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parenting teens

The Neurodivergent Family Toolbox
The Connected Parent Blog

How To Keep Your Relationship Alive As Partners While Co-Parenting Neurodivergent Children

Many parents whom I work with struggle with getting on the same page with and nurturing their relationship with their partner while co-parenting their neurodivergent children.

Parenting is one of the hardest and most complex jobs we will ever do as a person. We are literally responsible for taking care of and shaping the life of another human being. The pressure to get it right can feel intense!

A person would think with such high stakes and the momentous importance of the task at hand we would receive intensive training to match the significance of the job. However, that is sadly not the case. Many of us stumble into parenting having learned more about the mechanisms of giving birth than what it takes to raise a child.

In this blog I share some of the things my husband and Wayne, and I did to keep our marriage together while raising our three neurodivergent kids. Read more…

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The Connected Parent Blog

Understanding RSD in ADHD

Rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD) is when you experience severe emotional pain because of failure or feeling rejected.

RSD is linked to ADHD, Autism, BPD and CPTSD and experts suspect it happens due to differences in brain structure. These differences mean your brain can’t regulate rejection-related emotions and behaviours, making them much more intense.

For a person who experiences RSD, their brain is wired to interpret neutral events/feedback as negative, and their brain is wired to discount positive events/feedback and their brain is wired to amplify the negative events/feedback.  Read more…

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The Connected Parent Blog

The Importance of Seeing Your Child as ‘Good Inside’

Connection-focused parenting is based on the assumption that we are all fundamentally ‘good inside’. In other words, you are a good person and your child is a good kid.

This might sound deceptively simple. Of course, our kids, and we as parents are good inside. But stay with me here. It is easy to hold onto our idea of goodness when everything is going ‘right’, when we are calm and regulated or when our children are behaving as we believe that they ‘should’.

However, when our child has just had a meltdown, we argue with our partner about how to handle a parenting situation, or we are exhausted, overwhelmed and ‘over it’ it is very easy to see the worst in ourselves, our partner or our child. It is very easy to believe that we are ‘bad’ inside. Read how you can change this and use the principle of ‘good inside’ as a powerful parenting tool. Read more…

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The Valentins
The Connected Parent Blog

Shifting The Paradigm Of Neurodiversity

Autism and ADHD are something that affects approximately 15-20% of the population. The increased diagnosis of Autism and ADHD in teens and adults highlights the need for there to be more conversations that facilitate the shifting of the paradigm on how we speak about, perceive and include neurodiversity.

In this blog I highlight some of the key challenges for neurodivergent individuals and their families. I explore why we need to advocate for shifting the paradigm of neurodiversity. Read more…

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The Connected Parent Blog

Even ‘Good Parents’ Grieve Their Parenting Journey Sometimes

All parents experience parental grief as part of their parenting journey.

There are two types of parental grief. There is the irreconcilable grief that comes from the death of a child that no parent ever truly recovers from. (If this is you I hold nothing but love and respect in my heart for your loss).

And then there is the more nuanced grief that comes from the loss of our identities, ideas and expectations of what parenthood would be like.

There is nothing in the world like it – this heartbreakingly beautiful experience of life and death – becoming and surrender that we as parents go through every day. Read more…

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