In this episode, we are mythbusting ND affirming practice. I hear too often phrases from people who don’t quite get what neurodiversity affirming practice is, like ‘If we just let kids do whatever they want and don’t extend them, they won’t learn essential life skills’. Join me as I discuss what it means to support neurodivergent children and explore how affirming practices don’t just allow children to do whatever they want but rather guide them in extending their abilities in a supportive environment.
We’ll explore different approaches to challenging situations, like swimming lessons for an autistic child, and how a truly affirming approach differs from traditional and passive methods. We’ll also discuss the importance of safety, connection, and respect in learning environments, and how meeting these fundamental needs allows children to learn new skills effectively.
Links and resources mentioned:
- Free podcast training for Speech Therapists: Evolve Your Affirming Practice – Register here
-
Course for Speech Therapists – Affirming Communication for Autistic Children https://playlearnchat.com/acac-course/
- Free Webinar For Professionals who Support Neurodivergent Children – Neurodiversity Affirming Practice Kickstart: 3 Actionable Tips to Do Today – https://playlearnchat.com/free-neurodiversity-webinar/
Podcast Link: https://pod.link/1625478932
Website: www.playlearnchat.com
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Exploring Neurodiversity Podcast for adults who support Neurodivergent children. Whether you’re an allied health professional, medical professional, education professional or a parent of a Neurodivergent child, you are welcome here.
This podcast is recorded on the Aboriginal lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people. I acknowledge the traditional owners elders past and present, and I extend my acknowledgement to any Aboriginal first nations people listening in.
I’m Adina from Play. Learn. Chat. I’m an autistic ADHDer, a speech therapist, professional educator speaker, and I also support Neurodivergent Business owners in my other business, neurodivergent Business Coaching and Consulting.
I’m obsessed with creating a world when Neurodivergent people are understood, embraced, supported, and celebrated. A world where we Neurodivergent people can understand ourselves and thrive in a life aligned with our individual strengths, wants and needs.
On the Exploring Neurodiversity Podcast, you’ll get my perspectives and conversations with my Neurodivergent friends. All about how adults can best support Neurodivergent children in our lives.
I bring a Neurodiversity Affirming approach and indeed a human affirming approach to the support that we all provide for Neurodivergent kids in our lives.
Let’s dive in.
Today we are myth busting, folks. I hear too often phrases like this one, including this exact phrase, from people who don’t quite get what neurodiversity affirming practice is. If we just let kids do whatever they want and don’t extend them, they won’t learn essential life skills. I mean, I agree. Yeah, I agree.
If we let kids do whatever they want, we don’t extend them, they won’t learn essential life skills. I actually agree with that. What I don’t agree with is that neurodiversity affirming practice means letting kids do whatever they want, not extending them, and therefore leading to not learning essential life skills.
My hope with today’s episode is if you are a little bit confused about when neurodiversity affirming practice. So, if you are wondering how the world sits in terms of supporting children to learn new skills, then I hope to answer some of this and clarify some of it for you today. My other hope for this episode is that if you do understand the differences between being neurodiversity affirming and letting a child do whatever they want and never extending or teaching them, then you will be able to have better ways of explaining it to other people in your world who you might come across who struggle to understand exactly what Neurodiversity Affirming Practice is.
I feel like this misunderstanding of what Neurodiversity Affirming Practice involves comes from a fear. That if we are respecting a child’s emotions, their sensory needs, their communication preferences, then it somehow means we’re not encouraging, supporting, or pushing them to develop their skills. And here I’m using the word skills to encompass, really absolutely anything that a child or a person might learn in their life. We’re going to keep it pretty general in this episode.
Now, what a neurodiversity affirming practice approach really is, yes, it’s about understanding and honouring a child’s emotions, sensory needs, communication style, preferences. And in doing so, you then support them to be in the best space possible and have the most capacity for learning and development.
Part of me is actually completely surprised and incredulous that I even need to make this clear that neurodiversity affirming approaches are absolutely not about just letting a child do whatever they want, whether it harms others or whether it means they’re always comfortable in doing what they do, in knowing what they know, and there are no boundaries. But I hear it time and time again, so, I think we’ve got to talk about it.
Let’s take an example of an autistic child, we’re going to call her Mary.
Like many autistic kids, Mary had a lot of difficulty engaging in swimming lessons. She actually loved the water, loved splashing in the water, loved playing in the water. But when it came to structured lessons with an adult that she didn’t know, in a noisy environment, At a time of day that she couldn’t control, having to separate from her parent, mary struggled. Is anyone surprised?
The teacher called out to Mary’s parent and said, just chuck her in, she’ll be fine. Meanwhile, Mary was clinging to her parent, screaming and refusing to separate. Now, in fact, that is a very unaffirming way of framing it, to say refusing to separate. She couldn’t. Relationally, safety wise, security wise, Mary was not in a space where she was able to try that new thing, to move away from her parent, to get into the water with this stranger.
So here we have a sliding doors moment. I’m going to paint a couple of scenarios, and let’s see where they go.
We have the non affirming, we’re going to call it traditional approach. The approach that says, just throw Mary in, she’ll be fine, she’ll figure it out. She’s got to do this, she’s signed up for classes. She can’t always make a fuss, let’s just get on with it. That is not a neurodiversity affirming approach.
We’re going to explore what happens if Mary goes along that pathway. Then we’re going to explore the passive approach. The misunderstood version of what neurodiversity affirming practice might look like. This idea of never extending a child, never teaching them new skills, just allowing them to do exactly what they want at all times. And again, let me be clear, that is also not a neurodiversity affirming approach.
And we’re then going to explore what a neurodiversity affirming approach to supporting Mary in her swimming skills looks like.
The traditional approach That’s the instructor shouting at the parent, Just give her to me, she’ll be fine. The parent in that scenario submits to the pressure of this very confident teacher encouraging the parent to pry Mary off her and throw her into the pool where she’s clearly feeling unsafe on every level.
Maybe Mary would find that it’s okay. and she would end up enjoying the lesson, or at least being okay with the lesson. Maybe Mary would continue to have meltdowns with her whole body and brain completely being unable to be in that situation, let alone learn something new. Because that base level of safety, security Feeling okay in her body. Feeling supported by the people around her. That’s not there.
And maybe, here’s a really common one that people like me and many, many other people have experienced all too often. The masking trauma response.
Mary’s given messages from the adults around her that she’s supposed to trust. Her parent, the swim teacher. That it’s supposed to feel okay to be in the swimming pool, to be with this stranger in these class settings.
In that process, she’s masking her emotions, disconnecting from her body, suppressing her understanding of what her body and brain are telling And losing trust in being able to read what she needs. Now, self advocacy is something I talk about a lot, many people talk about. And the first part of self advocacy, being able to ask for what you need, is knowing what you need.
And if you don’t know what you need, you can’t ask for it. Yes, there’s many other pieces of the pie as well that need to be in place before you can advocate for yourself. But the first piece is knowing what you need. If you feel unsafe, uncomfortable, your brain is on fire. Your body just needs to get out of that space.
You have no trust in the weird grown up next to you who’s shouting at you to be calm. You’re going to learn to not trust what your body is telling you.
You’re going to end up essentially gaslighting yourself into believing that you’re the one with the faulty response. And when you feel unsafe in that situation, you’re going to learn to suppress it judge yourself. Disconnect from being able to perceive your own sensory and emotional needs. And over time, seek less and less of what you actually need to be okay.
So whether Mary is getting in that pool and trying to get out of it screaming. Whether Mary is getting into that pool and shutting down because she’s learnt to not trust how she’s feeling.
If Mary is not feeling safe to get into that situation, it is not affirming to throw her into that situation, forcing her to comply, invalidating how she feels. So there’s our traditional approach. Let’s chuck Mary in the pool.
Let’s go with the passive approach. Mary feels some distress at being in this swimming pool situation for her swimming lessons. And the misunderstood application of what neurodiversity affirming practice is, some people think that means, well, let’s just get out of there and not even try, and therefore Mary doesn’t learn to swim, we don’t extend her.
As she grows up and her peers get older and get more confident in the water, Mary loses Her interest in being in the water because she recognizes that she has different skills to her peers and she can’t be safe on her own, even though she used to love the water.
This is not neurodiversity affirming. It’s not even safe. I mean, in Australia, we live around water. It’s pretty much a non negotiable in my mind for Almost every child to be able to learn to swim. I’m going to say almost every because there’s always exceptions. But it’s a real safety non negotiable in my world for the kids that I support.
And a layer on top of that is that Mary actually likes the water. She wants to be involved in the water. It’s just really, really, really hard on many levels for her to get from the point of not being able to swim and not having experienced swimming lessons to being able to swim independently and safely.
We don’t want to do the passive approach. We don’t want to say, okay, Mary, you never have to. That was hard once. We’re just going to leave it. We’re not going to do it. That’s not neurodiversity affirming. And that is not what I share. That’s not what I explain. That’s not what many other neurodiversity affirming advocates teach.
So what do we do? What is aligned with neurodiversity affirming approaches when it comes to Mary’s swimming lessons?
Let’s go old school. Let’s go into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So if you are familiar with it, cool. If you’re not, that’s okay. Envision a pyramid in your mind. And this idea from, I think it was around the sixties, where Maslow proposed that all of the lower levels need to be in place. before the higher levels of learning and development can occur.
So the lower levels, these basic needs, need to be in place, like psychological needs, safety needs, so feeling safe, feeling connected, feeling supported. Sensory processing is a huge challenge for autistic people, so feeling sensorally safe, feeling okay with the noise around, the smells around. The feeling of your swimming costume, feeling okay with the people around you, being able to trust that your parent will keep you safe, and put you in situations when you feel ready with the right support.
The relationship with that swimming teacher is deeply important for some kids, yes, some kids can just jump in a pool and splash around with whoever’s there. And many kids, especially many neurodivergent children, need a much more deliberate, slow pace of relationship building before they feel safe to do that. And that is absolutely the case for Mary.
When psychological safety and physical safety and relational safety is met, Then new learning can happen. Then a child can extend beyond what is currently okay, safe and comfortable for them, what’s within the usual repertoire. Even if Mary can sometimes get into that pool with her dad and splash around and have a great time,
but on the day of her swimming lesson, she’s not able to because of that relationship with the swimming instructor just not being there. That’s the piece that needs to be built first. She needs to feel safe in her body, safe in her environment, safe with the relationships of the people around her. And then, slowly, slowly, she will get into the pool. She will try new things.
Now the piece of frustration, I think, for many people is, slowly, slowly. Yes, this can be a slow approach. But it is the approach that builds lifelong skills, lifelong trust in self, lifelong confidence, lifelong relationships. This is learning without trauma.
So bringing it all back together, neurodiversity affirming practice doesn’t mean letting kids choose exactly what they want to do all the time and forever. What it does mean is supporting children to be in their best space for learning and development. That can take time. That can take five minutes from walking in the door of a therapy session to actually starting any kind of work in inverted commas.
Maybe it takes 50 minutes. Maybe it takes five weeks for what might look like structured work to happen. And that is valid. What it doesn’t look like is never asking anything of the child, never teaching them new things, never modelling new ideas. Like, that is just wild that anyone would think that I and other educators are advocating for us to just sit and let kids do whatever they want all the time.
I hope that this is clear, and I hope you’ve got some ways to share with the people around you the truth, that neurodiversity affirming practice is really just honoring a child for their real experiences, respecting that their experiences are different from yours and they’re different from neurotypical people’s experiences.
And getting curious about why something is hard for a child, not judgmental, not about avoiding the hard thing, it’s about finding out what exactly is hard for them. And then recalibrating, figuring out do we need to change something up and make it easier for them, get them more comfortable, give it more time, build more relationship, and then the learning will come.
Or maybe we need to recalibrate our entire expectations, and maybe Mary doesn’t need to learn to play the tuba, but she still does need and want to learn to swim.
Nothing against tuba players or music, I’m just giving it as another example where you might recalibrate and choose that some expectation you did have of Mary might shift, it might not be the right thing to do. But when you’ve decided that a piece of learning is something that’s really important for her, and especially when she’s interested in that herself, she can get there and she will get there.
But how you get there looks different, and that’s okay. So if there’s one takeaway that you
keep in mind from this episode, it is that learning happens when kids feel safe. If we focus on connection and respect, and honouring kids real experiences as valid, then the learning can unfold. And so it should.
Now, this is just the start of me doing a bunch of myth busting. I have a few other ways that I’m supporting people now and into the future. If you are a speech therapist, I’m running a webinar on Friday the 14th of March called Turning Affirming, and it’s for speech therapists who support autistic children.
We are putting Neurodiversity Affirming Practice into action and we are myth busting. We’re going deeper into some of the myths that come up about what Neurodiversity Affirming Practice is in the context of our speech therapy support.
One myth I’ll be tackling is this idea of, Oh, but you’re just playing with him. He’s not even learning. So, yeah, we’re diving into that one. And a lot more, and I’ll be providing a bunch of tools for speech therapists to help you take that clarity and understanding into your advocacy for autistic children. So that is a free webinar happening on the 14th of March. If you’re listening after the date, check the link in the show notes anyway because you’ll see if it’s still available or what else I have open for you.
Either way, head to the link in show notes and register. And that one is specifically for speech therapists. If you’re not and you’re curious and , I’m not going to stop you signing up, you’re very welcome to, but I am, talking to the specific scenarios, questions, and challenges that come up in our speech therapy worlds.
Also available for speeches, I have my free podcast based training series called Evolve Your Affirming Practice, and that is out now. It’s four short episodes in your ears, just like this one, and I go even deeper. I’m getting stuck into the grey area. And again, of some of those real nuanced areas that we speechies come up against when it comes to neurodiversity affirming practice for our autistic kids.
And if you are not a speech therapist, I am still really, really happy that you’re here. I have a free webinar for you, for any professional who supports neurodivergent children. called Neurodiversity Affirming Practice Kickstart, three actionable tips to do today. So really helping you get some clarity on other neurodiversity affirming strategies and ideas and just put them into action straight away. That’s available all the time. Go to the link in the show notes and you will be able to check all of that out.
If you have other myths that you’re hearing or that you’re wondering yourself, please feel free to send me a line, probably on Instagram is the easiest, but you can also send me an email, hi@playlearnchat.Com and I may well follow up with another podcast episode unpacking further myths. Thanks for being here, for challenging thinking, for opening your mind, and for supporting this movement by getting real accurate information and clarity out there. I appreciate you.
Thank you so much for sharing this space and time with me. Thank you for being open to learning and unlearning and to listening to the perspectives and experiences of Neurodivergent folks.
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I’m @play.Learn.chat. Have a spectacular day!
