As part of Autism Acceptance Month, we have partnered with Austen Marie (the_neurospicymama and The NeuroSpicy MomPod) for this article about raising neurodivergent children as a neurodivergent parent.
Austen has a degree in Psychology, and was a classroom teacher for ten years until experiencing her own Autistic burnout. Through her podcast and social media accounts, she is normalizing the neurodivergent experience and nervous system healing while on her own healing journey. She is a proud mama of two children who are also neurodivergent, and they are just trying to live their best nervous system-safe lives.
To say that being a parent in the year of 2026, is an experience that no other generation has had - is an understatement. While all generations have had their own unique experience of parenting, with its own unique set of challenges and difficulties, the current environment in which parents are raising their children, is one that humanity has not yet encountered. We all at once, have all the information we could ever dream of at the tip of our fingertips, but with no real mentor to guide us through this delicate time in our lives. Unfortunately, the wisdom of our elders no longer applies to the reality that we are raising our children in, and for many of us we no longer have that village they keep telling us is required to raise a child.
Most of our parents had the privilege of sending us outside to play, shutting the door behind us with a quick reminder to “come home when the street lights turn on.” There was one family TV, that everyone shared and whatever program was playing at the time was what you could choose to watch, or not. Now we have endless choices to watch on TV, or on the tablet, or on your computer, or even on your phone. We have social media, which was sold as a way to be able to connect with anyone around the world. But there are two sides to every coin and now we have to protect our children from not only the dangers of the real world, but also the online world.
However, the positive side of that coin is that we do have the ability to connect with other people’s stories and we have the ability to share our own. There is a certain comfort when you realize there really are no unique experiences, that we can always find someone who can relate to us and what we’re going through. This combination of shared experiences and the availability of all of the information, has contributed to a growing number of people realizing that they are neurodivergent late in life, especially after becoming parents themselves.
If you went through most of your life undiagnosed neurodivergent, then you most likely would be considered “high functioning” and you learned to move through life creating coping strategies to help you function without support. But after becoming a parent, those same coping strategies no longer work simply because your situation is no longer the same.
The reality of being a new parent is that you will experience sleep deprivation, intense hormone fluctuations, and if you are a woman, your brain’s physical structure will literally change. Sleep deprivation and hormone changes compound neurodivergent traits, reducing executive functioning even more and decreasing emotional regulation capacity. Having a baby exposes the areas in your executive functioning that you struggle with and it can become difficult to try to make up for those deficits while also dealing with an immense amount of sensory overload. The mask you used to move throughout the world, no longer fits.
Our children also grow and become little mirrors of our own nervous system and that can bring up things that we forgot we experienced in our own childhood. And now there is a collection of parents who are wanting to do it differently. Not only does having the internet provide us with the language we didn’t have and the ability to research anything we want to understand, but it also gives us visual models of parenting in different ways than how we were raised.
Traditionally, we relied on the wisdom from our own family and friends. People typically parent in the same way that they were raised - but for some people, they are realizing that it didn’t serve them well and are consciously finding a different way to raise their own children. And this is where the undiagnosed neurodivergent parent begins to parent in a way that respects their child’s nervous system.
When parents step into conscious parenting, they are centering the regulation of their child’s nervous system. This can come with a lot of misunderstandings - a lot which can be seen online with people mocking gently parenting, showing it as children who behave inappropriately and disrespectfully towards their parents. Of course that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what conscious, or gentle parenting actually is, and it is the exact kind of parenting that neurodivergent children thrive under.
In the same way that conscious parenting is misunderstood, there are still so many misconceptions of neurodivergence. Typically, Autism and ADHD come to mind when people hear the word neurodivergence or they are imagining someone who requires a lot of support and accommodations to be able to function in modern day society. That is leaving out a huge group of people who are neurodivergent, but who have had to fend for themselves because they didn’t fit the mold of “what neurodivergence looked like” or because their neurodivergence wasn’t disruptive enough to other people to accommodate.
This lack of validation our entire lives often leaves us betraying our own needs and can lead to early burnout, especially if you're experiencing a life event that fundamentally changes your life, like becoming a parent. What these children don’t realize is that they are actually incredibly lucky to be born to these open-minded parents. Because if these parents lean into their attunement with their children, and remember their own experiences - the child will be met with validation instead of shame or dismissal. And this fundamentally changes the way that we show up as parents.
The beautiful thing is that we now have so much research that confirms how important it is for children and their development to validate, acknowledge, and honor their emotional experiences. When we put their needs in the center of our parenting, the perception of needing to control your child’s behaviors dissipates because autonomy is respected. The function of parenting shifts from controlling the child’s behavior, to teaching them the understanding of societal norms and the morals of being a good person. You make space for feelings, but teach them the appropriate behaviors to respond instead of react.
The word “gentle” may confuse people into thinking that this type of nervous-system conscious parenting is “soft” - but there is no greater strength than being able to regulate yourself and hold space for another. To hold yourself accountable for how you show up, no matter how you are feeling inside. It is so easy to blow up on someone, especially a child who has no power or authority, it takes true strength to take a breath, and respond instead of react.
Although you do not have to be neurodivergent or have a neurodivergent child to live a life that respects nervous system regulation, I do believe that is this specific group of people who are standing against the stream. Turning away from the status quo and making a new path for their children. They take the heat from people who do not understand the kind of courage and compassion it takes to parent in a new way and hold the space their children need to grow into fully emotionally attuned humans.
If this article resonates with you, I want you to know that you are not alone. There is a different way to parent your child or even reparent yourself. There are so many amazing resources online that break down all of the academic information that helps us understand child development and neurodivergence. There are also online communities like mine, The NeuroSpicy MomPod, who are coming together to heal and to create safe spaces for ourselves and our children. There has never been a more complicated time to be a parent, but how lucky are our children who are being raised by parents who are centering their safety and ensuring they know in their bones, what true love and acceptance feels like.
