Two people with neurodivergent children share their stories.
my phone buzz in my pocket. My heart skipped a beat, sweat slowly beading on my forehead. I closed my eyes and hoped that it wasn’t a dreaded call from school. It was. I excused myself from the meeting and stepped out into the hallway. As expected, my kid’s school was having difficulty with them and needed me to pick them up. I popped back in to apologize for leaving early and joined the rest of the meeting from my phone as I jogged to the train station to get back home.
Parents of neurodivergent children — which both of us are — experience personal challenges that are difficult to explain. There are many reasons for this — the lack of representation of neurodiversity in the media, the myth of the “perfect” family, the pressure to be the “perfect” parent or to have the “perfect” child, the social media illusion. But it all comes down to it often being too exhausting to get into explanations at work on top of everything else we are dealing with.
If we are to use these skills and thrive in the workplace, colleagues need to more deeply understand our parenting situation. In personal contexts, a lack of understanding can be annoying: friends who get angry when we miss an appointment to deal with a meltdown at home, difficulty finding babysitters, everyone’s unsolicited advice on something we never said was a problem. In work contexts, however, parenting a neurodivergent child can be debilitating. We need more support.
Unsurprisingly, these factors cause parents of neurodivergent children to drop out of the workforce at. This is often because one parent needs to provide full-time support to their child, especially if the family can’t afford adequate care. Organizations must take it upon themselves, both from a moral and performance perspective, to step in to ensure that these parents get the support they need to stay — and flourish — in the workforce.
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