Podcast Episode 7 - Neurodivergent Parenting & Relationship Distress (Final Version)
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Parenting Neurodivergent Teens and Young Adults podcast. I'm Dr. Ed Callahan, a PhD-level therapist, coach, and educator. For over 30 years, I've helped parents like you guide their neurodivergent teen or young adult towards independence, confidence, and a thriving adulthood, with far less conflict, distress, and resistance.
If you are overwhelmed, unsure what to do next, or just want to parent in a way that truly works for your neurodivergent child, then you are in the right place. As you have likely discovered, conventional parenting approaches just don't work, causing additional harm that just makes things worse. I want you to know this is not your fault.
I know a better way. I can help you change your family dynamics by understanding neurodivergence and then applying [00:01:00] approaches that will bring peace, connection, and confidence back to your home. Let's get started. Okay. Amy and I were just having a conversation about some of the strain that parenting can put on a relationship, particularly parenting a neurodivergent teen or young adult.
And so again, Amy J., thank you for joining me for this discussion. I really appreciate your time and effort and your perspective on things. So we did want to record a shorter version of a video to cover this topic, and we can go into more, uh, detail about it later. It's important to talk about because parenting in general is challenging on relationships because each parenting partner comes into the relationship with a different background, being raised differently by their families of origin, and a lot of times when we get under stress, we revert back to our auto-programming or the parenting we received as a kid starts to kick in when we get under stress or if we're not paying attention.
Sometimes it takes a lot of intentional [00:02:00] understanding to change the patterns that we were raised with by our parents, and hopefully a lot of that was good. Hopefully we had good parents and they took good care of us. But a lot of times they were flawed themselves and they were having their own challenges, right?
Because life is hard and parenting is hard at times, so- And all families have dysfunction, for sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And again, for all the same reasons, right? And even with our generation, going to therapy and doing parenting and stuff like that w- and our parents didn't do that as commonly as a generation.
And then our generation, we started getting more into that and saw the need for therapy and learning things and studying. Moving forward from here, parents will, one, have a lot more resources to help them learn how to parent in effective ways and will be more open to embracing those resources. So there's a lot more, obviously a lot more resources available now, and then hopefully a lot more willingness on parents' parts to embrace those resources and try to improve.
However, when we get to the parenting a neurodivergent teen or young adult, then again, I'd say about [00:03:00] 90% of the parenting advice that you're gonna get through books or videos or going to workshops and all that kind of stuff is gonna be good parenting advice in general, but it's just not gonna be great.
Again, I always say, like almost the opposite or contraindicated for a neurodivergent teen or young adult, so. And I'd say it's 99.9% ,because I swear there's not hardly anything out there. There really just isn't. Okay. Well, you know, I'm trying to be generous. I'm trying to... But yeah, you're right. Again, the majority of the parenting advice out there is not going to be tailored for a child with ADHD or autism or basically any of the stuff that we talk about when we talk about neurodivergence and neurodiversity.
So let's talk about how- Can you get unified as a parent? And when we were talking about this before, the idea of communication is always important, and in fact in my program I'm quite a bit in depth into strategies for communication and problem solving and working together as a partnership and all the [00:04:00] important things that go along with working not only with each other as a parental unit, but also how to get the whole family on the same page in terms of how to talk through issues.
So that'll be a topic for another day. So communication certainly would be the obvious yes, and that means working together hopefully in advance to discuss situations and come up with strategies and if you're gonna hold a consequence or hold a boundary, that both of you are on the same page so you're not inadvertently stepping over each other or working against each other, which can easily happen in a situation where the stress level's high and the- Right
action is happening and one parent has to make a decision or they're getting in their downstairs brain, they're getting emotionally distressed, and so make the decision that the other parent wouldn't necessarily agree with. And what was really challenging for my husband and I is we were communicating about what was going on, but we just weren't in agreement.
[00:05:00] And a- at least my experience has been that the parent who is doing most of the disciplining and spending the most time with the neurodiverse child tends to favor more of the nurturing because they're living it day to day. And the parent who may not be there as much sometimes struggles to understand, "Well, why didn't you just tell them to do this?"
Or, "Why didn't you have them do that?" 'Cause w- it's easy to look at the moment from afar and say, "Well, this should've worked," but we all know when you're in the moment, you know darn well that's probably not gonna work out. Right. And so what helped for my husband and I, besides communication, which is a huge thing, was working with you to get on the same page about what the needs of a neurodiverse child are, and how you parent them to build trust and establish longer term relationship.
Yeah. [00:06:00] Besides handling and deciding how to handle or strategize on a specific circumstance, which I think is really important, and again, I think that's where the coaching can really be helpful is like, "Hey, this is what's happening with our particular kid in this situation," and having you both participate in coming up with a strategy or a plan and agreeing on that plan and then trying to execute it, right?
Which can be tricky too. Right. But the idea of at least being on the same page to start with is very, very helpful. But backing that up farther to your point, learning together what does neurodiversity mean? What does autism spectrum disorder mean? What does attention deficit disorder mean? And what does the combination of those two things mean?
Or pathological demand avoidance or just demand avoidance. All these kind of tricks that are, um, common in neurodivergence in trying to parent from a neurodivergent-informed parenting mindset. So getting that foundation together is very, very helpful. And then some additional guidance on how do we take that information now that we are both on the [00:07:00] same page in terms of understanding neurodiversity, and then how do we apply that to our specific son or daughter in this particular situation, right?
So it goes from, one, you gotta get the big picture knowledge of neurodiversity, and then you gotta narrow down into how does this apply to our kid, our flavor of neurodiversity or neurodivergence, and how do we work on that? And then how do we as parents put together a plan on how we're gonna intervene- Well, it's so funny
or change things or what strategy we're gonna take. So it's, you know, it's a big process. Well, and when you say it intellectually, I understand it. My husband and I still slip in terms of not always being on the same page, but we thankfully have finally gotten there, but it's a long process, right? Uh, it takes a while, but it's so worth it because the household improves, the relationship with your spouse improves, relationship with your child improves, your child's self-esteem appr- improves.
But, you know, intellectually you can understand what you're supposed to do. You really gotta [00:08:00] be working on it all the time- With each other, and for me, what I found was that we were both learning the same things around the same time. That was very helpful. Working with you and we're both talking about situations and thinking about them through the lens of we know what a neurodiverse child is, we know what their needs are.
Something as simple as they're not doing this to annoy you. Something's wrong, right? They're feeling distressed inside, and once you start to focus on that, it does make it easier to be a little bit more objective. Right. Yeah, and again, if you really understand what's going on, then it makes it easier for you to respond in effective ways, right?
Rather than being, feeling disrespected or your son or daughter is being oppositional or something along those lines, that they're, that there's really missing that big piece, that there is actually a difference in neurological processing here. It's not just [00:09:00] them being resistant or lazy or whatever, right?
So when you work together with your son or daughter to solve a problem, I want parents to see this as a project that we work on together, that it's not us- Mm-hmm ... as the parents against them as the kids. But, and that's true of how I want you as parents to see it too, like, "Hey, we need to learn about this.
We need to study. We need to get the support that we need." And in doing that together is something that can build the relationship, right? Instead of having disagreements over how to handle situations, you're getting educated to learn how to do a new thing, a new behavior, a new way of approaching things, or a new way of seeing how your son or daughter, a better understanding of your son or daughter.
And if you're seeing that as something that you as parenting partners are doing as a project together, you're doing something together to learn and grow, and then work towards figuring out how to take that information and apply it to your specific son or daughter. And it's you guys working together versus what can commonly happen and start driving a wedge between you, that you're [00:10:00] working against each other unintentionally, so.
Right. But one of the other consequences of getting on the same page was it improved our marriage. And I'm gonna go off on a tangent here, but one of the other unintended consequences was it, it, it made it easier for me, and I don't wanna speak for my husband, but I think it did for him too, to tune out all the noise.
You get a lot of noise from other people. Family members will tell you how to parent your child, friends will tell you how to parent your child, and you start to learn that- They're not right. A lot of that stuff can creep in as doubt as a parent, 'cause we're all insecure and we all wanna do the best we can, but we're all not sure about what we're doing.
And it made me certainly a lot more confident to be able to say to people, "No, he's neurodiverse and he doesn't react to things the same way. If going through this kind of thing, doing that is like pouring gasoline on a fire." And so that has been really helpful [00:11:00] for me as a parent to not have that stuff get to me anymore.
I just say what I have to say and I move along, 'cause I feel confident now that I'm doing the right thing for my son or my daughter. Yeah, and again, that, and that noise can really work on either partner, right? Like, maybe one of you gets it, like you've done some study and you understand more about what's going on, but your, the other partner has not, and so they're still in that traditional mindset, like, "We just have to hold stronger boundaries," or, "We just have to take more things away," or, "Apply more consequences."
And then that creates a very different approach towards how to handle situations as they come up, and then that drives a wedge not only, like you said, between you as parents, but between you and your son or daughter as well. So the level of difficulty is higher in this situation. And again, parenting is, is a challenge for all of us.
But it's something that kind of creates the most growth ever I think in our lives as well in some ways, trying to figure all this out. But if you do have a neurodivergent son or daughter, then that creates another level of [00:12:00] complexity, just because it's not something that is commonly understood and commonly understood how to appropriately nurture or raise or help support a kid that's neurodiverse versus even just traditional parenting and raising a kid that's neurotypical, right?
Agreed. Yep. So yeah, so I guess the big, big takeaway here is it's definitely important to get the information you need to be successful as a parent, and as much as possible to have both partners or whoever's involved in the parenting, even whether it's grandparents or aunts and uncles or whoever's in the- Agreed
in the inner circle. Yep. Or if you're a single parent, same thing, right? Just get this information so that you can then know how to parent your child from a neurodivergent-informed parenting perspective, and then get as much support as you can to work together if you're in a parenting partnership, or just- Educate your village
get the information you need. And [00:13:00] also- Then know how to a-a-adopt all that to your specific son or daughter. Because again, there's a wide variety within neurodiversity and different situations that call for different types of interventions. So all that I think is definitely doable, and there's some real things that can help, and I've seen now hundreds of families be able to make a big dramatic change in their family dynamic, where it was super chaotic and they're feeling like the, it's the end of the world, and th-they're not sure if their marriage is gonna survive.
They're not sure if they're gonna be able to- Yep ... parent their son or daughter into get through the teenage years, let alone into an independent young adulthood. And so it can drive a huge wedge in a lot of families, and I say unnecessarily because there are things you can do, and there's information out there that can help.
And my program is completely designed to help Get everyone on the same page, work together not only as a parenting partnership but as a family to work with your neurodiverse son or daughter, and the other siblings as well, to support your other siblings as well in this [00:14:00] situation. And just bring the whole family unit together in a much more productive way.
Then the family can feel like they're moving forward. You can feel good as a parent yourself, you can feel good with your relationship. It can be something that can build the marriage or increase your parenting relationship and the connectedness there, let alone support the neurodivergent kid and also their siblings and their relationships, because that's a whole nother thing, right?
It's like this- Yeah, we do need to talk about sibling relationships at some point ... complete situation like- So as a family, a work in progress. But for us, it, it did all of those things. It helped our marriage, it helped our son feel safer and trust us more. It helped his sibling, uh, who is also neurodiverse, have more peace just being in the household.
That would be the thing. Our household is not perfect, and it never will be, but it certainly is a much happier, more peaceful, ba- versus when we were working in survival mode. And I know every parent who's out there understands. You wake up in the morning and you think, "Well, what's gonna happen today," right?
I'm so glad not to be there anymore. [00:15:00] Right. And I really feel like- Yeah, and as someone said, just putting out- ... working with you has made such a difference for our family. Oh, great. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And again, I think it is going from crisis, check my free training, From Chaos to Confidence. Trying to make that transition- Right
from just, "Oh, man, what's gonna happen today?" And having to scramble to put out fires, or just all the challenges can come with that. And then the other siblings feeling neglected and all that kind of stuff that comes with it. So yeah. So again, there are things that can be done. I've seen it happen over time, and I've put together all this experience to help families be able to navigate through this.
And not just navigate through it, like, in terms of survival, but going from surviving to thriving and to improving relationships rather than just getting back to some normal state. I want it to go beyond that into a thriving, healthy, happy family- Really enjoy all being together ... healthy family relationship.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. In the long game, you wanna be able to be invited to the wedding, get to see the grandkids, you know, as parents. You're doing the [00:16:00] hard part now. You wanna get the fruits of that labor, which would be all the joys and everything that comes from after they're launched into adulthood and all that kind of stuff.
So anyways, that's the goal, and definitely have information and courses and direct intervention and all the kind of things that can really make a difference that help you as a family unit get on the right track. Again, Amy, thank you for your time and doing this quicker video. I appreciate it. Yep. And I'm s- And, uh-
just so glad we found you, 'cause it made a difference for us, so. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Well, until next time. We'll catch you guys on the next video or podcast. Thanks a lot. Bye, Ed. Bye. Take care. Thanks for joining me today. Remember, every episode of this podcast comes with a free learning guide and workbook to help you practice these tools and create lasting change at home.
Click the link in the show notes to turn this podcast into your own personal parenting masterclass. [00:17:00] If you are in need of help and guidance now, click on my calendar link in the show notes immediately to schedule a personal call with me to explore which level of support will be the best fit for finding peace, confidence, and connection, and ultimately success for your family.
And as always, please like and subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share this podcast with other parents or friends and family members who need to gain understanding or who are in need of encouragement. I'm Dr. Ed Callahan, and I know a better way. Let me provide you with the knowledge and tools to reduce the pain and to help you guide your family to greater peace and success.
Thanks again for listening. I'll see you in the next episode.
I sincerely hope that you have found this content helpful. Please note, as with all my programs and content, this is for [00:18:00] parent training and educational purposes only, and does not represent therapy nor qualify as establishing a therapist-client relationship. Thanks again.
