Supporting Neurodivergent Children as a Parent
By Allison Westmoore, LMSW | October 20, 2025
Accepting Your Child’s Neurodivergence: How to Support, Validate, and Empower Them
The first step in being able to support your child is to try to understand how they view and/or process the world may be different than you, and that is okay. Try to step into your child’s shoes and see how they experience and interact in the world around them. Every child is unique and has different needs that they need met. This can be overwhelming at first, especially when we realize that we cannot always understand what our child needs or how to approach meeting these needs. The key is that as parents, we need to remain open, curious, and adaptive to our child’s needs. Your child’s needs can change year-to-year or even day-to-day, but I would like to offer some options or places to start that I have seen help not only clients I have seen, but my own children as well.
Embrace Routine and Predictability
Children who are neurodivergent often experience increased anxiety and dysregulation when things do not go as expected. One way to help mitigate this is to help build routines so that they are able to predict what their days look like, but also to help them increase overall independence.
Routine building with children can look like a lot of things. It could be sitting down together and coming up with a list of tasks that need to be completed before you leave for school in the mornings. It could look like making a schedule for their bedtime routine. It could even be a list of tasks required to earn an allowance or other reward.
One thing that has been helpful for clients and my own children as well has been utilizing dry-erase to-do lists. You can find them online at Amazon, and they come in a variety of colors. I will link one here that I have personally used and have had success with. You get to personalize what each task is, and then there is a slide bar that a child can move to show that the task is complete. I personally have one made for the morning routine and one for the nighttime routine for my school-aged kiddo, and it has been very helpful in making these times less hectic and allowing my kiddo to feel more independent and accomplished.
Validate Feelings, Explore the Connection Between Emotions and Behaviors, and Build Emotional Vocabulary
Children and adults alike have an inherent need to feel seen and understood. This is why it is important to make sure you validate your child’s feelings and emotions. Neurodiverse children can often get overstimulated quickly and can have trouble not only naming their emotions but also regulating them. It is important that during these times of dysregulation, we as parents are there for them to emphasize that their feelings are valid and they have a right to feel how they feel. Validating their emotions not only makes the child feel understood and seen but also helps create a stronger bond and shows that you are a safe place for them to express their emotions.
After validating a child’s emotions, it is also important to model what we can do with our emotions. Yes, you are valid for the emotions you are feeling, but you are also responsible for what behaviors you do next. This is a good time to show how we can allow ourselves to feel our emotions, pause, and allow ourselves to regulate, and then use the information we receive from these emotions to make informed choices. It is also important to show children that when we do not allow ourselves the time to feel our emotions, reflect, and take the time to decide what to do next, we can make choices that maybe we would not have made otherwise. This is a good time to model to your children what taking accountability looks like, and that adults also experience difficulties with regulating emotions, too, and that they are not alone.
I have found in my experience as a mom and a therapist that children sometimes struggle with finding words to explain how they feel. To help in this process, I like to have a feelings wheel on hand to help them identify how they feel and to help build their emotional vocabulary. You can also help them make connections between bodily sensations and feelings to help them aide in identifying how they are feeling. I will list a link below to a free one that you can download and print.
Offer Choices
Children who are neurodiverse can often display something called “demand avoidance,” which means that they have extreme resistance to demands. It is believed that this stems from the child experiencing negative emotions and increased anxiety from not having control over themselves.
One way to help a child with building independence and autonomy is to allow them to make choices throughout the day. This could look like allowing a child to pick what book to read at bedtime, or which homework assignment to complete first.
Another positive to allowing your child to have power over making choices is teaching your child about cause and effect in real time. Allowing them the freedom to make choices allows them to see that their choices have natural consequences, both good and bad. Children who are Neurodivergent often learn by doing and observing, so allowing them to see and recognize this lesson on their own can help foster taking responsibility and ownership over their actions in the future.
Teach Coping Skills
Neurodivergent children often have big emotions and are unsure of how to use them. This can lead to disruptions in their behavior and can cause conflict with themselves and the people around them. One way to help mitigate this is to teach your child many different coping skills they can use to help regulate themselves.
The first step in this process is to help the child recognize the emotion they are feeling. Using the feelings wheel linked previously can be helpful in this process. Once they identify the feeling, work with them to find a coping skill that can help them regulate both in the moment, but also when that emotion may arise again in the future.
There are endless options for coping skills, and what works for one of your kiddos might not work for a different one. One thing that I have found to be helpful is to create a “coping skills plan” with your child. It is best to do this when your child is in a regulated state of mind. Sit down with them and brainstorm different things they enjoy and different skills that you can help them learn and use to regulate. Then write these coping skills down and put them somewhere you and your child can reference them easily. Sometimes when we are dysregulated, it is hard to remember the skills we have. Having them written down and in an accessible place increases the chances of your child being able to use their coping skills. I will link a free resource below to help aid in the process of creating a coping skills plan with your child.
Final Thoughts
As a parent to four children myself, I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be at times to be a parent. Despite the challenges, tiring nights, or how unsuccessful you may feel in the parenting world, I want you to know that you matter, and you are doing a great job at raising those kiddos to know that they matter, too. I also want you to know that when things feel too overwhelming and you need perspective or assistance, do not hesitate to reach out for help and show your child that everyone needs help sometimes – even their superhero parents.
