New Book - Coming 2024
The neurodiversity-affirming guide you’ve been waiting for.
I've written a guide for parents to help you better understand your college student with ADHD or autism.
This book looks at your student's challenges through a neurodiversity-affirming lens and gives insights from my years of teaching, coaching, and living as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world.
I detail my approach to supporting your student, as well as my own journey to thriving in a world that wasn't designed for brains like ours.
Some of you may not know, but I almost failed out of college during my first go round as a teenager. Although I had diagnoses of ADHD, ASD, and dyscalculia, I did not have the skills to advocate for my needs in the higher education setting, so I went without support, muddling through nearly 6 years of undergraduate work to end up with a 2.9 GPA and every letter grade imaginable.
I distinctly recall being held back after class by my Honors English professor mid-semester freshman year. She was a kind woman, but expressed her disappointment and bewilderment at my steep decline in class attendance and writing quality from the beginning of the semester until then. She asked if there was anything going on in my life that she should know about, such as financial struggles or family problems.
There wasn’t anything unusual going on in my personal life, and I didn’t have the words to describe my executive functioning difficulties, so I simply apologized and told the professor that I would try harder.
The problem with “trying harder”, as your neurodivergent college student knows all too well, is that every college student with ADHD/ASD is already trying harder than most of their peers. They just aren’t getting the same results from that effort and the effort is largely invisible to their parents, professors, and peers.
Luckily for me, I landed in the perfect profession to ask questions and dig deeper into how our brains acquire knowledge and develop new skills. As a teacher, I devoured every book, video, and training on the subject of executive functioning that I could get my hands on.
What I learned was both heartening and underwhelming.
I kept teaching and researching and eventually went back to school to get another degree, where I ended up with a 3.9 GPA.
I’ve distilled everything I’ve learned from my own experiences as a student, a teacher, and a coach into a guide for parents that I hope will provide insight into how your student’s brain and body work, ways you can support them, and how coaching can help.