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the neurotypicals are not okay (a long post about a "parenting neurodiverse kids" class)
i go to a parenting class for parents of neurodivergent kids. the other parents are all neurotypical.
holy fuck is it a nightmare
i started by trying to empathize with these parents, to some degree. they truly do not understand how their child's brains are wired. and that feels horrible. to feel that disconnected and dissonant with your own kid is painful.
this empathy got me through the first half hour. the remaining 7.5 hours have been slow torment and me learning to control my facial reactions.
"how do i get my son to make eye contact?" you don't
"how can i get my daughter to not repeat the same things she's already said over and over again?" you don't
"how can I get my son to stop telling me about something i don't find interesting?" you don't
"how do I stop feeling guilty about giving my kid adhd?" holy shit get some fucking therapy
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the neurotypicals are not okay (a long post about a "parenting neurodiverse kids" class)
@gintoxicating re: making eye contact. My stepdad used to yell at me whenever I didn't look at him when I talked. He thought I was being evasive. It was just uncomfortable to me. It was a rough go.
the neurotypicals are not okay (a long post about a "parenting neurodiverse kids" class)
@stinerman sorry that happened. This is kind of why I was disappointed in the class; I do understand why a parent's first instinct would be that a kid isn't paying attention or being duplicitous. If they don't understand they will draw from their own experiences. That's natural.
But what's annoying is these parent's don't learn (or maybe accept?). I think even if I wasn't neurodivergent myself, I would pay enough attention to my kid that I could correlate "staring off while talking" and "paying attention" after a bit.
"Eye contact" has been my go-to example when talking to my kid's educators: "I do not care if she makes eye contact, I do care if she's paying attention. If you come at me with 'she's not making eye contact' we won't have the conversation you expect. I do not want you to make my child 'normal', I want you to enable her to succeed as herself". Fortunately the special education teacher she worked closest with seemed relieved and thanked me. I think there are a lot of parents that pressure her to make their kids their definition of normal, force them to mask... and she knows that's dumb stupid bullshit.
I felt like maybe I leaned too hard on this example because in my experience there's SO much info out there about how ADHD attention looks really different from NT attention... but after this class I will keep using it lol