When a parent raising a neurodivergent child starts working with me, the first part of the hour is often about the child. The assessments, the school, the thing that isn’t working this week. They’re here to understand it better, to get it right, to be sure they aren’t making things worse. And when I turn the question back to them, to how they are holding up in the middle of all of it, there is frequently a small pause. A flicker of surprise, as though the question belonged to someone else. Then something like, I’m fine, honestly. It’s my child who’s having the hard time.
That pause is worth paying attention to. It says a lot about how long this person has been putting themselves at the back of the queue.
These are parents raising a neurodivergent child, or a child still somewhere in the long corridor of referrals, assessments, and waiting lists. They have usually become fluent in a language they never asked to learn. They know the terminology. They can recite the reports. Without ever meaning to, they’ve become part case manager, part researcher, part advocate, on top of being a parent. Nobody trained them for any of it. They learned because there was no one else to do it.
The question almost nobody thinks to ask them is the plainest one. How are you?
The kind of tired that stops feeling like tiredness
The strain of this sort of parenting rarely shows up as a single, nameable crisis. It accumulates. A skipped meal, a broken night, a meeting at the school that leaves you sitting in the car for ten minutes before you can drive home and start dinner as though nothing happened.
What tends to happen is that people live in that state for so long that they lose the ability to feel it as a state at all. It stops being “stress” and just becomes the baseline. If you asked them outright whether they were struggling, they’d say no, and they would mean it, because they genuinely can’t remember what the alternative felt like.
It isn’t quite denial. It’s closer to adaptation. You can only stay braced for so long before braced becomes your resting position. For many parents, the emotional labour is invisible precisely because it has become ordinary.
The research is clear on this. Parents of neurodivergent children report more anxiety, more depression, more plain exhaustion than parents in general. The studies matter, of course, but so does what becomes visible the moment you pay attention. You can often read it in someone’s face before they’ve said very much at all.
The grief people are ashamed to name
There’s a particular grief that runs underneath a lot of this, and it almost never gets said directly. It isn’t grief for the child. I want to be careful here, because this is the thing parents are most frightened of being misunderstood about. The child is loved, completely, exactly as they are.
The grief is for something quieter. It’s for the future you had loosely sketched before you knew anything, the ordinary one, with the milestones roughly in the expected order, the friendships, the school run, the shape of a life you assumed without ever deciding to. Most parents never notice they’ve been holding a picture like that until it doesn’t come true.
And when a parent finally lets themselves feel that loss, there is nearly always guilt riding next to it. As though grieving the imagined child were a betrayal of the real one. It isn’t. If anything, it works the other way around. The parents who can let themselves feel the disappointment, and the fear, and the tiredness, usually have more of themselves left over for the child in front of them. It’s often the parents who insist they’re fine who are closest to running on empty.
What strength actually looks like
We have a strange cultural idea that strength means not struggling. It’s often closer to the reverse. Strength is not the absence of fear. It’s going to the next appointment after a discouraging one. Asking again after being told no. Staying steady and warm for a child who needs you while privately carrying a fear about the future you haven’t said out loud to anyone.
That’s not the absence of struggle. That’s what people do while they struggle. And it costs something every time.
Being looked after, for a change
Here’s the part I most want parents to hear, because it’s the part that gets argued with.
Looking after yourself is not a distraction from looking after your child. It’s part of how you look after your child. A parent who has somewhere to set down the weight, even for an hour a week, comes back steadier. That isn’t a moral point about self-care. It’s just how people work. Nobody stays regulated on empty.
What a parent in this position usually needs isn’t more advice. They tend to have more of that than they can use. What they rarely have is a place where they are the one being attended to. Where the question is how you are, and there’s time to answer it. Where you can say the thing you’re afraid makes you a bad parent, and watch it turn out not to.
You don’t have to be endlessly resilient. There’s really no such thing. Even the strongest person runs out when they’re never allowed to stop. And you were never meant to do any of this without anyone beside you.
If you’re a parent who’s been holding a lot on your own, and you’d like a place to set some of it down, that’s the kind of work I do. No pressure and no commitment, just a conversation to begin with. You’re welcome to get in touch whenever the time feels right.