Ep. 74: Are You Actually Neurodiversity Affirming? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions
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What is neurodiversity‑affirming therapy and why is it a buzzword today?
What's up everyone and welcome to Making the Shift for Autistic Kids.
We're an SLP couple from California with four boys.
And we're here every week to bring you neuroaffirming tips, tricks, and tools. Are you ready to make the shift? Let's do this!
Hello and welcome to Making the Shift. Today we are talking about are you actually neurodiversity affirming? The thing is that. Neurodiversity affirming is such a buzzword right now, to the point where some companies and clinicians are like, Yeah, we know we need to be that way because that's how we're gonna get our clients. So when our c when people, prospective clients ask, Are you neurodiversity affirming? They automatically say yes. Okay. Just because A person says they're neurodiversity affirming does not mean they're neurodiversity affirming, right? And it's it's something we can all work toward improving in ourselves, right? This is an ongoing journey. This is something that we're constantly learning about.
And we need to change our ways to better support the clients that we are working with. So in order to know if you are neurodiversity affirming, truly, I'm gonna give you five questions to ask yourself. And the thing that you have to think about here is there's a difference between Holding a belief and utilizing an approach, right? In order to be truly neurodiversity affirming, we need to make sure that not only is this a belief that we hold, we truly believe this, right? It's not just something we spew out and say. But not only is this a belief we hold, but it's something that we practice in our daily life. And there can sometimes be a really big disconnect there. And and sometimes it's not our fault.
It's yes, we really believe that, but I don't know how in in um real life to actually implement this, right? So there can be reasons why you may feel like, I believe this, but I can't implement it, or I believe it, but the systems that are in place in my work setting are keeping me from being able to do it that way. Okay, so when I'm asking you these five different questions, I want you to think about is this a belief that I hold? Is this something that I implement? If it's not, why? And can you? And are any of these changes we're talking about today something that you can easily make? Okay, so the first question is to ask yourself, and this is one of my favorites really, is do you presume competence?
Right? Do you Meet kids, meet your clients, your students, and automatically assume that they are capable of learning and thinking and comprehending and doing all of these incredible things. There's just been so much in the past, I'm sure. And I'm sure we've all been in places like this where we meet a child with a disability and it's this, oh no, they'll they will never grow to be like their peers, right?
Why does saying you’re ND‑affirming not guarantee you practice it?
And it's like this immediate Um, feeling sometimes that people assume or belief they hold that This person because of their disability cannot achieve great things, cannot reach their full potential. And that's something that we really need to understand how dangerous and hurtful that is. And it's especially relevant when we're here on the show specifically talking about autism because We know a lot of our autistic kids score poorly on comprehension subtests of assessments for a lot of reasons. We won't go into all of them, right? But these tests are a not normed on autistic kids, so they're normed on neurotypical kids. So we're comparing apples to oranges when we're looking at results. But two, there's so many other things going on.
that we may not be considering. Is this child regulated? Are they engaged with the activity? Are is this motivating and fun for them? Is their mind elsewhere? Right? There's like we all know because we've all bombed standardized assessments, I'm sure. And if you're here in SLP and you're an SLP and you've taken the G R E. I don't know if I'm the only one who left that test crying, right? But I can't imagine that I'm the only one. So we really need to understand that the test scores we're looking at in kids is by no means a reflection of their true capabilities.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
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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)