Neurodiversity
There is no one right way for a brain to work.
Some people notice every sound in a room. Some people forget what they came into the kitchen for. Some people can read three pages and tell you exactly what was on each one. Some people read the same sentence four times before it sticks.
These differences are not mistakes.
The word neurodiversity means that human brains come in many different shapes, the same way human bodies do. Some brains run on a clock that ticks faster than other clocks. Some brains light up around music, or numbers, or animals, the way other people's brains light up around small talk.
Autism, ADHD, and dyslexia are some of the names we use for these differences. They are ways of being wired.
Plant one kind of tree in rows and you get a tree farm. Plant many kinds together and let the birds and the moss and the mushrooms settle in underneath, and you get a forest. Brains work the same way. A world with only one kind of mind would be very small, and not very interesting.
Neurodiversity is two things at once. It is a fact, which is that the human nervous system varies widely from person to person in how it processes and responds to the world. And it is a paradigm, a way of thinking about that fact, which asks us to treat neurological variation the way we treat any other kind of human difference: as variation, not as defect.
The word itself emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s, from inside the autistic self-advocacy community. The Australian sociologist Judy Singer was developing the term in her honours thesis at the time, and around the same period the journalist Harvey Blume put the case in print: that neurodiversity might be "every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general." His 1998 Atlantic piece is where the biodiversity image first found its public audience, and it is the image that runs through this chapter. The framing has since been developed by autistic writers, notably Nick Walker, into what is now called the neurodiversity paradigm.
That second part, the paradigm, is the move that makes the word feel new. For most of the 20th century, the dominant framework for thinking about these differences was medical. A brain that worked differently from the statistical average was called disordered, and the goal was to bring it closer to typical, usually through therapy aimed at the visible behaviors. The neurodiversity paradigm doesn't deny that some experiences are genuinely difficult. It asks where the difficulty actually lives. A child who melts down at the supermarket is not malfunctioning. The supermarket, with its fluorescent lights and its hundred shouting labels, is a sensory event most adults couldn't comfortably parse either. The child is just less practiced at hiding it.
What changes, when you adopt this lens, is the question you ask. Instead of what is wrong with you, and how do we make you more like the others, you start asking what do you need to thrive, and what conditions are getting in the way? Sometimes the answer is a quiet corner. Or headphones at the playground. Or a schedule made of pictures, or being allowed to talk about trains for as long as the talking lasts. Sometimes the answer is simply being believed.
None of this is soft. The neurodiversity paradigm asks more of the people around the neurodivergent child than the older paradigm did, not less, because it shifts effort from changing the child to changing the conditions. But it asks more of the right people, in the right direction. And it gives the child back the experience of being themselves on purpose, which is the experience every child needs.
- Letting the child show you how they experience things, before deciding how they should.
- Changing the environment first (lights, noise, schedule), and the child second, if at all.
- Using accurate words, including autistic, in the same plain tone you'd use for left-handed.
- Believing the child when they say something is too much.
- "But everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes." (True. The size and frequency are the point.)
- Praising the child for not "seeming neurodivergent" today.
- Bargaining with a meltdown.
- Treating a diagnosis as bad news.