Ep. 27: Top 10 Neurodiversity Affirming Ways to Support Autistic Kids
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What is the neurodiversity‑affirming paradigm and why does it matter for autistic kids?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift.
We're an SLP couple from California with three boys and a passion for finding better ways to support autistic kids.
I'm Chris. You might know me as speech dude. I'm a Neurodivergent High School SLP and the creator of the Dynamic Assessment of Social Emotional Learning, and I specialize in crafting neurodiversity affirming IEPs through my online course.
And I'm Jesse, a sensory integration trained SLP, owner of a top-rated clinic in Los Angeles, and the creator of the Inside Out Sensory Communication Programs for Parents and Therapists. Join us weekly to learn neurodiversity affirming ways to support social, emotional development, and regulation in autistic kids.
Are you ready to make the shift?
Let's do it. Hello, hello, and welcome to Making the Shift. It is just me today, your last loud half of this pair. I hope everyone had a great Halloween. It was a lot of fun for us. I think the key was having low expectations. But I don't know. It's like this idea of Having high hopes but low expectations. Is that a thing or is that contradictory? Can I have both of those? Because that's kind of the mentality I went into trick-or-treating with. And it was like one of those things where We just were gonna go, we were gonna have a good time. We know our kids like candy. Didn't really matter, you know, how long we were out or what order we went down the streets or whatnot. And it was just so funny watching Jack because
He's like old enough now. You know, last year I think we were mostly carrying him around. This year he can walk and he's just like, Who are these random people wearing scary things giving me candy? My favorite thing in the world. And but he got the hang of it.
How did the hosts’ Halloween experience illustrate low expectations vs. high hopes?
It was really, really cute. He just like had this bewildered look on his face though the whole night. He never he never understood it. But We stayed up late and I'm just now asking myself how long Until the candy wears off, because seriously. They were still hyped up the morning after. And now I'm a little afraid that It might have permittive X. Anyway, I hope you had a great Halloween. And I'm excited for tonight's topic, which is all about my top 10 neurodiversity-affirming ways to support autistic kids. And I will tell you how this came up to be, which was that Chris and I just presented last week a full-day seminar for a few hundred SLPs. locally relatively speaking, traffic LA little bit far, but it was really fun.
And what I've just noticed after training so many professionals and being able to do lots of these Um Sebinars that we get so many of the same questions and they always fall back on these very specific topic areas. So what I did was I put together a list of the top 10 topic areas or strategies you really need to focus on. If you are trying to be a neurodiversity affirming therapist or if you are the parent of an autistic child and you want to adopt more neurodiversity affirming practices, these are the top 10. It always comes back to these 10. In all of the trainings we do, I own a clinic here in Los Angeles. We train lots of other professionals. We have lots of kids who have large teams. It always comes down to these 10 things.
And if I could have every professional trained in these 10 areas, I would. That's how powerful they are. So we are going to jump through those today. So let's just go ahead and get started. The first one, pretty obvious, but really helping people understand how to operate from the neurodiversity paradigm. So really understanding what is neurodiversity and how does neurodiversity and the neurodiversity relate to autism, because we know neurodiversity is this bigger umbrella term and lots of different brain differences fall under that umbrella. So how does neurodiversity specifically relate to autism? And this is something that We really need everyone to understand. We need them to understand, you know, the idea of if we had a bell curve, that that big chunk in the middle would represent all the neurotypical brains and all of those brains in the ends would represent the neurodivergent brains because those are the brains that are diverging from the middle, from the norm.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the neurodiversity‑affirming paradigm and why does it matter for autistic kids?
0:08–2:08
2
How did the hosts’ Halloween experience illustrate low expectations vs. high hopes?
2:08–5:33
3
Why is autism considered an identity and a neurotype rather than a deficit?
5:33–9:15
4
How does a strengths‑based approach reshape therapy goals for autistic children?
9:15–12:30
5
What strategies support higher‑level language and cognitive skills over the long game?
12:30–15:42
6
Why is honoring sensory differences crucial for regulation and learning?
15:42–19:12
7
How can co‑regulation and validation boost emotional well‑being in autistic kids?
19:12–23:49
8
What role do intrinsic motivation, special interests, and self‑advocacy play in neurodiversity‑affirming support?
23:49–30:06
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
Ep. 125 How to Run Successful Social Groups
Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)