. To double down. To find a firmer consequence, a cleaner system, a more consistent approach.

But here’s what’s actually happening: you’re inside a loop. And until you can see the loop, you’ll keep running it.

Why “just be consistent” misses the point

Most parenting frameworks were designed for neurotypical development. They assume that when a child doesn’t comply, it’s a willingness problem — that if you apply enough consistent pressure, the behavior will adjust. (They need to meet Ross Green and hear the truth: “kids do well when they can.”)

For families navigating ADHD, ASD, or PDA, this assumption breaks down constantly. The issue isn’t usually willingness. It’s capacity. The nervous system is already overloaded, and adding pressure doesn’t produce compliance — it produces escalation. Parents who follow the standard advice to the letter often find, bewilderingly, that things got worse.

It’s a systems mismatch.

However, once you start seeing the patterns as predictable loops rather than random misbehavior, the whole landscape shifts. You’re no longer trying to explain chaos. You’re diagnosing something recognizable.

The Five Loops

The Consequence Escalation Loop

starts when a parent- usually feeling out of control, tries to regain control through an impulsive, knee-jerk consequence (aka punishment). No eating your dinner= no dessert. Didn’t finish your homework= no screens. Didn’t clean your room= no going out this weekend.

And- no surprise- the child’s emotional regulation collapses before problem-solving is even available. The thinking brain goes offline. What follows looks like defiance but is closer to a system crash: crying, yelling, aggression, door-slamming. The parent, trying to restore peace, withdraws the consequence. And in that moment, the system learns something it won’t forget: escalation works. It becomes the child’s most reliable strategy — not always consciously, but reliably. This isn't a child calculating that a meltdown will get them what they want. It's a nervous system doing the only thing it knows how to do under threat

The Negotiation Loop

is the one that turns a simple rule into a thirty-minute courtroom drama. The parent explains. The child debates. The parent explains again, more thoroughly. The child escalates the argument. The conversation grows longer and more elaborate, and somewhere in the middle of it, parental authority quietly drains from the room.

This needs a caveat, because there’s something that looks identical but isn’t: collaborative problem-solving. A child saying “can we talk about this?” at a calm moment, outside the heat of a limit being enforced, is using their voice appropriately. That conversation is worth having. The difference is timing and nervous system state — problem-solving requires both people to be regulated, and it happens before the flashpoint, not as a response to one.

What the Negotiation Loop describes is something different: arguing that begins at the point of enforcement, escalates in intensity, and functions — for kids with ADHD impulse control and PDA demand sensitivity — primarily as a delay strategy. Not always a conscious one. But a remarkably effective one. The tell is that the debate doesn’t move toward resolution. It just keeps going.

The Reminder Loop

looks like ignoring but usually isn’t. A parent gives an instruction: go get dressed, get your shoes on, come to the table, turn of the video game, start your homework. Nothing happens. The instruction repeats, louder. Still nothing. Volume and urgency climb until someone explodes. What parents interpret as willful defiance is more often a failure of initiation — one of the most fragile executive functions in ADHD. The child wasn’t refusing. They were stuck at the starting line, and they need help getting off of it.

The Transition Crash Loop

happens when an activity ends abruptly and the child’s nervous system experiences it as loss — sometimes even as threat. Dopamine drops sharply. The brain, which had been locked in engagement, crashes. The parent reads the reaction as attitude or refusal and responds with pressure. Escalation follows. If you’ve ever felt genuinely offended when someone interrupts your scroll or suggests you stop mid-episode on Netflix, you already understand the neurology. For these kids, it’s not a minor annoyance — it’s a system shock.

The Control Panic Loop

usually shows up after months or years of the others. But underneath the dynamic, there’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: the fear.

By this point, the parent isn’t just reacting to today’s refusal. They’re doing the math. They’re watching their child struggle to get dressed, start homework, tolerate a transition, waste time on screens… and projecting forward. If they can’t handle this at nine, how will they manage at sixteen? At twenty-five? Are we running out of time? Am I doing enough? The urgency that starts to drive the parenting isn’t really about the unwashed dishes or the ignored bedtime. It’s about a future that feels increasingly precarious.

So the pressure increases. More demands, more urgency, more control attempts — not from a desire to dominate, but from a place of genuine panic that if they don’t intervene more forcefully, something irreversible will happen. The child, whose nervous system reads increased pressure as threat, resists proportionally. The parent interprets the resistance as confirmation that they need to push harder.

It looks like a power struggle. It’s better understood as a nervous system collision — two dysregulated systems both trying to regain stability at the same time, in ways that make each other worse. The parent is trying to secure the child’s future. The child is trying to survive the present. And neither of them is wrong, exactly. They’re just completely unreachable by each other in that moment.

What all five loops share

Zoom out far enough and the same structure appears every time:

Expectation → capacity gap → parent pressure → child escalation → parent retreat

What developmental research has consistently shown is that behavior problems most reliably appear when adult expectations collide with lagging skills or an overwhelmed nervous system. The child isn’t simply refusing. They genuinely cannot meet the demand under current conditions.

That’s not a reason to remove expectations. It’s a reason to adjust the system around them: the timing, the level of support, scaffolding design, the way the expectation is delivered.

Conscious parenting frameworks have pointed to this same underlying truth for years: recurring conflict usually reveals a mismatch between what we’re asking and what the child can actually access right now.

The skill that changes everything

It isn’t a better consequence. It’s earlier detection.

Every loop has an entry point; a moment before full escalation when intervention is still possible. The tone shift. The slight rigidity in the child’s posture. The tension that arrives in your own chest. That’s the window.

Once parents start asking which loop are we in right now? instead of why won’t my child just listen?, the whole dynamic changes. Not because the question is magic, but because it orients you toward the pattern rather than the behavior. And patterns, unlike behavior, can actually be interrupted.

Lower the pressure. Increase the support. Adjust the timing. Don’t overreact. Reduce the demand. Not abandoning the expectation but rather changing how the system approaches it.

That’s the work. Quieter than most parenting advice suggests. More diagnostic than punitive. And, for a lot of families in our support group, the first thing that’s actually helped.

One Thing to Try This Week

Before you respond to the next flashpoint, pause long enough to ask one question: which loop is this?

Not to solve it immediately. Just to name it. We’re in the Reminder Loop. We’re in the Transition Crash. That’s it.

It sounds small, but naming the pattern does something important: it moves you from reacting to observing, even briefly. And from that small distance, you have options you didn’t have a second ago. You might lower your voice instead of raise it. You might give two more minutes instead of demanding compliance now. You might recognize that your child isn’t defying you and see that they’re stuck. You may simply drop your end of the tug-of-war rope.

Keep a note on your phone with the five loop names if you need to. In a heated moment, even glancing at a list and thinking oh, this is the Negotiation Loop can interrupt your own escalation before it mirrors theirs.

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The support group is where we slow down and work through them together.
Join the ND Parenting Lab parent support group if you want real-time support from parents walking the same road.

I see you.

You are trying SO many things to manage ADHD behaviors. And yet things almost feel worse. Not because you aren’t trying hard enough, not because you aren’t learning enough. Not because your kid is un-helpable, worse than others. Not because you aren’t a good enough parent. It’s because change requires more than knowledge.

A reel gives you a dopamine hit but isn’t changing your life. A course is just another unfinished task to beat yourself up about. A book (even mine!) gives you information and insight — but not interruption. Information might be able to explain why your child is melting down over the grilled cheese being too cheesy. It may even be able to tell you what to do. But you probably aren’t going to remember when cheese-gate hits because a 60-second video was never going to rewire how you respond under pressure.

(And the Facebook groups. Oh, the Facebook groups. Thousands of members, a question posted at 10pm out of desperation, and by morning you have 117 responses that all contradict each other and at least 3 people telling you to try magnesium.)

But Don’t Confuse Learning With Doing

Here's what I have witnessed over the past decade of supporting parents of kids with ADHD.

Knowing what to do and doing it are almost completely unrelated — researchers call it the intention-behavior gap, and it's why you can finish the book, agree with every word, and still find yourself reacting the exact same way on Thursday. Your brain rewires from repeated experience.

This is where I am going to shamelessly talk about my weekly support group. Blatantly. Without apology.

Because I have seen firsthand how weekly accountability changes families. A support group doesn’t fix your child. It changes you. And when you change, the whole house shifts. I started a support group over a decade ago because I needed it.

A support group gives you structured learning, rythm that relieves instead of drains.

It gives you improved awareness — not in a theoretical way, but in the “oh… I see what I did there” way.

It gives you a safe place to unravel old stories. The ones about what a “good” child looks like or what a “good” mother should tolerate. The ones you didn’t even know were running the show.

It gives you language. For anxiety. For unmet needs and lagging skills. For nervous system overwhelm.

It gives you a place where the hard thing can be said out loud without someone suggesting a sticker chart.

It gives you accountability that doesn’t shame. Someone asking next week, gently,
“What happened after you sent that email to the school?” and “Now what’s next?”

It gives you perspective when you’ve lost yours. And repetition when you need practice, not inspiration.

If you are thinking, “This sounds helpful… but I’m not sure I can do this right now,”
I want to speak directly to your hesitations:

“I don’t have time.”

Of course you don’t. You’re already holding too much. That’s why this group isn’t another thing to keep up with. You don’t have to attend all the calls. You don’t prepare. You don’t need to engage constantly. You come when you can. You listen when that’s all you have.

Support shouldn’t require more effort — it should reduce it.

When it comes to time, I want to be honest — gently.

Most of us don’t actually need more hours. We need to use one hour differently.

The same hour that disappears into scrolling, zoning out, or another episode when your nervous system is fried.

This isn’t a judgment. Those moments make sense.

This is simply an invitation to ask: What if one of those hours supported you instead of numbing you?

“I can’t spend money at this time.”

If the hesitation is money, let’s talk about that honestly — and without pressure.

Of course this feels hard to spend on. You’ve already spent money on assessments, therapies, tutors, tools, books, programs, and “maybe this will help” solutions.

This isn’t an investment in information. It’s an investment in you — your clarity, your nervous system, and your ability to parent from a place that doesn’t leave you depleted.

And here’s the part no one says out loud: The cost of not having support doesn’t show up as a line item. It shows up as chronic overwhelm, self-doubt, strained relationships, and the quiet belief that you should be handling this better on your own.

Support doesn’t eliminate hard moments. But it dramatically reduces how alone you feel inside them. And that changes everything.

“I’ll fall behind.”

You can’t fall behind here. There are no modules. No replays. No content to catch up on. This group moves at the speed of real life. You arrive where we are — and that’s enough.

“I should wait until things calm down.”

This one is especially understandable. But here’s the hard truth: things rarely calm down on their own. Support isn’t something you earn after surviving the hard parts. It’s what helps you through them. You don’t need to be less overwhelmed to join. You join because you’re overwhelmed.

“I’m not sure I’ll say anything.”

That’s okay. Listening counts. Being present counts. Some parents don’t speak for weeks — and still leave feeling clearer and steadier. There’s no expectation to perform here.

“I should be able to figure this out on my own.”

Many parents of neurodivergent kids believe this — especially the ones who are thoughtful, capable, and used to holding everything together. But this isn’t a personal failing. Parenting neurodivergent kids inside misaligned systems is objectively harder. Needing support doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong.
It means you’re doing something honest.

I love this quote by Charlie Mackesey.

This group was designed because parents are busy. Because brains are overloaded. Because doing this alone is exhausting. You don’t need more discipline or motivation.

You need containment.
You need clarity.
You need other humans who understand this life.

The doors are open. Join Here.

If it isn’t my group, please find someone who can turn the firehose of information into sips of water for you. One who can alchemize all the latest research into strategies that work for you and your family specifically. Someone who can say, “Yes, this is anxiety.” Or “No, this is skill lag.” Or “You’re in survival mode — pause.”

Discernment is built in conversation, in someone asking better questions. In being gently interrupted when you slide back into old patterns.

Your future self will thank you.

Dear [insert judgmental parent name here],

I know what you see.

You see a child shouting. You hear the swearing. You watch the door slam. You observe disrespect and defiance.
You think, If that were my kid…

You think I've lost control. You think I'm being manipulated. You think I’m letting him get away with “bad behavior”.

You see a child who is misbehaving.
I see a tender child experiencing nervous system overload.

What We Know Now That Parents Didn’t Know Before

Over the past few decades, modern neuroscience has reshaped how we see child development—especially impulse control and emotional regulation. The parts of the brain that manage those skills develop slowly and unevenly. For neurodivergent kids like mine, that gap can be bigger, take longer and the stress response can be louder. Right now he has a Ferrari brain with bicycle brakes. His feelings get big before he has words. His whole body reads danger even when he’s safe. And when he tips over, his still-developing brain doesn’t have access to reason. Researchers have reframed neurodiversities like ADHD—not as a character flaw or a discipline problem, but as a developmental difference.

I am not excusing the behavior. I am explaining it.
Because explanation changes the intervention.

ADHD experts warn us that meeting fear with more fear, or shame with more shame, strengthens the very patterns we’re trying to eliminate. So we move away from outdated parenting strategies that relied on dominance, shame, or swift punishment to achieve short-term compliance.

“But How Will He Learn That Isn’t Acceptable?!”

I know this is the question underneath all of it.

If I don’t punish immediately, if I don’t shame the behavior, if I don’t make it hurt—how will my child know that aggression, disrespect, and defiance are wrong?

Punishing him in that state doesn’t teach him the behavior is unacceptable. It teaches him that when he’s overwhelmed, the people who love him most will add more pain to an already unbearable feeling.

And that doesn’t stop the behavior. It buries it. Or escalates it.

Compliance is efficient. It ends the behavior in the moment. But efficiency is not the same as growth.

Here’s what I’ve learned: He will learn. Just not in the escalated moment.

When my child is in the middle of a meltdown, when his nervous system is flooded, when he’s hitting or screaming or saying cruel things—that is not a teachable moment. That is a moment of complete dysregulation. His brain is in survival mode.

And what he needs in that moment, in order to build self-control later, is compassion and co-regulation now.

Because the capacity we want—impulse control, perspective-taking, accountability—doesn’t grow under threat. It grows when the body feels safe enough to come back online. You cannot teach a brain that thinks it’s under attack. But you can lend it yours until it finds its own.

Regulation first.
Skill-building second.

What I have learned to do

When things escalate, I’m not debating. I’m not negotiating values. I’m not delivering consequences.

I’m keeping everyone safe. I’m reducing input with fewer words, less noise. I’m getting space. I’m not adding threat to a system that’s already flooded.

Because a flooded brain doesn’t learn. It defends.

The learning happens later—when his system has calmed down enough that he can actually hear me. That’s when I say: “Earlier you hit. It’s never okay to hit someone. I understand you were upset. We need another way for you to tell me you’re overwhelmed next time.”
We recover then we repair. We name what happened. Then we practice. We build the next step. Consequences still happen—he helps fix what he breaks, he repairs what he hurts. But they're designed to teach, not to punish.

I’m not letting it slide. I’m choosing timing. This is not passive parenting. This is not “giving up.” This is not soft.

It is deliberate.
It is humbling.

The part you don’t see

You’re seeing a snapshot. A hard moment. You’re not seeing the work between moments. Progress doesn’t always look like “no meltdowns.” Sometimes it looks like: shorter storms, faster repair, a two-second pause, a request for space, a return with a softer voice. This takes time. It is slower than punishment but I am parenting for the long game.

I know it’s hard to watch the meltdowns and inappropriate language and feel like nothing is being done. Instead of being critical maybe you could be curious.

Instead of judging, ask: “Why did you choose that response? I’m curious what you’re seeing that I might not be.”

Instead of sighing, study: “What are you learning about his brain? Is there something I could read to understand this better?”

Instead of criticizing, get inquisitive:“What’s going on under the surface here? What does he need right now?”

Instead of assuming, ask how to help: “What would actually support you in this moment—or after?”

Curiosity builds bridges. Assumptions create distance.

I am not raising a compliant child.
I am raising a self-aware, intrinsically motivated, self-regulated one.

There is a difference.

I know this draws judgment but I am no longer parenting for the audience.

I am parenting for the adult this child will become and I welcome the support.

Thank you for reading this.

With love and gratitude, me.

And if you also need a letter to send to the partner that thinks you are too soft….

And if you still feel like you are doing this alone, join our Raising Happier Kids support group filled with other parents who get what you are going through.

“This cannot be normal.”
“I must be doing something wrong.”
“Why is my child attacking the one person trying to help?”

Let me gently interrupt that spiral.

Aggression is not the whole child.
It’s the shark fin mask — sharp, scary, and very visible.
Underneath is a gentle, still maturing goldfish: overwhelmed, flooded, under-resourced, and out of skills in that moment.

And here’s the part parents rarely get told: Rage toward the parent is often a sign of safety, not failure.

You’re the safest nervous system in the room. So the explosion lands where it can.

That doesn’t mean you accept harm. It means we respond with clarity, safety, and nervous-system intelligence — not shame, fear, or power struggles.

Picture this: Your child is fine… until they’re not.

It starts small:

• a tone shift

• a “NO” that’s sharper than usual

• a demand that suddenly feels unbearable

Then the switch flips.

Yelling. Throwing. Hitting. Swearing. Slamming doors.
And suddenly your body is activated too.

Your heart races. Your chest tightens.
Your brain screams: “Make it stop.”

This is where most parenting advice breaks down — because it talks to the behavior, not to the nervous systems underneath it.

So let’s slow this way down.

Shark Fin vs. Goldfish

The Shark Fin (what we see)

• Hitting, kicking, throwing

• Verbal aggression

• Threats, defiance, explosions

• “You’re the worst parent ever”

The Goldfish (what’s actually happening)

A nervous system that has exceeded capacity.

According to Dr. Stephen Porges and expanded clinically by Deb Dana, rage lives in the fight response — a survival state, not a thinking one.

Layer that with:

• ADHD nervous systems

• emotional intensity and fast reactivity (not defiance)

• anxiety that disguises itself as anger

• demand sensitivity and PDA profiles

…and suddenly the behavior makes sense.

Not acceptable — but understandable.

How did we get here? The Rage Recipe

Rage is rarely about this moment. It’s usually the final spark on a very short fuse.

Common contributors (not excuses, but explanations):

• Unmet physical needs: hungry, tired, overstimulated

• Lagging skills: they literally don’t have the regulation tools yet — see: Ross Greene who wrote The Explosive Child- a MUST read!

• Hidden stressors: school pressure, social shame, masking all day- as we learned from from Dr. Shanker.

• Hormones & development: especially in teens

• Perceived loss of autonomy: huge for PDA kids, see: At Peace Parents for more on PDA

And then there’s the invisible ingredient…

Your child’s rage and outbursts light your fuse. You feel the spark — that split second where you’re no longer choosing your response, you’re bracing for impact. You can almost hear the crackling flame as it nears your emotional bomb center.

First: Safety is not a parenting “style”. It’s the non-negotiable.

If your child is:

• hitting, kicking, biting, throwing objects, cornering you, blocking exits

• threatening serious harm to self/others

• escalating beyond what you can safely contain

Your job is to get everyone safe.

That can mean:

• creating distance using a calm, firm boundary voice, (you step out / they go to a safer space), “I am here to help you but I won’t let you hurt me.” “I’m going to step away so everyone can be safe.” “I’m here, and I need space right now.” “I won’t let anyone get hurt.” “We’ll talk when bodies are calmer.”

This does not mean permission to say, “Go to your room until you can calm down.” Those words don’t land as guidance. They land as rejection. “Go to your room” is often delivered in urgency or frustration, and a dysregulated nervous system hears it not as space, but as exile: You’re too much. Deal with this alone. Come back better. They need your co-regulation more than ever when they are this dysregulated.

Note: Creating distance is not withdrawal. It’s nervous-system first aid. You are not abandoning your child, you are modeling: self-regulation, boundary setting, safe conflict pauses on a path to regulation. And that’s powerful learning — even if it doesn’t look like it in the moment.

• removing dangerous objects (quietly, quickly) I have actually stood between my child and things he may throw, “I am here to keep you and objects around us safe. It’s ok to be mad, it’s not ok to break things.”

• calling for backup (partner, neighbor, family member)

• contacting professional crisis support if needed

Connection matters, yes — but no one can co-regulate while being harmed. Safety first. Always.

What makes it worse (even in loving homes)

Let’s name the unhelpful instincts without judgment:

• Lecturing mid-storm (“You need to calm down right now.”)

• Arguing facts (“That’s not what happened!”)

• Matching volume or intensity- now we just have 2 dysregulated people fighting.

• Threats or punishments during dysregulation (“Keep this up and you’ll lose your screen time!” — our go-to power grab when we start feeling out of control.

  In that moment, consequences don’t teach regulation — they add threat to an already threatened nervous system. The child’s brain isn’t hearing a lesson; it’s hearing danger. And ironically, the more we reach for control, the more their body feels the need to fight back.)

• Cornering or blocking escape

These don’t calm the goldfish. They just feed the shark.

What actually helps…wait before we get to that…

The Parent Piece (the one we can’t skip)

A child’s rage rarely stays contained to the child. It activates something in the parent as well — fear, helplessness, the urgent reflex to fix the moment before it spins any further out of control. These reactions are human. They are not a failure of parenting; they are a feature of the nervous system.

This is where conscious parenting matters most. Not in what we say to the child, but in what we regulate within ourselves.

Regulation is the intervention. Not perfection. Not control. Presence.

In moments of escalation, the most important words are often the ones we say silently, to ourselves:

This is not an emergency. This is a nervous-system storm. I can slow this down.

When the parent steadies, the room begins to settle. Not immediately. Not magically. But enough for safety, and eventually, for repair.

What actually helps… (by age, b’c we don’t do one-size-fits-all here)

Ages 3–7: Tiny bodies, big lightning

Goal: Safety + regulation (not teaching. that comes later)

In the moment

• “I won’t let you hit me.” (gentle, calm, firm)

• Step back. Create space.

• Fewer words than a grocery list. “You can be mad. I won’t let you hurt me. I’m right here.”

Oh and…A Parenting PSA: Do not record your child during moments of rage, meltdown, or loss of control. And please — do not take parenting advice from anyone who does and then posts it on social media.

1. A dysregulated child cannot consent: When a child is in fight-or-flight, they are not choosing behavior — they are surviving it. Recording that moment turns a nervous-system emergency into a performance, without the child’s consent, understanding, or ability to protect their dignity.

2. Being filmed escalates the nervous system: A camera adds threat, it signals: Instead of calming the system, it deepens fear, shame, and defensiveness — often making the rage last longer and hit harder.

3. It prioritizes proof over protection: Recording is often about us, not them; proving it’s “that bad”, defending ourselves later, showing someone else how hard this is. Your child’s nervous system should never be the cost of validation. That erodes trust — quietly, but deeply.

The strategic use of humor

With younger children — particularly ages 3–7 — gentle redirection and humor or silliness can sometimes interrupt escalation in ways logic never will because humor shifts the nervous system out of threat. Used well, it’s not distraction. It’s regulation by surprise.

A playful voice, an exaggerated misunderstanding, a sudden moment of absurdity can momentarily short-circuit the stress response — giving the child’s body just enough relief to regain footing. This works because young children are still deeply embodied. Their emotions move faster than their language. Humor meets them where they are: in sensation, not explanation.

But timing matters.

Humor helps before full rage takes over — in the orange zone, not the red. Once a child is fully dysregulated, silliness can feel mocking or overwhelming and make things worse.

And tone matters even more. No: sarcasm, teasing, minimizing feelings, laughing at the child. It is warmth, softness, and invitation.

Examples parents often find helpful:

• pretending your voice got “stuck” and can only whisper

• misnaming an object in a silly way “I can see how upset you are that your cheggo broke…I mean smeggo…I mean fleggo… oh my- of course I mean leggo!”

• playfully narrating what you see (“Uh oh, I know what it feels like to turn into a volcano… and now the floor is lava! Hurry get to the couch so we can solve the problem without burning our feet!”)

• turning movement into a game (“Can your angry feet stomp all the way to the couch like this?”)

When it works, you’ll feel the shift — a pause, a breath, a flicker of connection. When it doesn’t, let it go immediately. Humor is an offer, not a strategy to force compliance.

Later (when everyone is calm)

• Use the Zones of Regulation to give visual to the emotional.

• Help them name what happened: “Your body got so mad.” “That was a really big feeling.” “Your body didn’t know what to do with all that energy.”

This kind of language separates the child from the behavior. It teaches that emotions happen to us, and that bodies can learn new ways to handle them.

• Practice replacement skills before the next storm. Choose one or two replacement skills and rehearse them when everyone is regulated:

  • stomping feet or squeezing hands

  • ripping paper or pushing a wall

  • taking three deep “belly breaths”

  • going to a calm space together

  The goal isn’t to eliminate big feelings. It’s to give the body options before it tips into overwhelm.

  You’re not expecting mastery. You’re building familiarity — so that over time, the body recognizes another path before the storm hits.

Ages 8–12: Big feelings + big shame

Goal: De-escalate + preserve dignity

In the moment= co-regulation. They are borrowing from our nervous systme like it’s oxygen from an underwater tank.

• “You’re in the red zone and I can totally see why. We’ll get through this.”

• Offer two choices (both acceptable). When a child is dysregulated, choice restores a sense of agency without handing over control. The key is that both options already work for you. This is not negotiation; it’s containment with dignity.

  • “Do you want me to sit here, or step into the hallway?”

  • “Would space help, or would you rather I stay nearby?”

  • “Do you want quiet company, or time alone?”

  • “Cold water on your hands, or a few minutes outside?”

  • “Movement or stillness?”

  • “Deep pressure or fresh air?”

• Lower demands, don’t stack them: When a child is dysregulated, their capacity is already maxed out. Every additional instruction — even reasonable ones — adds cognitive and emotional load. What looks like defiance is often simple overload.

  Stacking demands sounds like this:
  Calm down. Use your words. Apologize. Pick that up. Let’s talk about what just happened.

  Lowering demands means deciding what actually matters in that moment — usually safety — and letting everything else wait. It’s choosing one clear, essential expectation and postponing the rest until regulation returns. This isn’t permissive parenting. It’s strategic. Regulation comes first; learning follows.
  

You don’t teach new skills in the middle of a nervous-system fire. You put the fire out first.

Later = Conversation (not closure)

The follow-up conversation is not a debrief, a lecture, or a neatly resolved third act. It is not a 1950s television ending where everyone hugs, learns the lesson, and the credits roll. In real life, these conversations are uneven. They stall. They circle. They resurface days later in the car or at bedtime. Progress comes through trial, missteps, and small moments of insight — not through one perfectly executed talk.

The goal is understanding, not resolution.

That means:

• asking fewer questions, not more

• tolerating silence or “I don’t know”

• resisting the urge to fix, explain, or correct

Two questions matter more than all the others:

“What was the hardest part for you?”
“What could help next time?”

Asked gently, without expectation of a polished answer, these questions shift the focus from blame to problem-solving. They tell the child: Your experience matters. We’re on the same side. We’re learning this together.

Sometimes the answer won’t come right away. Sometimes it won’t come at all — yet. That’s still information. Growth rarely arrives fully formed.

Important: the more we are able to practice this kind, respectful, regulated response to anger and rage, the easier it will be as they get bigger. If you need a safe space to learn, rehearse, unravel, understand all of this- I have created a conscious parenting support group for us parents to do just that!

Ages 13–17: Bigger bodies, higher stakes

By adolescence, dysregulation carries more risk — not because teens are more “difficult,” but because their bodies are stronger, their emotions more complex, and their need for autonomy more pronounced. At this stage, the work shifts. The goal is no longer close containment. It is safety, boundaries, and respect — for everyone in the room.

In the moment

When a teen is escalated, proximity can inflame rather than calm. Physical closeness that might have helped when they were younger can now feel intrusive or threatening.

Create physical distance.
Distance is not withdrawal; it is de-escalation. Step back. Leave the room if needed. Give the nervous system space to settle rather than fuel to push against.

Do not restrain unless absolutely necessary for safety.
Physical restraint with adolescents carries real risk — emotionally and physically. Unless there is immediate danger to the teen or someone else, restraint tends to escalate fear, resistance, and loss of trust.

Use adult, brief language.
This is not the moment for explanations, persuasion, or emotional processing. Speak calmly, clearly, and without commentary.

Script:

“I’m stepping away. I’ll talk when we’re both calm.”

Say it once. Then follow through.

The boundary is the message. Repeating it, defending it, or negotiating it undermines its effectiveness.

Later= mutually respectful conversation & collaborative planning.

The real work with teens happens after regulation has returned — sometimes hours later, sometimes the next day. This is where collaboration replaces control.

Collaborative Problem Solving.
Rather than revisiting every detail of what went wrong, focus on patterns and pressure points:

• What pushed things past the tipping point?

• What signals were missed?

• What helps lower intensity sooner?

Clear agreements about next time. Not punishments — plans. Decide together what will happen if aggression starts again. Who steps away. Where space happens. When reconnection will occur. Clarity reduces fear on both sides.

This conversation may feel unsatisfying. Teens often offer minimal insight or shrugging responses. That doesn’t mean it failed. It means you planted a seed: We handle hard moments with structure, not force.

If aggression is frequent, intense, or escalating at this age, this is support-team territory — not “try harder parenting.” That may include therapists, pediatricians, school supports, or crisis planning.

The adolescent years ask something difficult of parents: to hold firm boundaries without tightening the grip, to protect safety without humiliating, and to stay present without chasing control.

That balance — imperfect and evolving — is “the work” of parenting (the small print no one told us about 🤨)

The Long Game (what this actually teaches)

When handled with safety and compassion, rage moments build:

• emotional literacy (name it to tame it)

• interoception (body awareness)

• trust (“My parent won’t overpower me, they will help me”)

• accountability after regulation (especially when we need to apologize if we overreacted)

• real resilience through recovery and repair

One last permission slip

You can:

• love your child deeply

• block aggression firmly

• step away when needed

• repair when you mess up

  
  That’s nervous-system-literate parenting.

The shark fin gets our attention.
But we parent the goldfish.

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Facts: Research and classroom observations consistently show that kids with ADHD and other neurodivergent profiles receive more corrective/negative feedback than positive feedback compared with their typically developing peers — sometimes more corrective than positive at all. For example, in one classroom observation study, children with ADHD experienced a higher rate of corrective (negative) feedback than positive — roughly 1 positive for every 1.3 corrective remark — while typically developing children received up to 5 positives for every corrective.

But you don’t need a study to tell you this. Think about your own home. Do you know your corrective to positive ratio? Do you even notice how often you are corrective- even the ones that we don’t clock as “negative” anymore because they sound like logistics, tone, or truth-telling. They stack up.

Corrections framed as reminders: “Did you remember to…”, “I’ve told you this already.”, “You know better than that.”

Tone without word: The sigh. The heavy breath of frustration. The eye roll. The long pause. The look before the sentence.

Efficiency language: “Just do it.”, “This should be easy.”, “It’ll take you two minutes.”

Comparisons that sound neutral: “Your sister managed it.”, “When I was your age…”, “Other kids can do this.”, “You did it last time without any issues…” “You should be able to do this at your age.”

Future-casting: “How is this going to work in middle school?”, “You won’t be able to do this when you’re older.”

Problem-spotting as default: Walking into the room and noticing only what’s unfinished. Opening the backpack and scanning for what’s missing.

Conditional warmth: Praise only after compliance. Connection only after calm. Affection once things are “better.”

Narrating deficits: “You’re so forgetful.”, “You always lose things.”, “That must be your ADHD.”

Urgency disguised as help: “Come on, come on, come on.”, “We’re late- again”.

Public commentary: Correcting in front of siblings. Explaining their behavior to others while they’re in the room.

Questions that aren’t really questions: “Why can’t you just try?”, “What were you thinking?”

Silence: Not commenting when something does go right. Moving on. Assuming they know.

Over time these create a self-fulfilling negativity loop (yes, bonus feature of neurodivergence is sensitivity to feedback, perceiving it as rejection.)

And of course we have all heard of the negativity bias — the brain’s tendency to notice and remember negative experiences more strongly than positive ones — meaning that one negative moment can outweigh any positives in a child’s emotional memory.

While a 5:1 positive:negative ratio is recommended in many behavior-reinforcement and relationship models to support self-esteem, well-being, and connection, I say we aim for 10:1! If you only get 7 in, everyone is winning.

So the next post-it note for your fridge= “10🥰 to 1🤨!”

*Unnecessary paragraph coming up but throwing it in for those who need the reminder:

Why Positivity Matters: Growth Mindset + Neurodiversity

Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research shows that language around effort, potential, and “not yet” can reframe children’s relationship with challenges — especially for kids who get feedback all day long in school and at home. Dweck has found that focusing on process and effort (rather than static traits) helps kids view setbacks as temporary learning moments.

This matters profoundly for neurodivergent kids. When every misstep becomes a label, a problem to fix or an opportunity to pathologize, they internalize negative scripts. But when they hear many more supportive cues (“I noticed…,” “That was smart because…,” “You stuck with that!”), they literally start to build a different inner story — one where they can grow, adapt, and belong.

We Know It Works. So Why Don’t We Do It More?

Because most of our day is triage.
Noise, time, mess, pressure, worry.
The brain scans for what’s off because something usually is.

Negatives announce themselves. They are loud and messy. They take up a lot of space. With neurodivergent kids, the feedback loop is chaotic. More reminders. More corrections. More stakes. So our attention follows the heat.
Positives are quiet. They pass quickly, without making a sound. So we treat them like a sleeping baby, afraid noticing it will wake her up and then the peaceful moment will be gone as quickly as it came.

Don’t miss the positive moments. We need to seek them out, notice and inflate them with intention. We need to say to the child (and ourselves): This, too, is real.

Positives require attention. They require pause.
Pause feels expensive.

But not pausing is exponentially more costly in the long run.

Here are a few suggestions.

Print these, write them on a post-it note, write them on your hand, put a rubber band on your wrist to remember. I will keep holding you accountable and asking, “What are you going to do differently”? What will you actually DO after you read this because reading is not enough to make change. Remember: Mastery comes from mindful repetition, not random information.)

1. Just walk by and say, “You’re awesome.”

Or “I’m so lucky to be your mom.” or “On a scale of 1-10, you’re an 11 as a great kid.” Simple, direct, low effort = HIGH impact. Your ND kid hears this outside of correction contexts, which makes it feel sincere and not “performance praise.” This places value on them as humans, not on what they did right this time. (That’s key for self-worth.)

2. Affirmations on the mirror

I am subliminally training the minds in my house every day by writing positive statements where we literally see them every morning or night. Seeing “I am brave”, “I am strong”, “I am smart”, “I am kind”, “I can do hard things” can help prime their brain for strengths language before school or before sleep.

But — quick caution borrowed from developmental findings: keep praise realistic and specific rather than overblown hyperbole. Research shows that inflated praise (“You’re perfect!”) can backfire in kids with low self-esteem or complex feedback histories, because it raises pressure to always be perfect.

3. The “Power of Yet”

Borrowing Dweck’s phrase: when they say “I can’t,” help them add yet — “I can’t do it… yet.” This small shift boosts effort orientation and reduces internalized failure scripts.

4. Track good-things, not problems

Put a note by the dinner table, fridge, or bedroom saying “Tell me something good that happened today.” When they share positives first, brains start scanning for wins throughout the day.

5. Pair praise with why

Rather than “good job,” try: “I saw how you kept trying even when it was hard — that’s resilience.” Why? Because specific, sincere praise builds internal narrative, not just external reward.

6. Encourage “tootling” instead of tattling

This classroom technique invites children to report peers’ good behaviors — and it works for families too! Try “tell me something kind your sibling did today,” and watch the atmosphere shift. Make it a rule that if anyone ever “tattles” on someone else, they always have to pair it with a “tootle” (will immediately reduce tattling even if it doesn’t increase praise). Have a “tootle” box in the house for everyone to drop in positives they notice and the one with the most “tootles” wins something at the end of the week. (Whether you think this is silly or brilliant, I ask you again- what action will you do differently this year?)

7. Bedtime gratitude catch-ups

Before lights out, play a quick would-you-rather: “Would you rather tell me something nice you did for someone else today or something nice someone did for you?” “Would you rather I say 3 nice things about yu or you say 3 nice things about me?”

8. Hidden Notes

I like to hide love notes and affirmations in their lunchbox, ipad cover, shoes, jacket pockets, sports bag, bed, sock drawer... Challenge yourself and see how many you can sneak into their day. Make it a treasure hunt and see how many they find?

9. Teach them to notice positives too

Encourage language like “I noticed…,” “I appreciated when…,” and model it out loud. “You were really thoughtful today when you___- how did that feel?” “You handled that tough part with patience, what were you telling yourself?”

10. Celebrate small wins with connection

A silly dance, favorite snack, a kiss on the forehead, or a hallway high-five matters — our brains encode emotion with memory.

Neurodivergent kids often live in a negativity echo chamber — more corrections, more urges to “fix” behaviors, more emphasis on what’s wrong instead of what’s already working. When we consciously tip the scale toward connection first, we don’t just change behavior — we change their inner story, safety, and brain wiring.

Your goal isn’t perfection — it’s positivity exposure that begins to outnumber the negative feedback by a long margin. We’re aiming for 10 moments of affirmation for every corrective one, not because research has locked in a hard number — but because brains grow in warmth and safety, even more than in consequence and correction.

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There is a particular kind of parenting anxiety that sounds like this:
“If I let them quit now, what am I teaching them about life?”

And its evil twin:
“If I force them to stay, am I teaching them that their body, voice, and inner compass don’t matter?”

Welcome to the quit-or-stick-it-out dilemma. Every parent meets it eventually—usually in a car park, holding a half-eaten granola bar, while their child announces they are done forever with soccer/piano/karate/insert-expensive-commitment-here.

Let’s slow this down because “letting kids quit” is not one decision. It’s two very different ones that often get lumped together:

• Reactive quitting (nervous-system driven, heat-of-the-moment)

• Considered quitting (reflective, values-based, developmentally appropriate)

Understanding the difference is the sweet spot.

Reactive quitting: when the nervous system is driving the bus and wants to get off

Reactive quitting happens when:

• Emotions are hot

• Frustration is loud

• Shame, comparison, boredom, or fear have hijacked the moment

This is not a character flaw. It’s biology. (I say that a lot b’c it’s important that we get it!)

As Russell Barkley reminds us, kids-especially ADHD and neurodivergent kids-are still developing the executive function skills required to pause, reflect, and make long-term decisions. In dysregulation, those skills are simply offline.

From a nervous-system lens, reactive quitting often comes from a threat state:

• “I feel bad.”

• “I’m failing.”

• “I don’t belong.”

• “Make this stop.”

Quitting here isn’t about values. It’s about relief.

If we lock a child into commitment while they’re in this state, we don’t teach resilience, we teach endurance without consent. And that’s not what teaches grit. That teaches compliance.

Considered quitting: the quiet, brave decision

Considered quitting is different. It happens after the novelty has worn off, after real friction has appeared (it’s hard, uncomfortable, effortful) and the child has had more than one chance to respond to that friction with support

This is key.

As Ned Hallowell often says, perseverance grows not from pressure but from meaningful engagement. Kids persist when something still feels alive for them- not when they’re dragging out of obligation.

Considered quitting sounds like:

• “I gave it time.”

• “I learned what this feels like.”

• “I know why I’m stepping away.”

That is discernment: a critical skill we want them to learn.

But don’t kids need to learn how to do hard things?

Yes. And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

They learn that by doing hard things, through encouragement, not force.

There is a difference between:

• Experiencing effort

• Being trapped in effort

Naomi Fisher is very clear here, especially for PDA and demand-avoidant kids: when persistence is externally imposed, the nervous system reads it as threat. Learning shuts down. Resistance goes up. Intrinsic motivation dies quietly in the corner.

Hard things should feel:

• Stretchy

• A bit uncomfortable and support within reach

• Frustrating at times with safety rails

They should not feel:

• Shaming

• Coercive

• Identity-threatening

But won’t they be mad at me later…

Many of us joke:

“I wish my mom had forced me to finish piano/karate/French.”

But pause for a second.

What we usually mean is:

• “I wish I had access to that skill now.”

• “I wish I’d had support through the hard middle.”

Not:

• “I wish someone had overridden my autonomy and forced me to do something I didn’t want to do on the chance that I may wish I knew this skill later in life.”

Those are not the same thing.

As Dr. Shefali teaches, much of our insistence on follow-through comes from:

our unresolved regrets, not our child’s present desires or even needs.

That’s worth sitting with.

The real harms (on both sides)

Forcing follow-through at all costs can:

• Undermine self-trust

• Teach kids their “no” doesn’t matter

• Create power struggles instead of skills

• Link effort with resentment (heard of any child prodigy’s that hate the skill they are an expert in?)

Allowing constant reactive quitting can:

• Prevent skill-building

• Avoid discomfort entirely

• Reinforce escape over reflection

Neither extreme builds resilience.

The sweet spot: effort without control

Here’s what the research-backed, nervous-system-informed middle looks like:

1. Separate feelings from decisions

Let kids feel frustrated without deciding anything yet.
“Something being hard doesn’t mean we stop. It means we pause.” Then return to it later.

IMPORTANT: it is also important to add that we need to separate OUR feelings from their decisions as well. A child’s frustration can trigger a parent’s fear: What if this means they can’t handle hard things? Or it can stir something older and more personal: regret over what we wish we’d stuck with, anxiety about the future, embarrassment when things don’t look “on track.” Those feelings are real. They deserve acknowledgment. They just shouldn’t be in charge. We need to ask ourselves, “What am I feeling right now—and who is this decision actually for?”

2. Normalize friction

“This is the part where most people want to quit.” Friction isn’t failure, it’s information. Here are the kinds of phrases that lower threat, normalize effort, and keep kids in the learning zone instead of the fight-flight-freeze zone.

Think of them as emotional handrails; not pep talks, not pressure, just steadying language that says: “This is hard AND you are safe.”

• “Yep. This is the messy middle.”

• “Feeling frustrated doesn’t mean you have to quit or stay forever.”

• “Nothing’s gone wrong. This is what learning feels like.”

• “Frustration is a sign your brain is stretching.”

• “That annoyed feeling? That’s effort. On the other side of this is grit.”

• “You’re not failing, you’re practicing.”

One sentence to keep in your back pocket : “I’m not here to force an outcome, I’m here to support you through the hard part.”

3. Offer scaffolding, not pressure

Adjust the environment before judging the child: Shorter commitments, fewer practices, different teachers, more recovery time?(Yes, this counts as skill-building.) Invite problem solving instead of control:

• “What would make this slightly more doable?”

• “Do you want support, a break, or a tweak?”

• “What’s the hardest part right now?”

4. Use time-limited commitments

Borrowed from Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (thank you PDA Society):

• “Let’s commit until X date, then reassess.”

This teaches follow-through and agency.

5. Reflect together

Not “Why can’t you stick with anything?”
But:

• “What did you learn about yourself?”

• “What was harder than you expected?”

• “What helped even a little?”

That’s intrinsic motivation being born quietly, internally, without a gold star.

For PDA kids, encouragement can sound like expectation, and expectation can feel like a trap. Even hope can feel heavy.

The magic of “You don’t have to.”

I find that telling my son “the tutor is coming but you don’t have to engage with her if you don’t want to” makes it much easier for him to decide he wants to. It may not happen in the first, or even second visit- but if the tutor/mentor/specialist is good- then sooner or later my son will want to play the game she has brought. With some ND and PDA kids, the goal is not motivation. The goal is removing threat.

PDA isn’t about refusing to do things. It’s about needing to stay in control of the decision to feel safe.

That’s why this phrase, “And you don’t have to do it” is magic.

Not as a tactic. Not as a trick. But as a truth you can live with. You have to be ok if they choose not to engage. If you aren’t they will feel it. I know because I have felt not-okay with giving up or not showing up- and the pressure projected onto my son always makes it worse.

When you say: “The tutor is coming, and you don’t have to engage,” you are doing three powerful things at once:

1. Naming reality (the tutor is coming- because we are still going to keep offering opportunities to stretch)

2. Removing the demand (engagement is optional)

3. Returning agency (the choice stays with the child)

That creates a wedge of space—and in that space, the nervous system can soften and he has to ability to work on the skill of weighing options, feeling uncomfortable and deciding to give it a try (yup, sometimes they surprise us!) .

As PDA Society emphasizes, reducing demand is not giving up on growth; it’s the only way growth can happen safely.

And we have to be careful when we want to remind them, “But last time you went and had a great time!” (coercive) Sometimes this time just feels different and they can’t explain it.

• “Sometimes things surprise us…and sometimes they don’t. Both are okay.”

• “There’s no expectation that today will look like last time.”

• “Struggling today doesn’t erase anything you’ve learned before. And it doesn’t mean you won’t feel differently later.”

Avoid:

• “But last time you loved it…”

• “See? You were fine then…”
  (These can accidentally trigger shame or self-doubt.)

The non-negotiable rule: If you say ‘you don’t have to engage,’ you must be genuinely be okay if they don’t.

This is the line between:

• Support and manipulation

• Safety and covert control

Kids with PDA are exquisitely attuned to whether freedom is real or performative.

As Deb Dana would say, the nervous system asks one question first: “Am I safe from being pushed?”

If the answer is yes, curiosity can emerge.
If not, resistance is protective, not oppositional.

What this actually teaches (long-term)

This approach teaches children how to listen inward before acting outward.

They learn self-awareness: What do I need right now?
They learn interoception: I can notice what’s happening in my body.
They learn trust: My parent won’t override me when things get hard.
They learn agency: I get to decide when I’m ready.

These aren’t soft skills. They are foundational ones.

And here’s the paradox parents often need reassurance about:
Children who are not forced are more likely to re-enter later, on their own terms.
That isn’t permissiveness. It’s nervous-system math.

When pressure is removed, something unexpected happens. Space opens. Not a lot—just enough. In that space, there is room to stretch.

Adults often see a challenge as a road with a few hurdles along the way. Manageable. Expected. Part of the course. Many children, especially neurodivergent ones, see the same road very differently. What we experience as hurdles, they experience as high jumps. Exposed. Demanding. Risky.

So we adjust the course.

Instead of asking them to clear the first hurdle at full height, we lower it. We turn it into a speed bump. Something that still requires effort, but doesn’t activate alarm. Something they can cross without bracing for impact.

Once they’ve crossed it, once their body registers I did that, confidence grows. Not bravado. Not false positivity. Real, earned confidence rooted in experience.

Then, and only then, the speed bump can become something slightly taller. And then, over time, something taller still.

This is how resilience actually develops.
Not through being pushed over obstacles that feel insurmountable, but through a series of manageable stretches that teach the nervous system: I can meet challenge and survive it.

The goal was never to eliminate difficulty, but to make difficulty approachable. When children experience challenge this way- incrementally, voluntarily, with support rather than force- they don’t just learn how to persist. They learn how to trust themselves when things get hard.

When the fear voice whispers
“But what if I’m letting them avoid life?”

Try this instead:

“I’m not removing challenge. I’m removing threat.”

So… do we let kids quit?

Sometimes, yes.
Sometimes, not yet.
Always with curiosity, reflection, and respect.

The goal was never to raise kids who never quit.

The goal is to raise kids who know why they stay and why they leave.

That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom earned through lived experience.

And honestly? That’s the kind of resilience the future actually needs. 💛

How It Looks I.R.L.

My “neurotypical” son recently said, “I don’t like Tuesdays anymore because I have my drumming tutor.” My brain immediately flooded with those default thoughts we have been trained into: it’s good to push through hard things, you’ll be glad that you did this one day, hard things make us stronger… (all the BS I warn other parents against).

Because I have so much practice, I refrained from regurgitating all those conditioned responses and reminded myself of the skill of discernment that I am here to help him learn. So I got curious instead of righteous and asked,

“So why do you keep doing the lessons?” (My boys have zero issue dropping activities they no longer like so it’s interesting that he still does the lessons even though they have clealry ruined Tuesdays for him). I truly wanted to know- and support his process of figuring things out.

Not surprisingly his answer was, “I don’t know.”

Instead of pushing for an answer, for a tidy lesson-learned moment, I simply said, “That’s ok. Sometimes we don’t know.” And I left it at that. I have learned to be ok with the in-between space, the space between “I don’t know” and “now it makes sense”. The space where we don’t rush them to decide or feel one way or another. That’s very sacred space where they are figuring out for themselves what works for them. Don’t rush that space. It’s part of the process.☺️

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