Welcome to the Neurotribe, the podcast where authenticity meets empowerment. Your host, Teresa, is a certified business executive and life coach navigating the intricate tapestry of neurodiversity. She's someone blessed with ADHD and dyslexia and gifted a widow and a mother to four incredible neurodiverse children.
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Hey friends, welcome back to the Neurotribe. I am so grateful to have all of you here. I'm so grateful for all of you that comment and respond and send me messages knowing more subjects that you want me to touch on and talk about. Today we are going to talk about neurodivergent teens. This is a hot topic because there's a lot going on with our ND kids.
we can have Teens that are in different age brackets. For instance, maybe you have a senior, maybe you have a freshman. Those teens could be at total odds with each other and developmentally be in different places and finding ways for them to be able to connect to have something that's a shared interest can be really important at this time.
For some of our kiddos, that is finding a video game that they are willing and open to play with together while others, they playing a board game together is really interesting and powerful and they enjoy playing those board games. Another thing that you can do as a whole family is doing something like playing a game together, playing an interactive game together like Shanghai Rummy or Spoons or D and D.
These are all things that you can do as a parent to work with your kids and be able to help them bridge that communication and help them find a new way of getting along together because it might look different from when they were kids and they used to Play superhero in the backyard, and that's not something that they would do anymore.
So helping them figure out how to evolve their friendship and their relationship can be Such a powerful thing.
I have had a lot of conversations about parents that have teens and their teens are really lonely. They do not have many friends. They're concerned about their neurodivergent teen not having enough of a social life.
It could be that your teen is not really interested in a social life. There could be a lot going on at school and they just don't have the social battery left for much of a social life. But, helping them find something Where they can still find some connections to people who get them, understand them, and they can feel comfortable with.
Finding a Facebook group or a meet up group where you can have them join something that they're interested in. I have a lot of teens join D& D groups or Pokemon groups. There are card game or board game shops where they do, every Monday night is come in and play XYZ game or every Wednesday night is XYZ or every Saturday there's a tournament there.
That is one place or thing that you can do.
Another thing that's really, I think, notable is sometimes our teens struggle because they knew what they enjoyed as a kid and they're struggling to enjoy what they are interested in and what they like or what their hobby is as a teen. It can be helpful for us to help them figure it out.
Ask them if they want to go to a summer camp or they want to join a rowing club, or they want to join a knitting club, see if there's any type of clubs that they are interested, maybe in an afterschool program. If you have teens that really are not having the social battery after school, it can be that helping them join maybe an online art class or an online social group can be very powerful for them.
I think the thing that is notable is, Listening to our kids and what they are needing, and also using your parent intuition. Some of our kids don't want a lot of friends, and that is okay, but if they have one friend, they are super happy with that. And hey, I say all for that. There are also, Some of our nd kids where they're more of social butterflies, they want to have a more variety of friends, but they're not sure how to get it.
So that's where we can ask them, do you want to join an ice skating team or do you want to do gymnastics, something like that, where they are getting their hobbies and their interests, or they get to try multiple things to see what they're interested in, whether it's joining a team or.
joining an afterschool club or even working with a therapist to see if you can find a therapist who is open and willing to do a social group. I know for some of my clients, I hold social groups and we do online and in person. If my clients are local, we will do in person. So these are all some ideas of some of the things that can come up as Parents that have neurodivergent teens
as our teens are getting older, cognitively, their mind is still growing, it's still changing. They don't have full access to their prefrontal cortex. There's parts of them that are maturing, parts of them that are not. Some of them academically are on par or ahead, but then socially and emotionally a little bit
further behind there are some of our teens that are very deep and empathetic and socially they're way far ahead academically, they might be the same or ahead and You know processing at a lower speed it totally depends what's going on with your teen Depends on what their wiring is depends on what they're needing thank you so much. I love you all. Take care. Please like, subscribe, and share. Bye.
