Letting Them Fly: Lessons in Independence from a House of Three

Three kids, three completely different neurodivergent journeys, spanning elementary school all the way up through college, all under one roof at the same time. It’s bananas.

Some days it feels like triage, standing in the middle of my own house trying to figure out who needs me first, because they’re all priorities, every single one of them, but they can’t all be the most urgent fire at the exact same moment, even though in each of their minds, they absolutely are.

I’ve edited college essays and taught “new math” and reviewed phonics sounds back-to-back in the same afternoon, to the point where I have genuinely caught myself making letter sounds in my sleep. And all three of them feel, in that moment, that their problem is the one that matters most, the one that needs Mommy to drop everything and fix it right now.

So here is my advice, the only advice I really have … give yourself grace, and just do your best. That’s all any of us can do. So, what have I been doing to keep my sanity through all of it? Honestly, nothing, in the way
you’d expect.

I’ve stopped trying to fix everything the second it happens. I let them sit in their emotions. I let them identify what they’re actually feeling, work through it, and have a real moment to process before we even get to solutions.

As parents, we have this built-in urge to fix everything immediately, because all we want is for our babies to be happy and safe, and safe means their environment, their mental state, their emotional state, their physical state, their whole nervous system.

But the need for instant gratification in kids today is unmatched, and if I answer every single alarm bell the second it rings, I’m not actually helping them, I’m just teaching them that someone else will always catch it before they have to.

It clicked for me watching my dad. I watched him lovingly prepping food for my kids one
afternoon, and I thought, they’re old enough, they’re capable, they should be doing this themselves.

And right behind that thought came the scarier ones. What if grandpa isn’t here one day. What if Charles and I aren’t here one day. Could they fend for themselves? Navigate the rough waves? Make the good choices, solve the hard problems, without one of us standing right there?

And then the question that really stopped me: are we, without meaning to, making them more disabled than their diagnoses actually say they are, just by sheltering them? That’s when I understood what the real job was.

The best thing any of us, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, caregivers, can do for our special ones is let them fly. Let them try, let them fail, let them try again, no different than their neurotypical peers, just with modified support built in along the way.

Inclusion isn’t only a classroom concept, it’s the whole world, and we have to prepare them for a world that wasn’t built with their differences in mind. We can hope that world meets them with kindness, but we know it doesn’t always, so maybe our kids need a little more preparation than others, and that’s okay. That might mean practicing what to say if they ever need help from a police officer or a medic.

It might mean showing them how to use an app on their phone to find what aisle something’s on at the store, because talking to a stranger who works there isn’t always something they can do.

It might mean working through what happens when different foods on the plate touch and everything in them wants to shut down. We let them learn it in every way, with every sense, with every resource this world has to offer them right now. And to be clear, we’re not out here letting our babies drown either. We’re still human, and we still want them to remember the soft moments too, like the hot cocoa I made the day homework had them in tears.

But the bigger point stands: let them learn, let them grow, meet them exactly where they are, gauge what they’re capable of honestly, adjust where there are real limits, and let them know there is always a way through.

Let them live and learn inside the chaos instead of shielding them from all of it. They come out stronger on the other side of it, and so, believe it or not, does your sanity.