Neurodivergent teenagers
How can we help?
There’s a question parents often ask me and it happened at an online parent talk I gave last night. It’s always a variation on this:
“How does neurodivergence affect adolescence and how can we best help our neurodivergent teens?”
I always seem to give a waffly answer, mainly because I can’t check in with the questioner to see which form of neurodivergence they mean and if I leap to a particular conclusion, that might not be at all helpful. Each recognised or labelled neurodivergence is different, and in any case individual brains differ (diverge) so much that all the labelled differences can’t account for or describe all the possible variations.
Recognised neuro-differences include dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD/ADD and everything on the autistic spectrum. Then there’s every kind of brain injury or memory problem. Most of those can be experienced as a disability, though often accompanying extra abilities. People vary as to the extent they’d describe the condition they have as a disability. Perhaps we might instead say “differently-abled.”
Then there are the differences which many people would not tend to describe as disabilities, even though they make it difficult to perform certain tasks. A struggle to deal with left and right, for example, is a neurodivergence and, literally, a disability, but not something most people would bother to say about themselves unless required. Colour blindness is be another example.
So, there’s a vast variety and a wide range of challenge involved in that one word, neurodivergent.
For your info, here is a really nice description of neurodivergence.
How does adolescence affect a neurodivergent person?
It might have a variety of effects, including none at all, negative and positive. And often a mixture. Let’s unpick that a bit.
Adolescence represents a time of great change and upheaval, both biologically (body and brain) and psychologically (dealing with everything new in their lives). Teenagers are breaking away from reliance on their caregivers towards relying on themselves. It’s difficult and mind-occupying. It takes up a lot of brain bandwidth or mental processing capacity. That makes it hard to allocate sufficient processing capacity to other tasks.
Similarly, their neurodivergence is usually somewhat of a challenge, sometimes slightly and sometimes significantly. So the neurodivergent teenager is managing two sets of challenge: the brain difference and the adolescence.
That’s likely to be difficult. Therefore we can loosely say that adolescence might be likely to be more difficult for neurodivergent teens than others. On average. (In other words, not necessarily!)
Let’s look at some specific challenges
Adolescents increasingly have to manage their own tasks and time-tables - this can be more difficult for people with dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD.
They need to make new friends and manage many different social situations (a social situation is anything involving other people) - this will usually be more difficult for people on the autistic spectrum.
They need to be able to manage change, new challenges and situations - change can be more difficult for many people with neurodivergent brains. People on the autistic spectrum notoriously find change difficult.
The stakes can be higher - the consequences of opting out of or being excused from certain activities include falling behind, feeling/being left out and an increased anxiety about their differences. Younger children might not have been so troubled by such things but adolescents typically are.
But there are also advantages from entering adolescence
While empathy is relatively weak in younger adolescents, this is something which improves and teens will soon be able to find people who are willing to understand and value their differences.
They are likely to be able to find other teens to identify with and be friends with, who have similar or parallel challenges.
They can become more aware of the positives of their brain set-up - this is something parents and teachers can and should encourage. Dyslexics will probably enjoy hearing - and even reading - about highly successful dyslexic people or the extra visualisation or design skills they might have.
While conformity is important for teens, neurodivergent teens can often relish their differences/individuality (because individuality is theoretically highly valued, although that sometimes does not appear obvious) so they can win status for this. They can also usually find others who are similarly nonconforming. (Conforming to nonconformity!)
They can acquire stronger skills for managing their “disability”. There is usually a different way to achieve the same goal, whether by using tools designed as aids or by practising different elements.
You might be interested to know that dyslexia in girls can improve during adolescence. Oestrogen is beneficial to language skills.
Teenagers acquire better language skills and so are better able to express themselves and their needs. Along with language helping express themselves comes their ability to understand the nuances of what they read or hear, so, in short, they can understand more.
How does this help adults support a neurodivergent teenager?
The first thing to remember is that everyone is different and how adolescence affects each person is not reliably predictable, or at least not in detail. This applies to neurotypical as well as neurodivergent people.
However, just as a personality trait (such as introversion or anxiety or volatility) tends to continue and to affect (for better and worse) how one goes through each stage of life, so the same applies to your child’s neurodivergence. Thus, the dyslexic child or the child with ADHD is likely to carry the challenges of those conditions through adolescence and to need to deal with both the neurodivergence and the adolescence. Therefore, extra support might be needed.
TOP TIP: Help your child/teen understand as much as possible about their condition. But be careful to make it specific to them. For example, if you are helping them learn about dyslexia, make sure this relates to their type and level of dyslexia. Constantly bring it round to how they can affect their success.
Here are my best bits of advice:
Build the best understanding you can of how your teenager’s brain works. I mean your understanding and theirs. Get them to be as self-aware as possible and to learn about their condition as it relates to them. (See Top Tip above.)
However, don’t make the mistake of using the label (eg dyslexic/autistic) so much that you miss individual differences which might make the situation better (or worse). No one is only a label. For example, don’t let an understanding of dyslexia in general blind you or them to the specific nature of your child/teen’s dyslexia. It might lack some of the deficits and include some unusual benefits. Look at this human, first.
Break difficult tasks into small pieces. If your child has difficulty with planning but they need to plan a revision time-table (which is a big task) break it into subjects and break the subjects into topics. Help them plan one week ahead rather than the whole term. Build up gradually. This is the first part of scaffolding.
Don’t do everything for them. In a complex task which you have helped them break into pieces, work out together which bits you will do with them and which bits they can do themselves. This is the second part of scaffolding.
Acknowledge and praise success and always remember that success is relative. When a toddler learns a new word, we praise them even though they pronounced it imperfectly; we do not wait for perfection before we praise.
Also, equally importantly, praise effort and perseverance - these are more important than the results themselves because they lead to solid results. A huge accidental success is less important than a small self-generated one.
Teach and talk about growth mindset and make sure that your child or teen properly understands that we improve any skill by practice, effort and determination. This does not mean anyone can succeed at everything but it does mean that we each improve by effort and that it is effort and courage that give us the best chance of success, not waiting around for magic dust.
Keep a mutually respectful conversation going with your child/teenager’s school. It’s important for subject teachers and pastoral staff to know what particular challenges or worries your child has. They (staff) need to listen but you need to listen to their observations, too. This is what I mean by mutually respectful: you both have expertise - you in your child and the staff in children in general - but experts need to listen and adapt and be open-minded.
Every human brain is remarkable. We are each brilliant in our different ways and our possibilities are endless. My book, Ten Ways to Build a Brilliant Brain, will help a pre-teen build the best brain in advance of the teenage years, whatever their existing strengths and weaknesses.
I hope that was less waffly!
If you want me to talk to the parents or staff or your school, see my Speaking page for possibilities. My diary books up fast so don’t delay contacting me.
[…] Nicola Morgan’s excellent presentation on handling anxiety this evening. It really was wonderfully informative, pointing us to the facts and causes behind the behaviours […] And then the many very useful strategies that might help us all. I was struck by the amount of guidance on our own behaviour, as adults, towards handling our own anxiety, thereby offering a positive, reflective and supportive role model to our children.” From a parent after my online talk on Nov 7th
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