Caring for a Neuro-Targeted Child

The world is not kind to neurodivergent people, and that goes double for neurodivergent children. Almost every aspect of neurodivergence, from intense special interests to surprising emotional responses to distractibility, is a target of peer ridicule, and many of them also become the media of institutional mistreatment. Indeed, stress and trauma responses are a major part of how neurodivergence is diagnosed, to the point that a well-supported neurodivergent child might escape the diagnostic pipeline altogether. It’s a near-certainty that neurodivergent children will reach adulthood with some manner of trauma, and that trauma will almost certainly be connected to this sort of pervasive ableism. But what does that mean for us, as adults interested in the well-being of these children?

Who Are We Helping?

It’s not difficult to identify neurodivergent children who have experienced ableism. After all, it’s most of them. What can be a bit trickier is figuring out how to get your help through to them, because that kind of harm tends to leave some characteristic behavioural and personality traces.
•    Healthy distrust of authority.
•    Confusion
•    Sensitivity
•    Self-loathing
•    Defensiveness

Authority

For young people, authority figures and the institutions they either embody or represent are a different class of being from peers and other people they can relate to person-to-person. Parents, doctors, school systems, and similar bodies can act upon a child without that child’s enthusiastic consent in ways that peers cannot and that fact renders these relationships fundamentally distinct. Children are smart enough to know when an institution, or its representative, is acting in its own best interest rather than the child’s, or is providing advice that would make more sense for a different, perhaps neurotypical child. A neurodivergent child, as a result, is especially likely to regard kind words from most adults as just noises adults make that they shouldn’t regard as meaningful or that they should dissect for cues about how that power might soon manifest, not as signs that an adult is truly there for them.

The two most powerful sentences in the English language are

You were right

and

You are not alone.

Use them.

— Alyssa Gonzalez

Before anything else is possible, an adult who wants to help a child must establish trust. And for a child with this history, that means validating their struggles and observations and, even more than that, being willing to directly state that other adults failed them. Absent this admission, that child is likely to think of you as part of the grand mass of unhelpful adults, more interested in covering for or preserving relationships with other adults than with actually addressing the child’s problems.

Confusion

A neurodivergent child led astray by the adults in their life is likely to not really understand themself or their struggles. This is even more true if adults have been directly lying to them, such as if they told the child that the other kids don’t find them weird and off-putting when any observer can see that they do. Whether desperate for understanding, resigned to not having it, or simply flailing until something works, they cannot act on their own until they can make sense of what they’re living.

If confusion is the topmost concern, you’re in luck. Confusion is an innately negative drive state and confused people usually feel motivated to do something about it if they don’t already feel helpless. Resources that might help make sense of the situation may well be all that’s needed; after that, the child may be able to make progress on their own. Even if they can’t, they’ll be in a better position to both ask for and receive the specific help they need once they know what their problem actually is.

Sensitivity

Neurodivergence often comes with big emotions, bigger than is already typical for children. This can come up especially loudly when a neurodivergent child repeatedly tries and fails at the same task, especially if it’s a relational task such as engaging with new people or self-advocating. If they’re still trying and haven’t given up yet, that’s good, because it means they still have hope and you can direct that hope toward more useful actions. Find out what is troubling this child and give the most tailored, specific advice you possibly can. This sensitivity means the stakes are high and the child will have an outsized reaction to any failure, so choose your advice well.

The key danger to avoid is the perverse peace that can be found in repeated failure. Being able to reliably generate the same outcome over and over, even if that outcome is horrible, creates a sense of power and control, whereas trying new things is vulnerable. A person can expect, brace for, even learn to wield a familiar pain, but not a new one. This path leads to self-harm, and it is one that sensitive souls like these need to be steered away from with advice that actually works for them, in the situation specifically in front of them.

Along similar lines, this child needs a good peer group that can create the safety to let them grow. This peer group can help this child expand their comfort zone and learn to reach outside it with more confidence, and it can also help them practice the scenarios that currently fill them with such fear. Such a group can take the fright out of situations they’ll encounter in the wider world, enabling them to move forward.

This child’s sensitivity is a gift, not a curse. Though the child likely does not see it yet, this kind of attunement to others’ emotions will serve them extremely well later in life, when it will make all the difference in friendships, intimate relationships, workplaces, and more. It is a tremendous waste to let them bury it beneath scar tissue, where it cannot help them navigate social situations. They need to outgrow this fear, not sublimate it.

Self-Loathing

One of the most common traits of neurodivergent children is self-loathing. It is easy for them, especially if they’re already more sensitive than most, to turn their frustration inward and start wishing they were otherwise. Ill-meaning adults often encourage this sentiment, demanding total suppression of neurodivergent traits (especially in public) and treating any emergence thereof as a hostile act. Similarly, the child may feel that no one truly understands them, or that any information about themself they share becomes a weapon in others’ hands. Whatever the path, the result is the same: self-loathing, often paired with the desire to be remade “normal.”

Right now, this child does not see a path to a future that feels like their own. What they see ahead is either a torrent of perpetual failure as their neurodivergent traits ruin them and leave them without any real future at all, or a self-extinction wherein they actually do manage to suppress or extinguish this side of themself and grow into an adult they cannot recognize. You, as an adult in their life, must show them that there is a third path: a future wherein their neurodivergence becomes an integrated part of them worth celebrating, not free of difficulty but also not uniformly destructive. Provide possibility models that show this kind of future, so that they can imagine it. 

Along similar lines, this child also needs a supportive peer group. Peer connections provide an invaluable space to share perspectives and coping strategies, and in particular can provide insight into matters entirely too current for adults to know as well as other children do. There is a dark side to peer support, however, as “blackpill” groups exist online for virtually every issue and serve to actively cultivate hopelessness about it. There is no responsible way to keep a child away from these spaces directly, but with enough support, they can be optimistic enough that even if they find them, they end up getting kicked out for ruining the mood with their success.

Once this child can accept the pieces of themself they once hated, they can begin to grow and realize their future potential.

Dismissal

Sometimes, you don’t find them before they’ve already given up. A child may arrive in your care openly dismissive of others’ advice or the idea that engaging with them has any value. They may seem lazy, disaffected, above it all, and uninterested in the matters of their own life, but it’s a mistake to think this is who they truly are. A child like this has learned that engagement is a path to pain and has opted instead to withdraw into themself.

The key thing to understand is that this is armour. When nothing matters and nothing feels real, nothing that happens to a person is happening to them. It’s all happening to the projection, the mask, the outer shell: bullying, bad grades, tripping and falling, everything. This protects the soul inside from pain that they long ago decided could not be defeated, only endured. The problem is that good things don’t get in, either. This kind of outward numbness, indeed dissociation, does not discriminate, and it leads to a dull and lifeless existence.

Few children like this are truly as “above it all” as they seem. There is almost always something they still care about enough to experience excitement, and it is would-be benevolent adults’ role to find that thing and use it to get them to open a little. If the others are storms to calm or boats to navigate through tight channels, this one is tinder to be lit. But proceed carefully. When dissociation is one’s preferred defense, what is inside that armour is usually fragile. You must make sure that, when that shell cracks, it’s because the child emerged, not because they shattered.
The person inside the shell is almost guaranteed to be an especially sensitive soul who, likely, has few other coping mechanisms available. They have much to learn about how to exist without such a blunt defense, and they should not be left to learn it in the same situation that led them to put on that armour in the first place. Each such failed emergence makes the next one more difficult. Show them a better, healthier way.

Conclusion

You, as an adult in a position to make life better for a neurodivergent child who has been mistreated, have three tasks before you: Convince them to trust you. Show them a better way. And help them find themselves. What this means will depend on exactly what damage this hurtful world has done and how that child has responded. But there are patterns, and there are stories that resonate across those patterns. We can help them see how much better things can be. I believe in us.