Teach Emotions Like Driving #substack #shorts

21 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:29

In this short, the speaker argues that emotional and interpersonal skills are often taught implicitly, akin to throwing a child into a moving car without any instruction. While neurotypical children can absorb these abstract social norms by osmosis, neurodivergent children—especially those on the autism spectrum—struggle without explicit, step‑by‑step guidance. The speaker uses a driving analogy to illustrate the chaos that results from unstructured learning and calls for a systematic breakdown of social‑emotional skills into teachable sub‑components.

Chapters

The way I think about it is this. Imagine if we related to driving in the same way that we relate to emotional skills at the moment. Ah, yeah. Right? So if we never told anybody how a car works or what the big round thing is for or what the pedals do or where the mirrors are, we didn't tell them any of that, we just stuck them in the car and then we put the car in motion at speed and they had to just kind of figure it out. It would be a mess. It would be chaos. Mm-hmm. But that's what we do with people when it comes to emotional skills and interpersonal skills. There's no structured breakdown of like, here's the skill and here are the like steps you can take to build the subparts of the skill up and then have the skill. And the thing is, if you're a neurotypical kid, You have the ability to kind of absorb by osmosis from the people around you as they are doing it. All of these really abstract skills and rules and norms, you just— neurotypical kids soak up a lot of this stuff. But for a neurodivergent child, particularly one who is on the autism spectrum, if it's not made explicit, It's really hard to figure out what the heck is going on. Mm-hmm. And what exactly am I supposed to do?