We was not given a parent handbook:

Let Alone a Guidebook for Being a Neurodivergent Family

Were you given a handbook when your child was born? Did you get another one when your child got their diagnosis? I certainly didn't.

I thought I knew what I was doing. I'd babysat other people's children. I'd studied childcare, health care, all of it. I believed I understood. Then I had my own child and realised it was nothing like what I'd learned. More importantly, I couldn't hand him back at the end of the day.

When he got his diagnosis, everything shifted. That's when most parents hit a wall. We go from thinking we should know this to realising: I know nothing about neurodivergent. I don't understand any of this. That's the moment I got overwhelmed,

Some parents fight. Some shut down. Some find another way. The truth is, as parents, we have to deal with it in our own heads first before we can do anything else.

I have made mistakes as a parent. There are things I would probably do differently knowing what I know now. I'm not proud of every decision I've made, but I've learned from them. I'm human. I had pressures in my life that I didn't even know existed until I was living them, and most of the time I had to learn as we went along.

One thing I want to make very clear: I never saw my son as the problem. He is who he is, I am proud of him.

A lot of the difficulty came from the world around us and other people's expectations. People could see he wasn't like everybody else, and sometimes they seemed to think that meant something was wrong. There were expectations about what children should do, how they should behave, what they should eat, how they should cope, what a family should look like.

When people would say he was ignorant or rude, that upset me. Not because I disagreed, I understood what they was saying. He either didn't like a person or he didn't have confidence. I thought his confidence would grow over time. I cared far less about whether he was like other children. He was my son. He is who he was.

But I did start to worry when I realised he didn't have any friends. I worried about his social life. Then the school insisted he get tested, and it became too much for both of us. People having opinions, upsetting him. He wasn't happy. He wasn't sleeping. He was thinking things no young person should think about.

That's when I was really scared. I did what I could with very little knowledge at the time, but we got through it. After two years, he got his diagnosis and his EHCP for high school.

Here's what I learned along the way: you don't need someone to teach you how to make your child more like everybody else. You need information that helps you understand how to make the world work better for them.

The first real thing I figured out was about repetivness. My son would watch the same film over and over. Eat the same foods at every meal. I kept wondering why it was so hard, why we couldn't get it right. Then I realised: he was happy. He was calm. And I could do other things, clean the house, get ready to go out, just breathe.

So I stopped fighting it. He needed his sameness, and that was okay. More than okay. It worked.

People questioned it, of course. "He's not like other children." I didn't care at that point. He was my son. He knew what he needed, even if he couldn't explain it. And when I stopped trying to change that and started working with it, things got easier for both of us.

Every family figures out their own handbook as they go. You learn your child's communication, their routines, what foods work, what sensory things help, where their limits are, what makes them feel safe. Nobody teaches you this. You discover it together, through trial and error and paying attention.

The advice and guides you find, they work for some people and not for others. Life, parenting, neurodivergent: it's all trial and error. That's the best way to learn about your kids and about yourself.

One of the first times I took my son on a plane, he was barely walking. I had him in a pushchair, but he was screaming to get out. I was carrying the passport, tickets, hand luggage, pulling things out of my bag for security while he screamed. When I got him out, I let him walk by himself through the gate scanning and he ran off. The staff had to catch him. When I got through and got scanned, we got him back in the pushchair and packed everything while he screamed the place down.

He didn't stop screaming until we got on the plane. Then he fell asleep for four hours straight.

At the time, I thought it was pure exhaustion. Now I understand: he was trying to regulate his nervous system. All that noise, all that chaos, all those people, all those rules he couldn't quite navigate, it was overwhelming. He was doing the only thing he could do. And then when he finally got onto the plane, where he had space and movement and escaped from all of it, he could rest.

Travel can magnify everything that's hard about the world. Unfamiliar places. Airports. Queues. Noise. Different food. Different beds. Disrupted routines. And then there's the expectation, the big, unspoken one, that everyone should be enjoying themselves simply because they're on holiday.

That expectation doesn't work for neurodivergent families. It doesn't work for a lot of families, actually. But for neurodivergent kids, it's not just inconvenient. It's overwhelming.

I spent years thinking I needed to make my son fit into how holidays are supposed to work. What I actually needed was to understand what would make travel work for him. Not easy for me. Not more "normal." But actually workable for his brain, his body, his nervous system.

That's when things changed. When I stopped trying to do holidays the way other families do them and started figuring out what travel could look like for us.

Having a diagnosis gave us a title. It opened doors. My son completed his GCSEs with good marks. For me, it gave me reassurance that yes, I had been fighting for my son, protecting him, and there was a reason for the things that were hard. But then the guilt came in. Was it my fault? Was it because of this or that? What will his life be like?

Now that he's an adult, we've managed okay. Not perfect. But we have a good relationship. I still want to protect and defend him. But now I have to learn how to let him be independent, to discover the good and bad parts of the world without me. That's still very hard.

He's figuring out his own way now. I'm figuring out mine.

There's no handbook for any of this. There's no guidebook that covers your specific child, your specific family, your specific life. The handbook you need, you have to write it yourself, one day at a time, one discovery at a time.

And you know what? That might actually be better than any handbook they could have given you. Because it's yours. It's about your child, not some average child who doesn't exist. It's about your family, not the family everyone thinks you should be.

You're not doing it wrong just because it looks different. You're doing it right because it works for your child/dren.

Jemma Wild
Founder, Nero Divergent Travel
[email protected]