How to Balance Support and Independence With Neurodivergent Teens
What Dr. Emily King wants you to know about your teen or tween, so you can help them gain confidence and life skills as they embark on a new school year.
OMG! This summer Ocean has gained a lot of new life skills!
As I chatted with Dr. Emily W. King of Learn With Dr. Emily the other day, I realized that the foundations for those skills didn’t begin this year. His journey toward independence started before he could walk.
That perspective, and the realistic, neurodiversity-affirming advice Dr. Emily gave during our conversation, makes this the most valuable 40 minutes I’ve spent in a long time, and I bet you’ll agree. Wherever your kid is at, if you want to encourage their autonomy, there’s something for you in this episode of Mindfully Parenting Atypical Kids Podcast. Listen, watch, or read the transcript below…
Encouraging Neurodivergent Teens With Dr. Emily
Raising neurodivergent teens requires us to walk the razor's edge between offering support and encouraging independence...
...it's a balance that can sometimes feel elusive.
I'm Kate Lynch, and the other day I discussed this with Dr. Emily W. King, a child psychologist with a wealth of experience working with neurodivergent kids.
Before she became a parent, Dr. Emily was a licensed psychologist. Despite all her academic knowledge and training, having her own kids and working with her clients provided the real education. Nothing prepares you for the emotional experience of parenting. Knowledge helps, but understanding how our brains and bodies work together—in vastly different ways—comes from lived experience. As Dr. Emily put it, “Lived experience is just as valuable as any letters we have behind our name.”
Every child is different, and each family figures out what work best for them. For instance, my son is now comfortable taking the subway to school, although that journey had its challenges. He has navigated train disruptions, struggled with confusion, and yet persisted, growing more independent over time.
Dr. Emily noted that our kids are on their own timelines, and traditional age-based developmental milestones don’t apply to neurodivergent kids. Trusting the process, allowing for those inevitable challenges, and seeing them as growth opportunities are critical. Understanding and accepting this can alleviate some parental anxiety.
Sometimes, teens might feel they no longer need certain therapies, even when their parents think otherwise. Emily suggested a collaborative approach: understanding the child’s perspective, discussing their goals, and finding compromises that respect their feelings while ensuring they get the support they need.
One particularly touching moment Dr. Emily recalled was when her son unexpectedly grabbed her hand in a crowd, a simple yet profound reminder that there’s a last time for everything—we just don’t know when it will be.
By sharing experiences and learning from each other, we can help our neurodivergent kids feel safe, understood, and empowered to grow.
Join the Movement! Come Together to Create a More Inclusive World for Our Kids, One Parent at a Time...
If you’re anything like other parents I talk to, you’re seeking 3 things:
Connection with other parents who get it.
Support, empathy and guidance through the rough spots.
Resources to help your children.
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Transcript:
Emily King: I was a licensed psychologist and finished graduate school and all my training before I had children. I talked to many people who come to this work because of their children or adjacent to something else they were doing. Honestly, I learned most of what I know from my clients and my own kids.
Nothing that I know has shielded me from the emotional experience of all the internal shifting that had to happen for me to, take care of myself to be available to co regulate with my kid, all the ups and downs, there's no knowledge.
It just goes straight to the understanding of how our brains and bodies work together, but are so different, right? You can know all this stuff and not be able to implement it or not have the energy to. I always say lived experience is just as valuable as any letters we would have behind our name. That's why I love talking to anyone. We can keep learning from each other. And not to mention, I was in graduate school 20 years ago. This is a rapidly developing field of research and we just continue learning together.
Kate Lynch: Absolutely. And that's what I love about community. I learn so much from everyone in the community and, the power of being in a circle. In a group that is not hierarchical. So that's the way that I love working with parents, and it really informed my parenting too, because my son taught me how to parent. There is no way that we could have had a top down parent child relationship. It just wouldn't work.
Emily King: They all do. They teach us how. There's no one size fits all. There's just a lot of different ideas, and we have to choose what feels right for us, our kid, our family.
Kate Lynch: I am so overjoyed to have Dr. Emily King. She is a child psychologist known for her expert advice in real everyday terms, and you'll be able to use what she talks about today, not sometime in the future. It's real. And that's the kind of support we need, right? A former school psychologist. Dr. Emily specializes in working with neurodivergent kids and teens, their parents, and the educators helping them grow up in a world not designed for them. She's also the parent to neurodivergent kids who teach her everything she didn't learn in graduate school. Welcome, Dr. Emily. Thank you so much for being here on Mindfully Parenting Atypical Kids. I am so excited. I think we're going to talk about how to balance support and autonomy with neurodivergent tweens and teens, but we can talk about whatever you want to talk about because I know it'll all be valuable.
Emily King: Yes. I'm currently parenting tweens and teens. And I know you are as well. I sure have . So we were excited about this topic. Thank you so much Kate, for having me.
Kate Lynch: So Ocean is starting high school in September. And I know parents are like, oh, yay, our kids are back into school or, I heard a lot of parents recently in a group I was hosting talk about that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Do you know that feeling?
Emily King: Yeah. It's we're so conditioned for things to be hard that we don't believe it. We don't trust it when we don't enjoy it. And then it's hard to enjoy it, right? It is hard to enjoy it. The example I always give to my clients, and then I've experienced this myself is when you have a lack of something happening, like you're conditioned.
For your kid to get upset when you leave the house or you're conditioned for your kid to complain about that plate or that noise or that whatever it is, like we're expecting a negative and then we have an absence of that because of growth or maybe a treatment that's working or whatever. It's almost like you look around, you might look at your partner, you might say to text your friend like, Oh my gosh.
I think it's okay. And then you don't believe it. You don't trust it until you, you see it more and more. But the truth is that our kids do grow and mature. We just don't know when it's going to happen because they're on their own timeframe, which is so hard for, I don't know about you, but for me. I need a plan, I love a plan. I'm one of those people that mapped out things really nicely before I had children, and then there's just, no plan. And you just follow the next right thing. So when school starts, I always take it one school year at a time, but you're always wondering. There's always a honeymoon, first of all. I tend to find that the honeymoon for lots of neurodivergent kids, whether that is because of anxiety or because of routines or inattention, I'm not really sure, but just qualitatively speaking, the honeymoon sometimes lasts a little longer.
And then some autistic, really routine kids, can get into a routine fast. And if it goes well and they're feeling connected, they love it. So the honeymoon can just be different. Again, the timeframe unique to your kid. But we have to just trust our kid, trust the process, trust the people they're with during the day.
And every school year in my experience has been different. I have a rising fifth grader and a rising 11th grader. So I've done this many times before.
With tweens and teens, but especially with neurodivergent teens, figuring out when to step back, when to walk beside them and model, when to not save them, when to save them, all those things, I'd love to chat more about.
Kate Lynch: And that's what I need to know. Living in Brooklyn, in New York City, I'll just say Ocean has had his own timeline for independence, and sometimes he really surprises me, but often I'm more eager for his independence than he is. And that has happened many different phases from learning to put on his own pants, to now taking the subway.
And now that he's actually going to and from camp on the subway by himself, and even going after camp to meet up with a friend at a different subway stop, on a different train line. He's doing these things and I've just got chills thinking about it.
But also there's that little bit of hesitation about safety. And is he going to be all right? Because I've had, last summer, he tried it a few times and it proved really difficult. He had some trains that weren't running. He had some panicked moments. Wonder of wonders he survived and he is gonna have to take the subway to school this year. And I cannot go back and forth with him every day. So he had a bridge program, which is so wonderful that they had this bridge program. He was able to go to for two weeks and the first morning his dad went with him on the subway and I picked him and I said, this is the only day.
Because what I've found is if he does something more than twice in a row, in his mind it's a routine. So I was like, we're going to do this once, and maybe on special occasions, but in general, this is going to be your thing, and I'll offer you all the remote support I can. Leave early, don't worry about what time you get there or get home.
It's camp, it's not school. There's no academic pressure. So he's really been pushing himself and I'm so proud, but also, there's that little, when's the other shoe going to drop that little, fear that's holding back some of the gratitude and some of the relief that, that he's really stepped into independence.
Emily King: Yeah it's so amazing that he's doing those things and it sounds like your city and your culture within your city have demanded that.
And that's not our reality where we live. We have to drive or walk everywhere. We do live in a neighborhood where my fifth grader walks to school and I trust him with that.
We still drive my older son is not driving. And so figuring all that out every year in addition to all the teacher stuff and the academic stuff, that's a whole part of their development. And I feel like it becomes even more important as we get older. In our culture, we emphasize academics so much, but maybe it's just my whole neurodivergent lens of knowing that there are fewer supports as our kids get older. I just really want to lean into helping them be as independent as they can in everyday things, and it's wonderful when we see them, first of all, be motivated to do something independent, because the flip side of this is also true, where children feel safer with a parent or at home, and they're not motivated because it feels scary, and it's maybe not socially motivating.
Usually that's why neurotypical teens are motivated to be independent: because they want to get away from their family and they want to go towards their friends and they want to go to the thing, the movies, the ballpark, like whatever they're doing by themselves.
When we talk about anxiety and autism, if you're not socially motivated to do it and it's overwhelming, of course you want to stay in your little Safe cocoon. And then there are also some of us as parents who feel anxious and sometimes our anxiety can stop encouraging our child. I will say for anyone listening who has younger children that does get better.
I feel personally as a parent, but also in watching parent anxiety evolve over your child's lifespan. You'll get more confident putting them in situations where you know, they've got to figure it out. Or you trust the other people. Whereas, talk to any kindergarten parent and we're all a mess and not wanting to, Let our child walk in there all alone.
The other thing I wanted to acknowledge that you said is waiting for that shoe to drop. I think it will, like sometimes it just will. We don't know when it's going to drop and it might not feel like a shoe is dropping and we're In crisis, but it might be that, like you said, like the train wasn't running or a child misses their ride or they have to problem solve something and that's gonna happen.
And we worry about that stuff happening only because we are trying not to be anxious. So we're trying to control the outcomes, which we can't. And we just have to remember every time our kids problem solve something, they're growing.
They're building their repertoire of when that thing happened, I figured it out.
And as long as we are teaching them what to do and we have some sort of communication in place and we trust that they would know how to ask an authority figure in public for help, or even a stranger and how to figure out a trusted stranger. Those are all things we teach all of our kids, but we've got to think about our own kid. In their mind, what are they really great at? Are they really great at schedules? Are they really great at maps? Or would they be good at calling us and we trust them to call us if something happened and using technology? All of our portable devices and watches and phones and things when we need to help them be more independent.
Because the shoes are going to drop eventually. And we just want to help them know what to do when it happens versus when they're younger. We have anxiety about that because we always had to step in and figure it out, but we're preparing them to do it.
Kate Lynch: Yeah, absolutely. And I have so many directions I could go, but on this theme of Subway since I started it here I was just reflecting back to the different phases and stages.
He could, by the way, probably still in high school, get the little yellow school bus to take him. We could advocate for that. I just didn't want to when I saw that he was capable. Even if he wasn't doing it, I saw the potential there and maybe pushed him a little bit toward that, because I know that if he learns these skills, he'll be more and more independent and that won't be something he'll have to learn later.
Alphabet and numbers were big interests for him, but his gross motor skills were quite delayed. So he was for a long time in a carrier. Taking the train, I was always wearing him.
I taught him my phone number very first thing and our address. And that's what I learned as a city kid growing up too. I grew up in Manhattan. That's just the thing you do, right?
Finally he got too heavy. When he started walking and we were walking together on the train, I had to figure out something that was just super easy so he could learn what the guidelines are. There's this big yellow line between the platform and the train.
And that was my greatest fear. It was like, Oh, there he goes, cause he didn't have any fear. But he understood those hard and fast rules. Don't go by the yellow. Don't go by the yellow. It was like easy enough for him to absorb.
So he got used to taking the train with me and then I would go, okay, look around the subway car, look around the platform. Who would you go to if we got separated? Not just, you should find a family. You should find a, person in a uniform. You should find a, a mom or whatever. But. Look around and not stressing out about it, but just let's practice. Let's role play a little bit.
Emily King: Yeah We've done that in our family with travel I feel so strongly about travel and I'm like, why do I feel so strongly about travel? But it's situations like this of we don't have subways where we live and we Either drive or we have to fly places, but my kids have done subways or trains when we've traveled. We do have trains that we can take different places, but they're just not as common as in the northeast but it's so helpful because They're all systems, right?
And once our kids do it, if you think about how especially autistic brains work, they can do it and they can memorize it and it's a routine and it's a system and there is nothing more rigid than like an airport or a, trains actually, and airplanes could be late, but really they, they follow the protocols, our kids can learn that stuff. And so it just opens up their world beyond their small community and is so helpful. My son specifically is into geography and cultures and different countries and things like that. So he's always been fascinated by traveling. And then my other one just wants to go to every fun thing and every place he can find.
As a family, we've definitely used travel for moments like that, that I don't think we could have taught them as much around town. I think in more like suburban communities where you are driving a lot, it's easier almost to enable your child because you're in a routine of driving to do the grocery shopping and driving your kid to school and all they have to do is get in the car and the food just appears at their house. So we have to actually think outside the box of like, how is my child going to do all these things?
Actually just this morning, I took my oldest for a well visit and we started having me leave the room and having him just talk to the pediatrician and answer questions and fill out paperwork and all of those things that start to happen where we're still there in case they need anything and they're familiar with these people.
But it takes rinse and repeat. It takes practice, just like riding a bike would take practice, all of these skills that I think, in neurotypical world of parenting, kids just learn by watching, they learn by doing, and they don't get so stressed to just figure it out. They'll just figure it out.
I remember going to college and I remember having to teach this kid that lived in my dorm, this guy, how to do his laundry. He was just standing there staring at the washing machine. You need some help. And so obviously no one had told him how to do it. He wasn't super stressed. He had just never had that experience before.
But I think that, we can help our kids do these things long before they leave our house or even if they live with us for a little while, they can become independent, even in the home, which is different than how we were raised. I don't know about you, but I was raised you're 18. You're off to college. You're on your own. I forgot to teach you anything. I guess you'll figure it out.
So raising our kids makes us think about every single skill and what are their strengths? What are their needs? And, we have to go through almost every single skill to think it through, which I think would be good for every parent to do.
But we just have to do it right to help promote our kids independence. And none of us are truly independent. We rely on our communities and we rely on all these services we have in our communities. But whatever level of independence helps us and our child feel socially satisfied, emotionally confident, those are the things we want to get them to when we're thinking about independence.
Kate Lynch: We do drive as well. So it was really interesting when ocean got big enough, when it's just the two of us driving around, to be like a taxi. Yeah. Like, I'm not your chauffeur. You're taller than me now. You could sit up front with me. But it's like that habit. He just always sat in that one seat.
Then I would do things like. Oh, you're really motivated to get some chips. I will pull up at the deli and give you some money and you can go in and buy them. No way. No way. You have to come with me. There's nowhere to park.
So it was always like this give and take. And eventually, he would convince me and I would find a parking spot and we would go together. But, just by planting that seed that I trust that you're able to do this. I think then the next time I would push the point a little bit, and if he really wanted those chips, he would try it. But I never forced him, I never said, Nope, you're six years old now, you can do this.
Because it has nothing to do with age based development.
Emily King: Nothing to do with chronological age. And it actually has nothing to do with chronological age for anyone. It's just that most neurotypical kids do fall, generally speaking, in like the grade or the age expectations, but they're absolutely kids that are learning and doing things above their grade or age level or below and need support. And if there's one thing I wish I could change everyone's mindset right away. It's this: it's not on grade level and off grade level. It's like our kids are a collection of all of these asynchronous skills.
And we just have to be curious about they can do this, but they can't do this yet. So we'll nurture this and we'll step back with that. If there's one thing I would say, it's that you cannot put your kid in this one bucket of now they're 12. So we're going to do this.
You can work towards it and say, now that my kid is this age, we want to start working on this if they want to start working on it. Cause I have the flip side of this happen in my practice with autistic 18 year olds who are very literal and concrete. And they're like I'm 18, so I can do whatever I want now.
So I had to really get curious about helping them understand that there are safety things or skill things skill
that they're still working on, even though the law, I guess. it's really made me think about why do we go to school for 12 years? Why do we say 18 is the year we can do all these things?
Why 21? When we know from brain research that our brains don't fully develop till we're 25. And then neurodivergent brains, there's a bit of a window there. What I say to my 18 year olds who might be very literal about this is just because you're old enough doesn't mean you're ready.
And that's true too younger than 18. There are things I would trust my 11 year old with, that I actually might not trust my 16 year old with yet. They just are two totally different kids. And the reverse is true as well. Yeah, I was going to say vice versa probably too. There are things, my older one, oh my goodness, I would trust him with loads of things that I wouldn't trust the younger one with.
It just depends on, their skills, but also, your kid. Just like we were talking about earlier with being conditioned that something negative would happen. We are conditioned to trust that our kids capable of that thing. And whenever we're questioning if they can do it, usually it's just because it's an emerging skill.
It's not solid yet. But could they do it with some support?
It's hard sometimes to separate our own emotional fears as parents from our confidence that our kid can do it or not. And so asking a therapist or a teacher or they'll say oh, your kid can totally do this at school. If they can do something at school or in therapy, then it's at least an emerging skill, if not an independent skill that we actually are helping them too much on and we don't need to save them from anymore, we can step back. Because our kids, if they're routine oriented, they'll get stuck in a routine if it's easy, right?
Right.
Kate Lynch: So do you see in your families that there's one parent who's more anxious or even it's easier for me to just do this rather than teaching them how to do it and just wants to get it done, or is anxious about the child, not being able to do it or having trouble doing it and just wants to make life easier for them. That's one parent. There's a parent who's like, I think you got this.
Emily King: Or, they're never going to learn it if we don't let them fail or let them fall down. Let's call them the like nurturing parent and like the boundary, throw you in the swimming pool, that kind of.... never done that. Never do that.
But I see this a lot and what it comes from often is how we were parented. When we are in parenting partnerships where, when we're stressed, we lean towards the one that would make us feel safer, right? And so if the strong boundary parent feels fear about their child not developing, or not getting exposed to things, they're going to lean into the, we have to make them do it.
They have, we have to, get them out there and make them do it at whatever costs. And then the nurturing or more anxious parent may feel like we can't do that because they'll get overwhelmed and then shut down and then they'll never make progress. So both are extremes and both are necessary in small doses and we have to meet in the middle.
And what ends up happening is we have to ebb and flow with that. Sometimes we're going to need a boundary approach and sometimes we're going to need a nurturing approach. And these are unique decisions you make with your parenting partner or with your kid. If we're talking about teens, the biggest thing I say to parents with teens is we have to step back from being the authority.
And be a collaborator really sooner than you think, especially if you have a kid who really loves autonomy, who gets anxious without their autonomy which happens a lot in autism and anxiety. And they need to be more of a collaborator even earlier.
Tween age. 10, 11. And that might look like, okay, look, you want to do this. We don't feel like it's safe because you don't have this skill. We agree that you can do it if you learn this skill and we're going to help you with the skill, then what are your ideas? So it's more collaborative. There's still a boundary. There's still some skill building. But there's a compromise in there of I'm saying yes, but or yes, and we're going to do it together. And if you have an impulsive kid, they're not going to that answer because they're going to want to do it in the next second, or we'll have access to something in the next second.
Emily King: So that has to be worked on and mapped out and, delayed gratification is hard. But we have to think about those. Those are two very common parenting dynamics that you usually, I would say almost every parenting duo I work with has one and the other. And maybe some are more extreme than others, but I think it develops over time.
It evolves as we react to each other. And polarize. Yeah. And actually, but I believe both are needed. I believe that, we have to balance each other.
I've also worked with some single parents who have both of these feelings inside of them. They're like I'm nervous sometimes and then sometimes, but this is when we feel guilty, but I'm guilty that I didn't set the boundary or I'm guilty, did I give in too soon? We second guess and we do this even if we have a parenting partner too. But those are the decisions where if you feel guilt or if you feel like you're giving in, that just means you're not confident about the boundary. And I will always recommend just check in with someone outside of your family, whether it's a teacher or a therapist, so that you can get some more objective information, because so much of what we feel as parents is based on our own emotions and really not their skills.
So really just check in on their independence and their skills. We want to just check in with someone outside of the family, or if your parenting partner is not going to be as emotionally affected by the situation, checking in with them to find some balance on how to handle something.
Kate Lynch: Yeah, that's, that sounds great. Thank you.
I've heard this from other parents and I've noticed this in Ocean when they say, I don't need that therapy anymore. I'm not going to go. I've had Ocean sit in on IEP meetings and I said beforehand, I don't want you to say, I don't need this, that, and the other thing anymore during the meeting. You can talk to me about it beforehand or after, but I don't want you to just blurt that out and surprise me because we're a team and we need to decide together how we're going to approach this.
For most of eighth grade, he didn't have an OT. And I wanted to get an RSA and we could go outside of the school and get the OT there. And he was like, no, I don't need it. I didn't argue with him. But I do feel like he still needs it.
So what do you do when kids say, I don't need that anymore. But you know that it, you can see that it's helping them?
Emily King: Yeah. The first question I always ask with that is, What does the child get out of it? And what do you feel like he gets out of it? And those are probably different lists.
And also I question parents, are you getting peace of mind out of it? Cause your kid doesn't care about that, right? And does he feel, is he feeling like he's made enough progress? And are those goals, sometimes kids don't even know what they're working on in therapy. So we have to be clear about these are actually the goals we're working on, and when we revisit that, they're like, oh yeah, I could see how that could be helpful.
Especially if we're talking about kids that have been in therapy a long time. I know this from my work with kids and also in collaborating with so many OTs over the years. They are not working on what they were working on five, ten years ago, nor should they be, right? But it might be the same person or might be the same office.
And so their literal brains are like, Am I done with this place yet? How long am I going to be going to this? So sometimes it's an exit strategy or a plan, and they might need to know when you get to this feeling or this skill level, let's talk about not needing me anymore as a therapist. OT is a little different than of course, speaking to a mental health professional.
And this is where things I think are currently still evolving and can get a little dicey. depending on the therapist you talk to. And the reason I say that is I'm not sure that we fully understand the effects of, emotional processing and trauma and all of that with autistic populations. All of these therapy modalities are studied on neurotypical people and we're just starting to learn more about autistic experiences in talk therapy.
Now there are definitely so many benefits to therapy. But I do think we need to listen to kids and teens and young adults when they say they don't want to go anymore, or they say, I don't need it anymore. Something doesn't feel helpful to them. They don't feel like it's worth it.
So it could be a whole range of things. It could be. I don't like missing something I miss when I have to go to therapy. So that could probably be problem solved. I don't like the therapist. I don't like what we're doing. It's boring. We've got to figure out what it is they don't like, why they feel like they don't need it anymore.
And if it does come down to they have met, like I was saying before, like they're socially satisfied. They feel like they can solve problems. They feel like they can talk to the people in their family or their friends and don't need this extra therapist to talk to, then maybe the team considers that it might not be needed or it's an as needed thing.
And so understanding the flexibility of therapy with teens can be helpful. I would never force a child to go to therapy. Simply because there's so many kids, neurotypical or neurodivergent, there are so many kids that at any point in their life, people, any point in their life, are going to benefit from therapy, and need therapy.
I don't know if this is more rampant in the South or not, but it reminds me of like the adults that I talked to that were forced to go to church and they're like, yeah, never going to church again. I had to go, and so if you're forced to do anything when you're young, it can ruin it for you.
And I think that therapy, whatever kind it is, can be So helpful. And it's also true that you can have a bad experience. You can have a bad fit. And then you can have a great fit, therapy is not all the same, of course. So just staying open to all the whys underneath those comments and getting to the bottom of what your child feels like they get out of therapy.
And staying curious about something not feeling worth it to them anymore, and why. Why doesn't it feel worth it to them anymore? Because it obviously feels worth it to us if we're surprised that they said that, or we feel like, we're not ready to give this up. We may have different goals for them than they have for themselves.
And so we've got to figure out if we're okay with their goals, or if we think that they can go beyond what they're doing right now. And maybe they haven't thought about that. So it's an ongoing conversation, obviously. But it does start to happen because kids are independent during this age, they are voicing their opinions.
They're opinionated, they're figuring out who they are. Part of that is saying what they need and what they feel like they don't need and how they want to spend their time.
Kate Lynch: Makes so much sense. Yeah. I've never regretted listening to ocean. Times that I I've been confused or like, why, why don't you want to do this? When I really listened to him, found out things later on and been really grateful that I listened to him. And when I didn't understand what was going on and I didn't listen to him, that's when I'm like, Oh, I should have paid more attention to what he was telling me, either like with his body language or like underlying things or just saying he didn't want to do something, I should have listened.
Emily King: And I'll say if anyone's listening to this and they're thinking, I can't get this kind of information out of my kid, your child's mood and irritability. Their resistance to things if they hate going to therapy every time and they won't tell you that, but they're in a terrible mood. Check in with the therapist and ask how it's going and let them know that and start to problem solve outside of just talking to your kid about it. But maybe talking to them later when you're not on your way to the therapy and it's not looming to try to get an idea of their perspective of why it doesn't feel, you know, you're noticing it doesn't really feel worth it. They'd rather be doing other things. So why does it not feel worth it right now?
Kate Lynch: Right. So, Dr. Emily, what Do you most want to be remembered for?
Emily King: Oh my gosh, I love this question. I would most want to be remembered for helping teachers understand our kids so that our kids feel safe at school to learn and make mistakes. And keep growing because I think that there's so much about school that's hard for neurodivergent kids and we have a lot of work to do in helping educators understand that. And they're willing, they just are not trained, didn't get trained in grad school. And all of this is so evolving so quickly. I want our kids to feel safe and open and curious at school so they can do their best learning.
Kate Lynch: Absolutely. Thousand percent. I love that. Thank you. And what are your core values, especially related to personally parenting?
Emily King: The first is to not take things so seriously. Music and dance and humor, that's a big part of our family. I'm a very musical person. Keeping our bodies feeling regulated and connected to each other is the foundation of everything.
In addition, of course, to our physical needs of sleep and nutrition and hydration. But when I think of like just the mental health of our families and connecting, that's it. I've never regretted making my kid laugh about something. It can cut through so much tension and negative emotion and irritability. That is such a core thing.
And then just listening to each other's perspective, like we were talking about before, and that every person, respecting each other's perspective, which sometimes lends itself to creating new boundaries, and then sometimes lends itself to doing things in a different way maybe that we haven't done before, that our extended family doesn't do in that way, respecting and honoring that person's lived experience first as well.
Yeah. And I guess this goes with humor and fun, but play and exploration and adventure and travel. And those also being such important ways to learn. So I know you mentioned earlier, your child was going on the subway to camp and you were saying like, there are no academic pressures. He didn't have to be there at a certain time.
I love that because if you teach your child the skill of going on the train, they have to work on that at the same time of working on being on time at the same time of new teachers and new classes and new, academics, it's too much. So I love. travel and holidays and camp situations because all they're working on is independence.
And then when they get there, it's fun. And that is the skill that they're working on. That's why I love summer. I love breaks. Like we have so much learning we can do with our kids during these times that will set up that foundation for getting them more independent and feeling more capable when they do have to go in and navigate academics with teachers and all those things they're about to do in the school year.
Kate Lynch: Thank you so much. That's wonderful. And I just have 1 final question. Yeah. Do you have a specific parenting memory that brings you joy?
Emily King: Oh, my gosh. Brings me joy. It's gotta be trip being at the Grand Canyon with my family and like the views of the Grand Canyon that brings up joy for me.
Just the vastness of it and experiencing that together. A lot of the joy I have with my kids is really outside of our daily life. When we get to do these fun things, but we are able to do these fun things because of the hard work that we do. That they do in school and that we you know, we all do in our work. Being able to have the privilege to take trips. When I think about daily life joys, it's just laughing and snuggling, on a daily basis, if they'll have me still.
The other day, my 11 year old grabbed my hand when we were walking in public. And I was like, this might be the last time ever. He just hasn't done that in a year. And I don't know what came over him. We were in a crowd of people and he was okay with it. I just thought to myself, Oh, so great.
Kate Lynch: I've got chills and actually there are tears coming.
Emily King: Right? There is like a last time. Yeah. Boy grabs your hand. It, It fades, it doesn't just happen one day, it fades out. You don't notice it, but it, yeah. So bittersweet.
They gain skills and then they don't need you. And that is the goal of needing you because you're fun and you wanna hang out with them, but not needing you in other independent ways.
Kate Lynch: That is exactly the conversation I had with my mom last night. I'm like, you're going to have to convince him to hang out with you now. He does not need you anymore.
So, Dr. Emily, where is the best place for parents to connect with you?
They can read my Substack! I have monthly online workshops for parents:
My website for speaking and more is learnwithdremily.com.
Kate Lynch: This was just a wonderful conversation. I feel more confident and calmer and also validated in a way and ready for high school, I think.
Emily King: Your kid's riding the subway! You're doing great.
Kate Lynch: We'll see. We'll see. Wish us luck. Thanks again, Dr. Emily.
Emily King: You're so welcome.