The conundrum of autistic support…
Lately I’ve been sitting with what I call the conundrum of autistic support.
We care so deeply about supporting our students. Especially those autistic kiddos who reach their limits and need us most in those tough moments. Naturally, we want to know: What’s the right tool to use? The next strategy? What am I missing?
But I want you to think about it this way for a moment: we can only support kids to the level of our own capacity.
So the conundrum is this: we want to give more support to our autistic learners, but we can only support them to the level that our own capacity allows.
If our nervous system is maxed out, if we’re running on fumes, we can’t respond with patience or curiosity. We react. We snap. We raise our voices in the very moments we wish for calm.
I know you’ve felt those days: too many questions, too many squabbles, too many emails, and not enough of you left to give. It’s exhausting. And yet we expect ourselves to keep giving more.
Here’s the shift: the foundation of supporting others is supporting ourselves.
Safety starts with us. Regulation starts with us. The tools we wish our students had are the ones we need to practice first.
When we tend to our own capacity, we create the conditions to show up differently for our kids.
It starts with us, but you don’t have to figure it out alone. And when I let myself radically reimagine how learning spaces could be designed to be neuro-inclusive, I think about how this important aspect would need to be included… that the supporters need support too. And I’m letting myself imagine all the ways we can build that support together.
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