I wanted to be a ‘chill mom.’ My son needed something different.

• I expected to be a laid-back parent before my son was born.
• Raising a neurodivergent child changed how I think about parenting.
• I learned to focus less on philosophy and more on his actual needs.

As my son has grown, the distance between the “chill mom” I want to be and the mom I actually am has grown wider. I want to give him “90s kid summers,” playing outside for long, unstructured afternoons, but I’ve learned that he thrives on structure and predictability.

I want to sit and gossip with my friends while he plays in another room with their kids, but I’ve learned that this often ends in fights and tears. Like many neurodivergent kids, he has a hard time with emotional regulation, and if there’s not an adult keeping an eye on him, things can go south very fast.

On the other hand, independence is very important to him. His nervous system is constantly on high alert, and this means control is a very big deal. He wants to brush his own teeth, choose his own clothes, and make his own decisions. I can’t just give him a cookie for dessert; he has to choose one from the box.

As he gets older, I want to respect and foster his desire for autonomy, while also providing enough structure and guidance to support him.

It can be hard to parent a neurodivergent kid

This is a balancing act for every parent, of course. But it’s more challenging as a parent of a neurodivergent kid, because the things that work for other kids don’t always work for mine.

Sometimes choices are essential; other times choices lead to meltdowns. Sometimes letting him run around with his friends at an outdoor concert turns into a magical night catching fireflies; other times it ends with him screaming and me dragging him back to the car.

Of course, there are also things that are easy for him, things that are a challenge for other kids and their parents. He can sit through a three-hour musical (and discuss the characters’ backstories and motivations in great detail afterward). He can carry on a genuinely interesting conversation with a table full of adults about anything from reincarnation (“I think I will come back as a kitten”) to where the Easter Bunny lives (“the East pole”). He’s very popular at my parents’ retirement home. When he was in kindergarten, he got suspended for kicking the principal in the head and then, later the same afternoon, he astonished a group of my colleagues by sitting perfectly still and paying close attention to a new play reading. I felt like I had emotional whiplash, going from feeling like a terrible mom to an amazing mom so quickly.

My child is his very own person

I don’t think either my son’s strengths or his challenges have much to do with anything I’ve done. It’s easy to think of our children as reflections of ourselves, but my son is very much his own independent person.

Before I had him, I spent a lot of time thinking about my “parenting philosophy,” reading books, and talking to friends about different approaches. I thought it was something you decided on in the abstract: this is the kind of person I am, and so this is the kind of parent I’m going to be. But since having an actual child, I’ve realized that my parenting philosophy can’t come from books or friends or even who I am. It has to come from who my child is, and what he needs, and it has to be constantly evolving and changing.

I feel like I’m doing it all wrong most of the time. It would be easier if I had a clear set of guidelines. But even though I doubt almost everything about my parenting, the one thing I never doubt is how much I love my son. So all I can do is keep paying attention and trust that even if my parenting journey looks very different from what I once imagined, this love will be enough to guide us.