9. Raising Resilience: How Home Adaptations Can Empower Children

Hi, I'm Dave Whittingham.

And I'm Kate Morris. And welcome to Neurodivergence, Family and Faith.Today we're asking the question, how important is it to adapt our homes to the needs of our children? Will our adapted homes make our children weaker when they leave the home?

G', day, everyone. Great to be talking with you again. So we're asking this question of adapting the home.Do we eliminate triggers at home, like, do we dim the lights or do we keep the lights bright to help our children be able to cope with that? Do we mitigate things by letting them wear earmuffs or sunnies inside? Or do we tell them, get used to it. This is what you've got get used to?And it's a really tricky question because I think we're always asking that question as parents for anything. We've talked about how we're preparing our children for the future, for life outside the home as adults. That's what parenting is about.But we're always asking, okay, is this thing appropriate now? Is this thing appropriate in the home, or is it appropriate somewhere else?

Yeah, I mean, it's such an important question. It's an important question that I'm asked quite a lot by parents as well, and also by people around families as well.Are these families making good adjustments for their kids, or are they actually weakening their kids by making these adjustments?And, you know, it's really handy because with research, so much research into this sort of area, it's actually really clear that an adapted home won't make a child less resilient. They're actually going to make a child more resilient.And it's really important that we look at why, so that we can make sure that our adapted homes are actually kicking those goals. I suppose so. Research has been showing that it's going to help reduce anxiety.An adapted home is going to help with emotional awareness, and it's going to help with kind of increasing that energy that we've talked about in other episodes as well. Um, and so why don't we. Why don't we talk through some of these areas, Dave, that can actually be impacted by adapted homes?

Yeah, that's really helpful, Kate. Just thinking about the anxiety one, to start off, I think it. It can be opposite of what people think. Like, you want to.You want to get people doing things. You want to get our children doing things.But I found just in myself that when I'm more anxious about doing something, it just puts up barriers all the time.And when people try and push Me through those barriers, that anxiety actually just increases and makes it harder to do something, whereas I found that when the anxiety is less, I'm actually more able to do things.So it happened just the other day with the dishwasher, and this is a silly little example, but I'd been having all this anxiety about how we use our dishwasher, that sort of thing, but my wife just said, let's do it together, and it just removed all the anxiety about doing it. And in the end, I didn't need her to do it with me because I was able to go forward and do it without those barriers inside my head.

Oh, that's. That is so helpful, Dave. And what a lovely wife you have too.

Oh, she's great.

Yeah, I bet.

Shout out to Janice.

Oh, yeah, yeah. This actually, what you've explained there, Dave, is kind of textbook, actually. So that's a really helpful example. Anxiety and capacity.This is something that's great to understand as parents, because that's our question always, isn't it? How do we juggle this?We know from research that neurodivergent kids and adults are much more likely to experience high levels of anxiety than the rest of the population. That's going to be much more likely to be their reality.And so having a home that wants to reduce that anxiety is actually giving them a place where their capacity can grow. And that's. That's for a few reasons that it grows the capacity. One of those reasons is kind of like what you were saying.When anxiety is reduced, you're actually able to face things that are stressful. So to say it another way, we know that when a child or an adult faces stressors or triggers, their anxiety increases.And when their anxiety increases, they're more likely to be triggered or stressed by those things around them. And so their anxiety increases, which means they're even more likely to be triggered. And so, I mean, it's just this vicious cycle.If our home is a place that is adapted to lower that anxiety, you can see how that kind of snaps them out of that spiral, that spiral that you were in a bit, Dave, with your dishwasher as well. Actually, taking some of that anxiety away means that it's not this loop, this sort of spiral downwards.Instead, it's this moment where the anxiety is reduced so that stressors can be faced. The capacity is actually reduced in that time by having that anxiety taken away.

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because as parents, we can be the cause of that anxiety.

Yeah.

So as you were talking, I was thinking about the Bible verse, do not exasperate fathers. You know, talking to fathers particularly, do not exasperate your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.I think in the way that we want to bring up our children, training, instruction of the Lord, we can have that good motive and desire.

But the.

Way that we do it can actually lead to exasperation.And to put it another way, can lead to anxiety because we think we're trying to achieve this great goal, but actually in doing that or the way that we go about that, we've actually increased the anxiety and made the goal less achievable for the child.And so for us as parents, we need to be thinking, okay, how can I reduce that anxiety in order to actually increase, increase capacity to achieve that goal.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, helpful verse there too. And along these lines too, anxiety when it's high is going to interrupt sleep. And this is true for everyone.Sleep and anxiety are so closely related. If you have a bad night's sleep, I know for me I'm going to have a worse day, I'm going to be more anxious about things.And it's that spiral in a similar sort of way, because also if you're anxious, you're going to sleep worse, if you're sleeping worse, you're going to be more anxious, which makes you sleep worse. For some kids, this is really a spiral that will keep them awake a long time, awake in the night, awake early.It's that brain that just can't stop chewing over things.And so again, having a home that sort of supports them in reducing their anxiety will help with sleep, will help with being able to mentally process things. And this reducing triggers, reducing sleep difficulties is all feeding into the importance of mental health.And another thing that research has been abundantly clear on is that neurodivergent people are much more likely to face mental health concerns in the long term as well. And so depression, generalised anxiety, ocd, suicidal ideation, these things and more are a lot more common in the neurodivergent population.And they're fed by this constant drip of anxiety. And so again, it's more than the short term sleep, it's more than facing stresses the next day.It's a long term benefit as well and a long term risk if we allow just that constant drip of anxiety to be in their lives day in and day out, whether out of the home or in the home.

Yeah, we talked about this a bit in our fight, flight, freeze episode where we really struggled to say, fight, flight, freeze.

Fight, freeze.

Yeah, yeah.

You have to practise.

When you ask your happy, healthy child, who's had lots of great sleep to empty the dishwasher, that's one thing. But when you ask them to do that, when they haven't had enough sleep and they're already anxious, they're gonna really struggle with that. And so.And that builds up. It's like a cup building up and up and up and up and up.And if there's no outlet for that, for that anxiety, it just builds up that they aren't able to cope and function. So sleep is an outlet, but we want our homes to be an outlet that anxiety decreases rather than increases.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Like active decrease of anxiety. A place that isn't just you come home, put the TV on and you pause.But a place where we're incorporating some of those regulation ideas we've talked about over time, where actually a person is working on reducing that anxiety in an environment where they're welcome to have different needs to other people. A home that says you're going to find this stressful. Let's work on this. A home that says you're going to find this triggering, let's work on that.Whether it's eliminating or mitigating or regulating through these things, as we keep talking about. And I think it's also an opportunity for emotional awareness, which is another really important aspect of having an adapted home.So if you've got a home where kids are able to come home and kind of unmask all these things they've held in all day, and a lot of neurodivergent children do hold it all in. They can come home. And they're allowed to be someone who finds the lights triggering.They're allowed to say to someone near them, actually, I can't cope with singing right now.It's a place where they can grow in that ability to express needs within, you know, their own capacity and allowing for differences in that as well, and to grow in confidence to be heard or to be received for who they are. And research is so clear that this capacity increase will make them stronger and not weaker. And all.All throughout this episode, I'm going to keep referring to research, because there's a big research base for all of this. And so, as always, if you'd like to have a follow up of these things, the citations are going to be in our show notes.And so, yeah, for this emotional awareness, we can be teaching our children to recognize their needs and to be asking for things, helping them understand how they can identify what's happening in their body and using their preferred tools to communicate that.Now, it's important to understand that for a lot of neurodivergent kids, understanding what's happening inside can be a little bit like picking out the ingredients of a soup. There can be so much going on. You can say to a child, what are you feeling right now? And we're expecting sad or anxious or even serene.But it's a word my son learned recently. But in fact, it can actually be a lot of these things at once as well.And so as we're doing this, we're going to have kids at different stages with different needs, with different communication styles. It might be words that they're able to express. It might be, here's a picture of dinosaurs. Which dinosaur are you?And why can you act out what this dinosaur is? And then he can be happy and stompy at the same time. He can be hungry and excited at the same time.Things that kind of caught up with emotions can also be part of their description. And that's okay.

It's interesting, isn't it?Because I think in my head, what I really, really want, or maybe in my sinful heart, what I really want is for my child to do the work, do the hard work. So when I ask the question, how are you feeling in that moment?You know, I've done everything I need to do, and they then just need to respond, right? But actually there's, there's.There's so much more for me to do as a parent to help them get to that point where they can express it in whatever way is appropriate for them to express it. It's not like we're. We're not validating every reaction to every emotion. So we're not creating a safe space where we're saying, oh, you know what?You just, you weren't coping at that time, and so you push child. And that's just a natural reaction to how you were feeling at the time. We're not saying it's okay to go and punch your sister or anything like that.

Not at all.

What we're.What we're doing is we're creating a space in the home where they can slow down and think about what happened in that moment where they did punch their sister and express or find ways to understand their own emotions and then do it in a better, in a different way later on in a lot of life. Life goes really fast, doesn't it?And there isn't Time to slow down and to analyze and understand and draw the dinosaur and think about how the dinosaur's feeling or anything like that.And so home, actually, we want to make home a place where they can have that space to slow down and to analyze and think and work and say, okay, I don't want to end up hitting my sister. So what are some better ways to do that?

Yeah, I think that's really helpful, Dave, because it's important that we all encourage each other as parents in this, isn't it? That we aren't making a home where we just say your needs mean you can act as you like.We're actually still Christians working to raise our children as Christians for God's glory, imitating Christ. And so that's actually our guiding principle.But in all of this, we understand what's going on for our children in order to best support them, rather than just copy pasting an image of what we think parenting might be for other families or whatever it might be.Instead we're adapting where they're at and constantly looking to Jesus to see who we want to help them be, as we ourselves learn to be more like Jesus too, I hope.

Yeah.Because if we want to teach our kids how to be other person centered in loving, we actually need to be other person centered in our love of them before we ask them to do it, because we'll teach them so much better.

Absolutely. That's so true. And so hopefully our adapted homes are adapted and Christ centered. That's really important, isn't it?And another aspect that this will really help with is renewing energy.And so when our children are constantly overwhelmed at school or whatever they might have had in their day when they come home, this is a chance where we can be replenishing energy. And we talked about this in an early episode when we talked about spoons.So replenishing those spoons or that energy capacity that we have in a way that is supportive, so working out ways for them, like individualized for them, ways that will work for them to actually actively wind down, not just hit the pause button, but wind down so that they're renewing that energy. And we know that as we have these homes that are adapted, we're not saying, I'm going to push you so that you're more resilient outside of the home.We're saying, I'm going to support you to renew your energy so that when you face the next thing, you've got more energy, which means more capacity, which means less anxiety to face what's coming Next.

Yeah. So it's not chucking out the goal of helping our kids to do stuff and manage life, is it? It's actually finding a more helpful way to reach that goal.So it's not, it's not a ticket to laziness where we're saying, oh, we just, you know, you've just, you're, you've had a hard time, so there's nothing to do.It's about working, but working with the right tools and the right parameters, which sometimes those tools and parameters can be counterintuitive to what we might be used to or what we want to do, but.

Or what we were brought up with as well.

Yeah, exactly.

Sometimes we're doing it differently to when we were kids. Yeah.

So much of what we do as parents and in marriage is unthought out just doing, copying what we saw before. And sometimes those things were actually perfect for what we needed. They weren't all bad, necessarily.

Yeah, yeah.

But they aren't necessarily what our children need.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Okay, so in the last episode, we talked about lots of really practical tips of, you know, do this, do this, do this, don't do this, all that sort of thing. I guess in this episode we've much more tried to focus on an attitude of adapting the home.So it's not necessarily all the tools you need to adapt the home, but saying, okay, is adapting the home worth it? Is it valuable? Does it help our children or hinder our children? And we want to argue strongly that adapting the home is a really loving thing to do.For the sake of training your children, you'll help them to be less anxious, which will increase their capacity, which will prepare them to go out into other environments that are less adapted. The home will be a safe, loving place that's almost a training ground, preparing our children for life. What do you think?Is that a helpful summary, Kate?

I think that's a great summary, Dave. I think that's exactly the sort of thing that we've been doing, looking at today.And I'm hoping that this gives us confidence to be working with our kids, to work out how to make the home a space for them where they can be rejuvenating to be. To be building that resilience, to face this world that is going to be complicated probably for their whole lives.And those complications will change.We know from research these things will change over time, but we need to be giving them tools to be able to cope with a world that's always going to be tricky in different Ways for them.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, next week we're actually going to be looking at something very specific, aren't we? What are we doing next week, Kate?

Yeah, that's right, Dave. It's that time of year again. My kids are giving me a countdown to Christmas most days.And so next week we're going to be having a think through supporting neurodivergent children at Christmas time, through the events, through the family events, through things like decorations and presents. There is a lot to think through and a lot of joy, too, as we look ahead to Christmas.

Awesome.

But before we go, Dave, before we were recording, you were telling me some really interesting things about your other two podcasts. Can I just ask you some questions about them? Because I'm a huge fan of your other two podcasts.So Dave runs Stories of a Faithful God and that's a great podcast for adults. It's. It's Bible stories. They're very engaging and Stories of a Faithful God for kids. And this is great for kids.It's got the music, it's got the funny bits, it's got. I've heard you mention things like boogers in there, Dave.

What?

No, I'm sure of it. Okay, so kids love it. It's good for a laugh. It's good for being engaging.But most of all, it's the real Bible and taking kids through step by step through different aspects. So, Dave, tell us where you're up to and what your current season is about.

Yeah. So we've just returned to Exodus. We did the first half last year and now we've returned to finish it off.And it's so wonderful because even as God gives the law to his people, he's all about grace. And so he keeps showing grace to his people, but also so many things that he sets up in Exodus keep pointing us to the wonderful news in Jesus. Yeah.So I've been really excited to see all those links in there and have a go at telling those stories.I think God is the best storyteller, so I try hard to stick as closely to how he's telling us the story and the points that he's trying to get across for that, as well as, you know, my ridiculous humor that occasionally comes in.

It does sometimes.

Yep.

Okay, well, look them up on your podcast app or head to faithfulgod.net and you can find the links there.

Fantastic. And for now, we'll say goodbye and see you next time.

See you next time. Bye.

Bye. Well, next week we're actually going to be looking at something very specific. Aren't we? What are we doing next week? Kate.

I just realized I can't remember. Let me just quickly go to the season plan.