Brilliant Brains like Ours

Place2Be's Programme Leader for Family Work, Judah, reflects on his own journey navigating his children's neurodiversity to go alongside our new Parenting Smart resource: My child might be neurodivergent.

When I was a child, I had a lot of energy. I was always on the go and doing something active, whether that was playing football outside or literally climbing the walls and bannisters in the house. I also remember being easily ‘triggered’ into ‘big’ feelings that I now learned was emotional overwhelm. My mum sometimes would describe me to other people by saying, ‘Wednesday’s child, full of woe’. 

At school, I found it hard to concentrate in lessons that I wasn’t interested in. However, when I did enjoy doing something like football or songwriting, I could hyper-focus on doing it for hours, and I would become quite an expert at it too. I was also very forgetful, and this didn’t change much into my adulthood, many times leaving my house without essentials like my keys or wallet, and I often forgot where I had parked my car.

These were all signs of my neurodiversity, a difference in the way my brain processed information. The things that I still remember from my younger days are the comments that people would make about my struggle to focus or forgetfulness. I went from the top to bottom set in maths at secondary school after being told how ‘rubbish’ at maths I was by a teacher. I did not learn to appreciate the different ways that my brain works until much later in life, which I think is unfortunate.

Since my children were young, I noticed that they also had unique ways that their brains worked – some of the ways they processed things were very similar to mine, and some things were different. My middle son is very much like me in how his brain works. He has less interest in things like maths, but he is very creative and has always had a love for books from very young, which has now developed into a love for writing his own stories - I have read many and been blown away by them! He also has experienced similar challenges to me when it comes to things like remembering where he has put things or being able to focus on things that he is less interested in.