You are listening to episode 165 of the Autism Mom Coach, the space between.
Welcome to the Autism Mom Coach Podcast. I am your host, Lisa Canera. I am a lawyer, a life coach, and most importantly, I am the full-time single mother of a teenager with autism. In this podcast, I am going to share with you the tools and strategies you need so you can fight like hell for your child without burning out.
Let's get to it.
Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I am so glad you are here and I hope you are doing well. I wanna start off this podcast episode by making an announcement. I have two spots open right now in my one-on-one coaching program.
I've recently graduated some students and I now have room for more.
So if you have been considering working with me, wondering what it would be like, this is your opportunity to work with me now as your one-on-one coach. You will get my one-on-one support tailored to you.
Combined with the benefits of being able to participate in the group program I have that is only open to my current clients and my alumni clients and the group is amazing. There's just so much love and energy in that group and I would love to invite you in
and the sooner we start working together, the sooner you are going to feel like the calm and confident and regulated parent that your child with autism needs. So to get started, all you need to do is schedule your consultation. Call by using the link in the show notes.
Alright, on to today's topic, the space between, I struggled with what to call this episode because really what I wanna talk about is that gap between our children and neurotypical peers. That space that we start to monitor from the time that they are diagnosed, or from the time that we realize that they are not reaching milestones at the expected time. That is the space between our children, wherever they are, and wherever we think they should be, or we want them to be.
This is an issue that I've experienced myself and I've seen it in so many of my clients. For me, when Ben was younger, a lot of the things that he struggled with were things that other kids his age struggled with.
They struggled to stay still. They struggled to have joint attention. They struggled to take turns, those kinds of things. Of course, Ben struggled more and struggled in different ways, but it didn't look hugely different from the other people. And so we got those remarks like.
All kids are like that, or all children struggle with that, or that's totally normal because in some ways it did. It just looked like what kids at that age do and don't do, and it seemed age appropriate.
But for me, what I've noticed as Ben has gotten older, that space between him and his peers,
his behaviors being on par for his age range, his reactions being on par for what you would expect . Well, that gap has widened
and I especially started to notice this when Ben was in fourth or fifth grade because he had been in therapy for so long and he knew all of the strategies to. Start a conversation and engage in conversation with peers.
And he was really working hard on that and he was getting better at it. And just as that happened, it was like all of the rules of social interaction changed. From the kumbaya of elementary school where everybody talks to everybody and everybody gets along, into the social landscape of middle school where everything is different,
People who you thought are friends, aren't friends. Talking to this one person means another person's not going to be happy with you. All of that became really overwhelming for my son because he just didn't get it. But the other kids seem to get it. They seem to understand the subtle cues.
They seem to know who was on the ins and who was on the outs in a way that my son wasn't intuiting. And that became really frustrated for him. And so that's an example of where I saw he was looking so close and so similar to his peers and then all of a sudden that gap became a canyon.
One of my clients also recently shared an experience like this. Her son had played track a couple of years before and he had loved it and he was really engaged with it.
And so she was excited to sign him up again . But this time it was so different. These kids were very focused.
They just had a very different approach to it because they were a couple of years older. And her son, by contrast was kind of running with them, kind of wandering off to a bench to sit down. And it was in that moment of really shock and disbelief that she saw the space between her kid who looked pretty close to all of the other children and passable to, wow. There is a big difference.
the reason I wanna talk about this is because what I've noticed in myself and I've noticed in my clients is that the default reaction to seeing this. Gap become a canyon, is to look internally and to start to blame yourself to wonder, did I not do enough therapy? Should we have done more speech? Should we have done more ot? Should I try to get him more play dates? What can I do right now?
There's a lot of blame and a lot of belief that you haven't done enough and a lot of hustle to hurry up. I have to do more to catch my kid up. And if that is you, if you ever find yourself in this position, I want you to pause. Seriously. Pause. Because what has happened, first of all, you seeing this gap, it has triggered your nervous system.
Your nervous system has gone into fight flight reaction where. Biologically, you want to do something, you want to make this go away. You wanna assign blame, you want to fix it. And what I want to suggest to you is the fix here is to take the pause,
and just be with what's really happening here, because what you are protecting yourself from in these moments where you wanna get on Google and find all of the things, or you just wanna sit there and blame yourself, you're protecting yourself from feeling the grief and the sadness.
And the reality of having a child whose path does not look the same as you want it or expected or think that it should be after all you have done for them. I completely understand this, and I also know from trying to double down on all of the things, it was more to comfort myself than it ever served my kiddo.
I really want you to pause and be with what you are feeling, because the more you push that down with the Googling and the therapy and the blaming, it's not going anywhere.
It's still there. So let it have, its say,
if you feel that urge. Pause, let yourself feel the emotions that are coming up and be with the emotions
because again, that adding on more to dos or blaming yourself, those are just things that we are doing to hide from the sadness, the fear, all the feels that we are avoiding. All right everyone. I hope this episode was helpful for you. If this is something that you struggle with, never knowing if you're doing enough, always thinking that you need to do more.
Afraid that if you don't do enough of X or more of Y, that your child's not gonna catch up or they're going to have o bleak future. Schedule your consultation, call with me. This is exactly what I help my clients with in my one-on-one coaching program. I will teach you how to sort through all of these feelings and emotions so you can make decisions from a calm and confident place and not from this place of feeling like you're behind and that you need to catch up. Alright everyone, I will talk to you next week. Have a great week.
Thanks for listening to the Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me. Podcasts are great, but the ahas are fleeting. Real change comes from application and implementation, and this is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program.
To schedule your consultation, go to my website, the autism mom coach.com, work with me and take the first step to taking better care of yourself so that you can show up as the parent you want to be for your child with autism.