How to Parent ND Kids During the Summer

Good morning, everyone. This is Danielle and Vito with ND Out Loud. Good morning. Good morning. So we are talking about how to parent your neurodivergent children during the summer. And I don't wanna say just children. We're not talking little kids. We're also talking to college kids that are home too.

And so I, I was talking to someone the other day and so many of us parents of indie kids, like, we know the struggles that they have in school because surprise, surprise, we also had them in school. But how many times have you been told like, well, your kid is behind and they need to do all this work in the summer to catch up? Okay. As someone who spent 15 years in education and has 2 of my own neurodivergent kids, I'm going to tell you, like, let them take a break. Because how much do you enjoy leaving your day job and going home and doing more work? Or going on vacation from your day job and then doing work the whole time you're on vacation. This is what— this is one of the things that makes kids hate school. Kids that are behind in any subject, guess what? It's you just have to do more work to catch up. So you have to do more work with the thing you hate to catch up. So it triggers PDA. It triggers feelings of insecurity and shame, but there is a way around all of that stuff. One, we have to make activities that we do with that particular subject fun, but that's a conversation for a different day. This is about giving your kids a break. And they already know from August to May or whatever it is that they're going to have to do school and they're going to have to do all this stuff. But when you know that you also have to do it in the summer, Kids hate it, and I'm telling you this from my own personal experience.

So the other thing that it's going to cause, as the kid that was always behind until 5th grade, 6th grade, I was chronically behind. My parents tried to do stuff and, and it was horrible. It's forcing your kids when their friends and other family members and stuff aren't doing school to do school just reaffirms that they're broken, something is wrong with them, and they will hear this from Friends in the neighborhood, they will hear that they're stupid or retarded. And yes, we don't like these words, people, but children will repeat them, and they are mean to each other. You're just adding that all of those feelings and all of that frustration to their lives again. And we just lost Maida. Hopefully, she'll pop back in. Adding all of that in is very frustrating for kids because you're adding all of those— that shame and failure loop back into all of that when you're trying to force— oh, there she is— when you're trying to force them back into something that is frustrating already to them. And you aren't the I mean, you're the expert in your children as a parent. You are absolutely the expert in your child as a parent, but you aren't necessarily equipped to help with the learning disabilities, the comorbidities that go with having a neurodivergent kid. The reality as a parent that even Vida, who is a school teacher, is saying, don't do that to your kid. But you as a parent, you know your child well. But you aren't necessarily the best equipped to help with all the comorbidities of having a neurodivergent kid, a learning disability, whatever else is going on. Don't add to your own frustration because you're going to hate every minute of it as a parent. Your child is going to hate every minute of it, and you're just creating more frustration and anger in the house.

So that, that's the thing, right? Okay. If people who are trained to teach children and do all this stuff are not able to catch up your kid— and I'm not, I'm not throwing shade on anybody's intellectual level, okay? Like, I was a teacher. I had a child that was behind in reading, and I was an English teacher for a long time. So if people that are trained to teach that grade level and stuff like that are not able to catch your kid up during the year, the odds of you really catching your kid up over the summer are slim. And you can put them in boot camps. You can put them in all kinds of stuff. I did that. I went out when my daughter was young. She was behind. In my brain, I was like, you know what, one little boot camp, she'll catch up, blah, blah, blah. My daughter will tell you she hated it, hated every single minute of it. Do you know what made my kid a better reader? Free Comic Book Day. That's what made it better because it was fun. There were activities and she got to pick any book she wanted on the shelf and she could read. And it was all this stuff. So those activities made it fun, but we were taking a break. We were not sitting down. We were not doing schoolwork like it was. I didn't have her in a boot camp. I didn't have any of these things because all that stuff did was reinforce the fact that she couldn't do it. She couldn't meet the expectation. But Free Comic Book Day did not have an expectation on it. It was just fun. So the buy-in to participate in that was easy.

Mm-hmm. Um, okay, so when you have a neurodivergent college student home from Home from college. What are some of the things we're going to see with a college student? They're exhausted because they burn out.

Yeah. So if you have a college kid that's home for the summer, it really looks like a vampire has descended on your house because they're exhausted. They have a weird schedule. And remember, like, okay, especially if they Went away to school and they came home for the summer, like they have been living on a completely different parent-free schedule. So it takes, there's transition time for them to get back on or even slightly sync up with the schedule you have going on there. If they've been living at home, the exhaustion that they feel, that sleep that they do in those first couple weeks of coming home, it's because they're in their safe place and they've let go of a lot of stress because the semester's over, whatever. And I know it irritates you. Make them a visual schedule if you need stuff done at a certain time, but also let them sleep if, if that is a luxury that you guys can afford.

Let them sleep. Um, also Okay, so tough, tough, tough parenting tip here.

You—

they have lived for the school year as a parent-free adult. Don't launch back into treating them like a child because they've lived for the last 12 months, 11 months, whatever, as an adult. Allow them to make some of their decisions. Have and set expectations in your house. Make them very clear. Uh, we don't want you coming in at 3 AM drunk. That's fine. All of those kinds of things. But they are an adult who, who happens to have grown up in your home, and, and they do need some of that autonomy because You will alienate them pretty quickly if you try to helicopter parent them again. So keep that in mind because you're going to see PDA really come in then. I'm talking to many parents right now who are very angry with their college students because they aren't listening and they aren't— Yeah, well, because They're— they've been living outside in adult worlds and not in your bubble. And number 2, don't criticize for how they eat, how they sleep, how they dress, all of those things, because again, adults. And that, as a parent, I had a hard time. My son was gone for a few years and came home, and I had a really hard time not jumping back into parent mode. That's really, really hard. Been there, been there, been there. I understand this, but we can't— as parents, especially with neurodivergent children, we need to remember that they've had freedom and we need to give them that same courtesy and freedom that we expect. And yeah, that's hard. The other thing that I'm gonna say is eating. When your kids are home for the summer, I don't care if they're 5 or 20, and at home, their eating schedule is going to be very, very, very different. And I have seen so many TikToks about, you're not eating, you're eating on the same schedule you did for school. No, they're eating on a different schedule. Their bodies need a different, need different fuel than they did in school because they have different sorts of energy that they're using right now. So take that into consideration. They need more protein, they need more sugars, Yes, I just said they need more sugars. And they have a lot of other energy. And again, if your child is in burnout because school was rough this year, they're going to need other special care too. And that's where somebody like us comes in and our team comes in. Coaches that work with kids, we have coaches that work with teens and college kids and stuff, because many of these kids coming from school, elementary school up, are really burnt out right now.

Yeah, that's the thing. Okay. Do you know that preschool is optional? Right? In most states, preschool is optional. Pre-K, pre-kindergarten is optional. And the thing that they're trying to make sure in pre-K is that you're ready for kindergarten.

Mm-hmm.

Which is ridiculous because kindergarten starts at 5, pre-K starts at 3 or 4. We're trying to make sure that kids know enough to even enter school. That is like going on a diet before you start a diet. Stop it. Let your babies watch PBS Kids. It will be fun. Do some interactive things. They will be fine. Okay, we put way— like, yes, we need to emphasize stuff, but if you look at countries that have a high literacy rate like Finland, if you look at countries that have like high math literacy rates like many of our Asian countries, the way they go about front-loading these activities is not the high-stress environment that Americans do.

No.

They let kids explore. They don't have state tests. They don't do any tests in elementary school. They're just learning to have fun with education.

I think one of the coolest things I saw when we were traveling, um, the world was, uh, little kids, their math was bouncing on trampolines. And learning their numbers. Their spelling was picking up blocks with letters on it and running it across the gym and building the word by physically running back and forth and building a word. There were so many of those things, and our kids aren't getting that. Our ND kids, who are mostly high-energy kids, not all of them, so I understand that, but most of our ADHD kids especially are high-energy in school. Or they're masking their anxiety or whatever, are using so much mental energy.

So I have one. This is one of my pet peeves. And yes, I taught English for a long time before I moved into special ed and administration, but they will get onto kids for counting on their fingers with math. They did it with me when I was in school. They did it with my daughter.

They did it with my son.

Okay, they get on to you for counting on your fingers because you're just supposed to know. Okay, this is ridiculous because neurodivergent kids sometimes are visual learners and need manipulatives. We have manipulatives on our body. The other thing that I hate about this is— and if— have you seen one of those videos of the kids doing the— this? They're doing this and counting and doing all this complex math because they are doing an abacus without the abacus. They are doing— that's like, they'll do their fingers and stuff, and then they'll like do all these complex things, and they're doing that computation in their head, but they're using a stim to do it. So it's like, there are so many things about education I wish that could change, especially for our neurodivergent kids. But my main thing is, is please let your kids have a break in the summer if they want to do school stuff, because I was a kid that loved to learn. Um, let them. But if they deep dive into feudal Japan and then come out telling you all this stuff, that's fine. That's fine. My son can tell you everything about so many different things, but all I did was took him to the library and let him pick out any book he wanted.

And, and for my son, it was giving him just the time off He had to spend 1 hour doing something quiet a day. That was it. And you want to know what he chose? He was building with Legos. And you want to know what that meant? That meant he had the Lego book out and he had the Lego history book out because he wanted to know why they built this thing.

And he then—

he wanted to research why, how Legos worked and why they designed them and how they did. You want to know what? We had a whole entire school day's worth of learning in because he wanted to build some Lego set.

But that's the thing, giving them the safety and the space to explore what they wanted. In that instance, your son was able to learn so many different things besides just playing with Legos. But people are so afraid to let kids just sit there and, and let them learn stuff that they want to learn. Like, I, I remember getting into an argument with a librarian. Uh, about my daughter, because the librarian at the elementary school would only let kids read books on the shelves that were on their reading level that they scored on the test. So if you only scored a first grade reading level, you could only read the books that were first grade and below.

We had the same issue with the school library. My son in kindergarten was reading chapter books already. And I'm like, it too. And I don't know how he started reading it too. He just did. That, that's my kid, okay? I did nothing to teach him to read. He just learned. And he goes to school and he could only get the kindergarten picture books out. And he's like, Mom. So I went to talk to the librarian. He's in school. He will make other kids feel— kindergarten. He will make other kids feel bad, so he can't have those.

Well, and I, I think there are lots of things that could improve in our school system. But the thing is, is you have free rein at your house. Like, um, if they want to look at every picture in a National Geographic and you don't think that they can read, who cares? Let them look at the pictures. It might inspire a love of learning. They might ask to watch a documentary. They might do all those things. You never know where kids are going to come up with that. So let them be kids. Let them have a break. You take a break. The summer break is for everybody. Take a break from trying to stress about all that stuff and just enjoy not having to deal with that. The learning will come.

The learning isn't essential. Learning— your child learning to relax, not be burned out, recover and enjoy being a kid is more important than any other skill that you can teach them. If you're frustrated and you're like, but my kids are going to tear my house apart if I don't make them learn or sit down and do something, if you are struggling with your kids, if you are just not sure what to do with them all summer long and you're really struggling as the parent of an ND kid, reach out. We can help because one, we are parents of ND kids. Mine is now almost 27, so I've been there, done that, and raised a productive member of society. So been there, done that. Vida is in the middle of raising productive members of society still, and we have coaches who specifically work with kids, kids with neurodivergence, all kinds of flavors of neurodivergence. We have art therapists, so if you need— if you have a kid that's into art and needs help, we have an art therapist. We have, uh, at-risk A coach for kids that are at risk. We have coaches for teens and college kids. We have everything that you could need here. Please reach out. Let us help you as a parent.

Yeah.

We can help you as the parent. We can help your child as well. But get the help that you need because you want to know what? One of the best things that I ever did was find a community of other moms that had kids like mine because I needed the help and I needed the support and I needed somebody to vent to.

Well, and that's the thing. If you guys need that, reach out to us. We'll talk to you about it. We'll talk to anybody. We are literally the people that are like, we'll talk to a brick wall if no one is around. Like we would do it. So we'll talk to you about your angst, about the stress, about whatever. And if you want to talk to other people, we actually have a free community.

Mm-hmm.

We have a free community. It doesn't cost you a dime, but you can go in there and there are other people like you in there.

You can enjoy your summer with your ND kids. It's absolutely possible. I promise it's absolutely possible. If you have any questions, please let us know here at ND Out Loud. We are here to support you, the parents. We're here to support the kids. We're here to support the teenagers. We're here to support the college students. Let us know how we can help you. If you have questions, ask questions under this video. We will absolutely answer. We are paying attention to all of this stuff, and we'll come back and answer any of your questions that you may have. Have an amazing day, everyone. Bye.