Parenting a Neurodivergent Child: The Questions No One Asks Out Loud
Being a parent at any point in life, to any child has its challenges, but when your child falls outside of social expectations or “norms” this can bring a whole host of new challenges.
There are many questions I hear time and time again from parents of school aged neurodivergent kids. Because they’re so common, I thought I’d share them here.
Many Neurodivergent families become isolated and it’s easy to feel like no one else gets it, so this is a friendly reminder, you’re not alone. There are others who have the same or similar fears and experiences and you don’t have to stay isolated or alone.
Common Questions Parents of Neurodivergent Children Ask
Parenting a neurodivergent child isn’t just a now thing, it spans multiple times at once. Parents often grieve the past, the time before they knew. They worry if they’re doing enough in the now and question what quality of life they and their child will have in the future. If you’ve wondered some or all of the following, please know you’re not alone.
- Could I have done more before I knew?
- Did I cause this?
- What if I’d have known sooner, could this have gone better?
- Should I keep them home or send them into school?
- Is school the best place for them?
- Will I have to give up my job and homeschool?
- Is what I’m doing enough to give them the best chance at a happy life?
- Are they happy?
- I don’t like my child or what they’re doing to our family. Does this make me bad?
- Is this behaviour part of them or their Neurodivergence?
- How can I fix this?
- Will they get married and have kids?
- Will they work?
- Will they live at home forever?
- Will I get my life back?
These are big, heavy and painful questions and many of them don’t have answers yet or can’t be answered. That’s a lot to be holding alone. Here are a few gentle answers that might help to soothe some of the uncertainty.
A Few Gentle Answers
When we look too far back or too far forward trying to find answers to unanswerable questions, anxiety grows. Sometimes looking back might be a need to grieve the life you thought you had, expected to have or the lost chance to support your child sooner.
Grief is a normal part of change and it’s something that deserves to be felt. Acknowledging your losses doesn’t make you a bad person and it doesn’t mean you don’t love your child. It could actually make more space to love them even more.
Looking too far forward can also be grief of what was, but it can also be a space for anxiety to inhabit. No matter how hard we try, we cannot predict what the future will hold, so when the what if’s take hold, allow yourself to come back to right now, because with the right support, that’s where you have the power to create change.
When you can’t change the past or predict the future and now feels chaotic and overwhelming, what can you do to find some stability?
Recognising Burnout in Neurodivergent Parenting
When you’re in the thick of it, chasing down EHCP’s for 9 thousandth time just for it to be wrong again, or trying to support your child through today’s post school meltdown, or drowning in paperwork and appointments, you might feel powerless, overwhelmed, exhausted and defeated.
If you’ve noticed that you’ve lost joy, you don’t enjoy time with your child, you feel stressed and maybe even physically unwell, there’s a good chance you might be burned or burning out. Parental burnout is an incredibly common experience in ND families, often in two parent families, one parent takes the mental load while the other takes the financial one. Time together dwindles and you feel like the only thing fuelling you is stress and caffeine.
If this sounds familiar, you don’t have to keep going alone, there is support out available, here are some ideas of where to look.
Support for Parents of Neurodivergent Children: Where to Turn
Not everyone is lucky enough to have a supportive school, but if you do, lean into them for support. They spend a large amount of time with your child and know them well, but not as well as you. If you are lucky enough to have a school who are able to collaborate on ideas and support options with you, lean in.
Other support options might include:
- Finding peers, others who get it, the National Autistic Society have an email forum that you can join and some of their branches also offer in person meet ups. autism.org.uk
- If you’re in the Kingston borough and surrounding areas Express CIC have an incredible support group, who are an unimaginable wealth of information. Their WhatsApp groups (mums, dads and PDA) are a fabulous mix of emotional and practical support. expresscic.org.uk
- Your local carers support, parent carers are also carers and carers support often host social groups and events to make new friends who really get it. You can find your local service on your local authority’s website.
- Counselling can be a great place for parents to speak openly about your struggles. It can help you to find realistic ways, that work with your reality, to reconnect with who you are as a person, not just as a parent carer. It’s a space that is just for you in amongst all you do for others.
- Couples counselling could help if you and your partner feel like strangers or worse, enemies. You could move from fighting against each other, to fighting alongside each other. It could support you to communicate about tough topics like different parenting styles, expectations, hopes and sharing out the family responsibilities fairly.
If reading this left you wanting to talk things through properly, try to make sense of it and find a way forward that fits for you and your family, counselling could be the space you need.
Counselling for Parents of Neurodivergent Children
If you’re interested in how counselling could help you, find some calm in the storm, reduce overwhelm, stress and fall back in love with your family again you’re welcome to get in touch. Whether you’re seeking support for yourself, with your partner or don’t know which would be most helpful, we can arrange a short free call to talk it through and help you find the right next step for you.
I hope that this post has helped you feel less alone and invited a little hope back in if needed. Whatever your next steps look like, I hope you find the right ones for you.