Neurodivergent Conversations | Autism, ADHD, AuDHD, PDA, Emotional Regulation, SEND parent, Meltdowns, Special Needs Parent

Her sister was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school. So was her dad. And JoAnn spent years insisting it definitely wasn't her.

Her sister presented the way we all expect ADHD to look. Couldn't sit still, all over the place, pushing back against authority. JoAnn didn't look like that at all, so she assumed she was in the clear, and quietly carried a lot of shame instead. The klutziness. Running into walls. Going into class determined that today would be the day she paid attention, and catching herself 10 minutes later having heard none of it.

It took her husband, who is autistic and was diagnosed only about 18 months ago, pointing out the things that made her different from the norm before it all clicked into place.

I loved how she describes their marriage. They are jazz. He's the bass and the drum keeping everything on time. She's the saxophone doing riffs all around it to keep it interesting.

Then we get into what she actually does, which is helping mamas put down the guilt. And she says something I hadn't heard before: guilt isn't the villain. Used correctly, it is a pro-social emotion. It is the thing that nudges you to reply to the message you ignored, to repair the relationship, to reach back out. Guilt only turns dangerous when it stops describing what you did and starts describing who you are.

She walks through the guilt equation, which is expectations minus reality, and the gap versus gain shift, which is one of those tiny changes that quietly rearranges your whole day.

And then there is a coffee shop story involving the wrong woman, a free coffee and a genuinely spectacular misunderstanding, which she tells to make a point about what to do with the moments you would normally replay for weeks.

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She teaches families how to sleep for a living. And then her own bedtimes fell apart.

Michelle is a paediatric sleep specialist, so she knew every rule in the book. Bath, teeth, pyjamas, story, bed. It had worked. And then, seemingly overnight, it stopped. Bedtime battles climbing, teeth brushing refused, baths refused. She sat in it feeling baffled, convinced she must be doing something wrong, and quietly not telling anyone because how do you admit you are struggling with bedtime when bedtime is your job?

What shifted it wasn't a new technique. It was letting go of the shoulds and starting to ask a different question: what is my child's nervous system carrying right now, and how many demands am I stacking on top of it in the last 30 minutes of the day?

So she spread it out. Teeth after dinner. The nightly bath quietly retired, because honestly, how dirty are they? Instead of a routine her children had to get through, an evening they could float through.

We also get properly into the 4am wake-ups, because so many of us are living there. Michelle explains what is actually going on in the body at that hour, and it turns out to be several things at once rather than one thing you are failing to fix.

And her one small thing to try tonight is not what you would expect from a sleep specialist. It isn't dimmer lights or a calmer voice. It's jumping, tug of war with a dressing gown cord and pushing into the bathroom scales, because pressure through the body boosts melatonin naturally and laughing together does more for a nervous system than a quiet room ever will.

If bedtime in your house has stopped feeling like relief and started feeling like recovery, this one is for you.

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She married young, with an anxiety diagnosis, and assumed the wedding would fix it. It did not.

Jackie is back, which makes her my very first repeat guest, and this conversation went exactly where you would expect two ADHD brains to go, which is everywhere. We didn't prepare questions. We just hit record.

She talks first about showing up authentically online versus in real life, and why the internet has always felt safer than a room with two people in it.

Then we get into marriage, and this is the bit I keep thinking about. Jackie married two weeks out of college with what she was told was anxiety and what turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD and a stack of sensory differences she wouldn't understand until she was 31. Her husband's brain works nothing like hers. For years, that difference felt like a choice he was making, and when something feels like a choice, it feels like an attack, and then you're both defensive and nobody is actually talking.

What changed was understanding that every brain is just trying to feel safe, and different brains find safety in different places.

She is also clear about the line, which I appreciated. Neurodivergence isn't an excuse for bad behaviour. You do not get to say I can't. But you absolutely get to say I do it differently.

We talk about the "manual car" idea, which is possibly the kindest reframe I've heard for the fantasy that a partner should just know. We talk about touch, and the moment Jackie realised it wasn't her husband she was recoiling from, it was a specific type of touch. And we talk about the middle chunk of life, the survival years, where the laughter quietly disappears and you look up one day and realise you're partner roommates.

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She was 21 years old before she found out that most people do not love their job.

Angela grew up in a family where her dad fell in love with cars at 12, shined shoes outside a church for a quarter a go, bought and fixed up his first car at 16, and built a life inside the thing he loved. Nobody sat her down and explained any of this. She just absorbed it. Find the thing at 12. Charge for it at 16. Build the career.

So she did. First book of poetry at 7. First novel at 12. Writing other people's papers for money at 16. And then a 30-year career as a ghostwriter with more than 2,000 books behind her.

It wasn't until a friend's dad's retirement party, when Angela earnestly asked him when he first knew he loved insurance, that she found out the rest of the world was not operating this way at all.

What she describes, of course, is monotropic focus. And here is why I wanted to talk to her about it: going all the way down the rabbit hole builds a kind of confidence you cannot get anywhere else. Angela says she has imposter syndrome about plenty of things, but never about writing.

Which is why she is so firm that a special interest is not a reward and should never be used as one. Her advice for the 10-year-old in an Oxford pub with a stack of books about German tanks was simple: fill the house with German tanks.

We also talk about the harder side, which nobody warns you about. Special interests move on. Sometimes right after you have learned everything about skateboarding, or bought the expensive Yu-Gi-Oh card, or rearranged the bedroom. There is real grief in that, and Angela names it honestly.

Then she takes us somewhere I found genuinely brilliant, which is autistic culture. We talk about autism almost entirely in medical language, and yet for most of human history it was simply the way certain people were. Angela has boiled it down to 10 pillars of autistic culture, and she tells a story about her grandmother, cut glass and an encyclopaedic knowledge that came from absolutely nowhere except pure, deep interest.

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If you started out with a clear picture of the kind of parent you'd be, and then real life quietly dismantled the whole thing, this episode is going to feel like someone finally gets it.

This week I'm joined by Carrie Grant, mom of four (one of whom joined their family through adoption), an autistic mama herself, and someone who has run a support group for more than 300 SEND families for nearly 15 years. Carrie talks about the moment she “jumped ship” from the parenting she'd planned to a completely new way of doing things, and how that shift was less a few tweaks and more a total worldview change.

We get into what it means to become a “professional parent” overnight, learning the acronyms, writing the endless emails, holding two worlds together, and how she and her husband David landed on different pages for a while before finding their way back to the same one. Carrie shares the reframe that stuck with me most: our kids don't rise up into our world, we grow up through theirs. She has zero interest in making her children look more neurotypical, and so much interest in who they actually are.

We're also honest about the hard parts. The mornings that swallow whole hours, the days you barely recognize yourself, the loneliness of feeling like no one around you understands. Carrie's answer to all of it is community, the kind of people you can sit with and just say “this morning was hard” without explaining a single thing. She talks about holding space, being held in mind, and why other SEND parents are, in her words, the most amazing parents she's ever met.

And if you're running on empty right now, her take on self-care alone is worth the listen. Spoiler: she gives you full permission to ignore the advice that doesn't fit your life.

Come sit with us. It does get easier, and you are so far from alone in this.

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If you've ever had that quiet little feeling that something with your child is just a bit different, and you couldn't quite put it into words for anyone else, this episode is going to feel like a deep exhale.

This week I sat down with Karla, who taught for 15 years in mainstream schools, moved into specialist neurodiversity settings, and then walked this whole journey herself as a mum. She works with parents in that tender, confusing space before there's any label or answer, and she breaks down the five stages so many of us move through without realising it even has a shape.

We talk about that first nagging feeling. The way we explain it away (it's been a busy term, it's COVID, they're just tired). The dismissal stage, where you start voicing your worries and people look at you like you're imagining it, which Karla says is hands down the hardest part. And then discovery and understanding, where you finally stop and think, no, I've sat with this long enough, I'm going to trust what I'm seeing.

I also share my own GP-told-me-it-was-my-American-accent story, because yes, that was a real thing someone said to me, and we get honest about how quietly we hand our power over to the professionals in the room and start losing our own voice.

The thread running through all of it is simple: you are the expert on your child. Not the playground mums, not the age group, not the assessment table full of people. You. And once you get into the SEN and EHCP side of things, where the system is stretched so thin and the urgency just isn't there, that voice matters more than ever.

If you're sitting in the messy middle right now, exhausted and second-guessing yourself, Karla has a message near the end that I literally soaked in while she said it. Come sit with us for a bit. You're not doing this wrong, and you're definitely not doing it alone.

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When you're hearing this, my family and I are in full wedding celebration mode, because one of my brothers is getting married. And while we are beyond excited, I know that for a lot of us a wedding invite can land with a stomach drop instead of a happy dance.

In this episode I walk you through exactly how we prepare our neurodivergent kids, and my own nervous system, for big family gatherings like weddings. These days stack every tricky thing on top of each other all at once. A new place, loud sounds, bright lights, itchy clothes, unpredictable timing, and a whole lot of social demand. Once you see what your child's nervous system is up against, it gets so much easier to know that a hard moment is not your child being difficult or you failing them.

Then we get practical. I share how we preview the day so it stops being a mystery, how we handle clothes and safe foods, why planning your timing and breaks in advance changes everything, and how one simple message to the host ahead of time can open up a quiet space when you need it. I also walk you through my on-the-day toolkit, what to do when a meltdown starts, and the one short sentence to keep in your back pocket for those well-meaning but not-so-helpful comments.

If you've ever quietly braced yourself before a big event, this one is for you. Leaving early with a regulated child in your arms is not failure. It's a total win, and you are doing a great job, mama.

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Her son signed his first word back after a full year of her signing to him. One year. At a fridge. Asking for milk.

If you have ever been told "have you looked into Makaton?" and then felt your stomach drop because that sounds like one more thing to learn, this conversation is going to feel like a big exhale.

I'm sitting down with Kaley, a Makaton tutor and the mum behind @sign_possible. Her son Rui was diagnosed with low muscle tone and global developmental delay at one, and autism at four. He wasn't hitting milestones, wasn't babbling, wasn't pointing. A speech and language therapist suggested Makaton as a bridge to communication when he was two, and Kaley went all in: she and her husband did the Level 1 and 2 course, then got the nanny, granddad, and both of his nursery key workers on it too.

She is honest about the middle part, the year where nothing came back and she nearly gave up. She is honest about how overwhelming it felt to be handed what looked like a whole new language while everything else in life was still happening. And she is honest about the thing that made it click: she stopped trying to learn all of it and picked five signs.

Rui is seven and a half now. He said his first word at five and a half. It was "me." Then "mummy." Then "yes."

I'll be honest, I learned a huge amount in this one. I know a little ASL but I really didn't know much about Makaton, and Kaley breaks down what it actually is, how it's different from British Sign Language, and exactly where to start if you're sitting there thinking "okay, I think this is us."

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If your child's meltdowns, big feelings, and constant motion have ever left you wondering what is really going on underneath it all, this episode is going to give you a whole new lens.

This week I'm joined by Dana Kay, founder of the ADHD Thrive Institute, who has worked with more than 1,600 families and walked this road with her own son, who was diagnosed at four and is now 16 and thriving. After years of trial-and-error with medication, Dana went back to school, dug into the science, and started looking at ADHD symptoms in a completely different way.

Her big idea is one I keep thinking about: behavior is communication. Instead of asking “why is my child behaving like this,” she invites us to ask “what might be stressing his system.” We talk about the hidden stressors she sees come up again and again in her work, from gut health and food sensitivities to nutrient depletion and that cumulative “trash can” load on the body. She shares the simple, doable first step she gives overwhelmed families (hint: it starts at breakfast and involves zero perfection), plus her no naked carb rule that any tired mama can actually pull off.

We also get real about what thriving truly looks like, and spoiler, it is not a perfect home with zero meltdowns. It is calmer, more connected, more ordinary in the very best way.

A gentle note before you dive in: everything Dana shares here comes from her own experience and her work with families, and every child is different. Think of this as food for thought, not a prescription. Please loop in your own doctor or care team before making changes to food, supplements, or anything else for your kiddo.

If you've been stuck in survival mode and quietly wondering if there's more to the story, come listen. There's so much hope in this one.

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If you've ever stared at a 40-page IEP and thought “I know what all these words mean, but I have no idea what they mean together,” this episode is for you.

This week I'm joined by Vicki Christensen, a parent advocate of about a decade and mom to two boys who both have IEPs and are wonderfully different from each other. Vicki has sat on both sides of these meetings, as the professional in the room and as the mum who once walked in with an empty binder and just hoped everyone was doing the right thing for her son. She's so good at making this stuff make sense.

We get really practical in this one. Vicki shares how to prepare before you ever walk in, like requesting the draft documents a few days ahead so you actually have time to read them, sending your questions and concerns in advance, and making sure the right people are at the table. She talks about leading with curiosity instead of defensiveness when you disagree, and why protecting that long-term relationship with the school matters even on the days you'd love to go in guns blazing. I also share the one thing I make every person in the room do at the start of my son's meetings, and how it shifted everything.

But this isn't only logistics. We talk about how lonely those early years can feel, even when you have a supportive family around you, and Vicki's beautiful reminder that if it feels like you're the only one, that feeling is real, and you're still not actually alone. Her chapter on finding your village is a favorite for a reason. Your village can be small, it can be online, it can look like whatever you need.

Vicki's book, Uniquely Fully Enough: The Neurodivergent Parenting Journey, weaves her family's story together with a “love lesson from a mom” at the end of each chapter, plus quick handbook highlights you can actually use. You can also find her sharing advocacy tips on Instagram.

Come sit with us. Whether you're prepping for a big meeting or just need to feel a little less alone today, this one delivers on both.

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