Parenting Through the Chaos and Finding Peace (reprise)

This week we're bringing you a conversation we had with Dana Abraham. Of the book Calm the Chaos, so we can hopefully unravel these questions and provide insights on the emotional roller coaster that often accompanies raising a challenging child. That's straight ahead on episode 288. I'm Emily Kircher Morris, and this is the Neurodiversity Podcast.

A course on the foundations of dyslexia, and even one designed specifically for therapists who want to embrace a neurodiversity-affirming approach in their practice. If you're curious but just want to dip a toe in, there's even a free mini course on how fandoms and AI can help kids build coping skills. You can check them all out at neurodiversity.university or click the link in the show notes. I hope you'll find something that speaks to you. Okay, Dana is up next.

especially when society has all of its opinions. I just want to start off and ask you about how parents can shake off that pressure and that stigma when they're parenting neurodivergent kids.

Helping parents remind themselves that you are exactly the parent your child needs and you are the expert in your own child. And sure, you might not know everything there is to know about. what your child needs or how to support them and you're still learning those things, but there is no better person than you to do that job. And then the second thing is grounding themselves in the fact that

they're not failing. That if things aren't going well, it just means that there's opportunities to learn, opportunities to tweak or shift. But It doesn't mean that they are failing. We are talking about real humans and we're talking about raising humans that think differently, that act differently, than what we've been taught or raised to believe parenting is going to be about. And so there's gonna be bumps in the road and just realizing, okay.

I can do this. I am not alone. There's an entire podcast I'm listening to that's all about raising neurodivergent children. And so I know I'm not the only one doing this, and If we can ground ourselves in that, I think it makes it easier to handle the what I call storms, but the bumps in the road. Yeah.

is really hard for her because it's overwhelming and she doesn't like to raise her hand. She doesn't like to ask for help. Um, but she loves learning and she loves the idea of school and she loves friends, but there's so much about it that's really hard. And so it was really hard to get her to go to school. And we really just focused on supporting her and her needs.

And so if that meant we went to school an hour late, if that meant that we missed school for a day, then I was okay with that because I would rather her be in a place where she can be receptive to learning, where she feels safe in her body, where she feels listened to and heard. And so The school though made me feel like I was the only one in the entire school who was struggling with this and the only parent who couldn't get their kid to school.

And I know from little side conversations here and there that that's just not the case. That there's far more kids who are struggling, far more kids who don't feel safe at school, who don't feel like they're being heard or their needs are being met at school.

I just want to acknowledge that even with my knowledge and with what I've gone through, I still struggle in the quote unquote real world to find those support systems. And so I find a lot of those support systems online. Ten years ago when my son was really struggling. So he was kicked out of his first preschool. He was in trouble in kindergarten. And by second grade, he was kicked out of school more days than he was in school.

Um, he was having lots of aggressive meltdowns. He was eloping and leaving the school. He was doing all sorts of things and the principal illegally told me that you can either let your son be taken into custody with this police officer, or you can take him home. Don't bring him back until you figure out what's wrong with him, quote unquote.

Everything looked so perfect that I felt like I was the only one that didn't know what I was doing. And here I was with twelve years of classroom education, knowledge. child development. I I had all this knowledge, but yet I couldn't help my own son. And so I decided to start our blog. And the sole purpose was really selfish. I really just wanted to know there was one other person out there who was going through what I was going through.

I didn't find one person. I found millions of people who were going through what I was going through. And now I've created an online community. And there are so many other communities out there. I saw just the other day that Walmart is having sensory days to do your shopping.

Ten years ago that would have been unheard of. And so the world is becoming more accepting, more understanding, more knowledgeable that we have all of these differences and these needs that our children have and that adults have. And so there is hope that there is community out there and there are others going through this.

influences parents of neurodivergent kids. You mentioned it a little bit with your experience about trying to find that balance of what was right for your son, but how can parents have some resilience with some of that? How can they start on that journey?

in the world, right? But the number one question I get is, Well, what's he doing next? Is he going to college? Is he doing that? I said, nope. Mm mm. He's just taking some time. Oh, he's having a gap here. Nope. Not a gap year. Like this is just what's next in his life. He has so much educational trauma from what he's gone through. Yep. And he has so much that he has to unpack.

Of what he's been told about himself and what he has had to navigate the last eighteen years, that he deserves some downtime, and he will figure out what's next.

it will take some time and we're not on a timeline. But boy, when he hit eighteen or as he was heading up to eighteen, those thoughts of I didn't do enough I he should be looking at colleges or he should be getting a job or he should be wanting to move out or he should he should he should he should I should I should I should um and it got really heavy. And and so I had to remind myself in the things that I teach my parents.

The first thing is one focusing on progress, right? Tiny progress. I always tell parents, don't judge your progress on your worst day. Because there are bad things that are or difficult days that happen. And my son just had another meltdown. He hasn't had one in over a year. But if I say, what's the point of everything we're doing? Because he's just gonna have another meltdown, I'm ignoring all the progress he's made in between. I'm ignoring the fact that his meltdown had

minimal aggression and that we were able to get through it. He was able to calm down. His girlfriend was able to get him to a calm place, get him to able ver to verbalize what was going on and why he was upset. And then we were able to get through that moment and then reconnect. And it was a couple days later that we were able to reconnect, but we were able to reconnect, rebuild that relationship.

But if I only judged it on, well, he's still having meltdowns, I guess I didn't help him at all, then I'm negating all the other progress and hard work that he's had um along the way. So that's number one is As parents of neurodivergent kids, we have to focus on those teeny tiny baby steps that we're making forward, not the three steps back and then the one step forward. But we have to look at that progress.

We also have to really focus on our own mindset. And I know that sounds hokey pokey and all of that, but I think it's so important that we focus on our own perspective and our own thought shift. And we use something, I talk about it in the book and we do it in our program, and it's called Thought Monsters and Super Swaps. And so

depersonalizing these thoughts and ideas that we have. And I'm neurodivergent myself, so I can go on a worry loop like no one's business. And I can really go down that spiral. So having these thought monsters that I can pull out and say, oh, I noticed that Cyclone is here, or I notice that um the always and never beast is happening, or, oh, I'm letting Judgy McJudgerson get to me.

takes it off of it being about me and it being shameful and it being something I'm judging myself again about. And instead I can say, oh, this is a common thought, a common belief, a common thing that happens. Now who can I call on to help me? And so we can call on some super swaps. So for Judgy McJudgerson, that's like this idea of everybody else's opinions and thoughts, those sorts of things.

And so you pull in Wa Wa Warrior, or you can pull in uh Progress Princess. I've got a couple of others, uh, the sparkler who focuses on what's going well and what you're doing. So instead of All these things are, you know, you should be doing this. What's wrong with your parenting? You're ruining your child, you're setting them up for failure. All these things we hear or we think we hear, right? We just assume that's what people are thinking when they see our child doing whatever they're doing.

or not meeting these milestones, we assume that other people are thinking, Wow, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with your kid? Um and sometimes they just come out and say those things, which those people I like to use Um, the Watt What Warrior, which just turns all their words into Charlie Brown noise. And so it just goes, wah wah, wah. Like, okay, you do not matter to me.

And then for the ones where we are starting to believe that maybe they're right, maybe we should have done this or we could have done this, um, pulling in that progress princess or

pulling in the sparkler to say, I am the best parent for my kid. I know my kid. I am here for my kid. And the more that we can ground ourselves in those beliefs, The more receptive, the more compassionate, the more accepting, the more in tune we can be with our kids because it removes that barrier that we might be having to being able to show up for our kids.

Um, because if we enter a situation, let's say my daughter's school refusal, and I'm like, You're never gonna go to school, they're gonna call the truancy office, they're gonna think I'm the worst parent ever. If I'm worried about that, I'm not worried about my daughter and I'm not meeting her needs. So we have to address those thoughts first so that we can meet our kids' needs.

But I know both from my own experiences personally growing up, but also from the work that I've done with my clients, that there is trauma that occurs for a lot of these kids. Can you share a little bit more about that?

Um, but my son was put in isolation rooms, so white rooms with nothing in them, just the pipes, just the walls. My son was locked in closets. My son was grabbed. My son was put in rooms that uh where he was put on display, uh, glassed in rooms inside of an office where people are walking by watching him have a meltdown. Um, my son was uh put in the prone position, knees on his back. I mean, we already know that there are children who have lost their lives with those types of holds.

And I don't know who can listen to that list of things that have happened and not feel the trauma. Um, with his meltdown the other day, it's not educational, but He jumped out of the car. We were driving down the road and he started to open the door while you were driving and luckily I stopped. I stopped the car, pulled into a parking lot, he opened the door and he jumped out. And flooding back all these memories came into my head.

And it triggered this trauma that I didn't even realize existed from when he was seven and he would jump out of the car.

You don't need to have a behavior management system in your classroom. And for what it's worth, my mind was kind of blown a little bit. Why hadn't I ever thought of that before? Like I knew how damaging that was for me as a child. I knew I I saw kids who it was harmful. But having somebody just verbalize that to me was a huge shift. When you have a child who is constantly in trouble

was built because we needed conformity, we needed soldiers and we needed workers to go into the factories and we don't need that right now. In a lot of our education is shifting to multidisciplinary and meeting the different learning needs, but we're not meeting the different

body needs, the different neurodiversity needs. Like we're not meeting that yet. And so I think that's the next rung of where we can help teachers, where we can help educators. And as a parent, we can advocate for and educate

on the different ways to see our kids, the different perspective for to help them realize that the children are not doing this to purposely disturb the classroom. They're if they're acting out There is a reason and we have to look for the underlying reason of why this is happening instead of just saying,

coming out of nowhere or it's just because. Um, and on the flip side, like my daughter that I talked about, we're gonna end up homeschooling her again because of the struggles she had last year. And I would say that she has that little T trauma from school because she felt like She was constantly on edge. Her sensory system was overloaded every single day. It was too loud. It was too bright. There wasn't a place she could go to settle her nervous system.

And she didn't feel safe enough to raise her hand. And when she advocated for I have a friend in the other class that when she sat next to me, I felt regulated and I felt like I could ask her questions and I felt, um,

Yes, I want friends and I want to be around my friends, but it is worth it to be at home and learn in a safe place and learn on my timing and get the amount of sleep that I need. And honestly, she can do her work in two to three hours. Right. And so Why prolong that stress level of being at in a situation that doesn't feel comfortable?

And so the first three stages are really about that, you know, what do we do in the worst of moments? Right. You absolutely don't need to say anything. It's about getting to safety. It's not about fixing. It's not about solving. But it How do we just ride through this? And I I like to call it kind of the plan before you have a plan that works. And so because, you know, if you're listening to this episode and I share a plan for in the moment, you might go try it and it's still not gonna work.

And so you need something to still just get through the next moment and to get through that next argument, that next fight, that next frustration. And so that is more about just literally planting your feet in the ground and stopping all movement, stopping all talking, stopping all questioning and fixing

And then just taking your own deep breath. And it's like what you talked about, getting our self-calm first. But then on top of that, It's looking at our own body and saying, okay, even if we think we're calm, we could be sending messages with our nonverbal communication that we are not calm. So we might not be saying anything, but our body might be saying a lot. And our kids who are neurodivergent a lot of times are way more receptive of our body language.

than we think that they might be. And so they're looking at our eyes, they're looking at our mouth, they're looking at our shoulders. They're not going to be able to do that.

The second stage is more about time and energy. And because if you don't have time and energy, you won't be able to do that pause. You won't be able to stop talking. Right? If you're exhausted, you're gonna say things that you didn't mean to say. If you're tired and depleted, Um, and it's the third meltdown of the day, you're not gonna be able to just hold steady and not say anything or do anything, right? And so

The in the moment plan though is what do I say and do? And that say is so qu like it's so quiet. It's barely anything at all. So it's moving closer to our kids. And if we have a hitter or a kicker, obviously we're not going to move so close that they're hitting and kicking us. But we're moving into the same area and we're saying I'm here with you. And that's it. We're just letting them know we're here. We hear that, you know, for my daughter, I hear that you don't want to go to school.

But we're not trying to solve why they don't want to go to school. Now, in our head, the thing we can do, because we are solvers and fixers as parents, is we can start going through a checklist of what could be going on so that when they're calm, we can start kind of Solving the situation, but we have to wait until we're out of that situation to do anything involving fixing or solving.

It's been really wonderful to talk to you today. As you reflect on your own journey as a parent, you've been through a lot. I'm wondering if you could send a message about what you've learned to yourself as a younger parent, and you're just learning to navigate this path with your child, what is it that at that time you most needed to hear?

to my younger self. And I wish then I could have walked in the door and said, stop. Trust that gut feeling, parent him the way that you That feels aligned. You believe and that supports him and connects with him, you don't have to listen to everybody else. You are the expert in your child and You're not failing. And your child's not broken. Just be there with him. I think if someone had showed up in that moment and done that, I think I could have Myself um for a long time.

All of your efforts to provide calm are incremental.

Our host is Emily Kircher Morris. Corey Oric is our office manager and production assistant. I'm the executive producer, Dave Morris. For all of us, thanks for listening.