Parenting tips for neurodivergent students when progress feels slow and goals feel out of reach
I’m leaning against the kitchen counter, waiting for my 8th grader’s frozen bean and cheese burrito to finish heating, when my phone pings. The microwave has a sticky coffee ring on its handle, our golden retriever is chewing a broken Lego steering wheel at my feet, and the notification is from the county technical high school robotics program— the one my son has talked about almost every day for 10 months. I open the email before I can overthink it, and the first line says “Congratulations on your acceptance.” That’s the greatest news a student (and this parent) could have asked for right now.
A year ago, this would have felt impossible. Back in 7th grade, we got a steady stream of notes from his language arts teacher: doesn’t turn in assignments, doesn’t participate, seems unmotivated. He brought home Ds and Fs on every quiz, and would hide his test papers in the bottom of his backpack instead of bringing them home. I spent months yelling, reminding, taking away his Lego and his screwdrivers and his access to the YouTube robotics channels he binged, telling him if he just tried harder he’d get better grades. It wasn’t until we pushed for educational testing that we got the answer that explained everything: dyslexia. He wasn’t unmotivated. He was working 10 times harder than every other kid in his class just to read a paragraph, and by the end of the school day he was too exhausted to finish anything else.
We got the standard accommodations: extra time on tests, permission to type assignments instead of writing by hand. But I still got stuck in the mindset that we needed to fix his reading first, before we could worry about anything else. For the first two months after his diagnosis, I made him do an hour of reading remediation every weekday right after school, before he could do anything fun. Most nights, he’d sit at the kitchen table and cry through the whole hour, and I’d sit across from him pretending not to cry too. We were both miserable, and his reading scores went up a whole 3 points in three months. That’s when I flipped the schedule.
Instead of doing remediation first, we moved his “strength time” to right after school. Every day, he gets 90 uninterrupted minutes to work on whatever build he’s doing— right now it’s a remote control rover that can pick up trash off the sidewalk— before we touch homework or remediation. It sounds like a small change, but it made a huge difference. He started coming home from school looking forward to something, instead of dreading the hard work that was waiting for him. He ended the school day feeling capable, instead of feeling like he was bad at everything before he even got started. After that, we only do 20 minutes of targeted reading practice three nights a week, instead of an hour every night. His scores have gone up 17 points in six months, because he’s not burnt out. That’s the first thing I tell other parents now: if your kid has a learning struggle, don’t lead with remediation. Lead with what they’re good at. It’s not coddling them. It’s giving them the emotional energy to tackle the hard stuff.
When it came time to apply to the tech high school, the biggest hurdle was the personal essay. A 500-word essay would take him 4 hours to write, full of spelling mistakes and crossed out lines, and he’d end up throwing the whole thing away because he was frustrated. Instead of making him sit and write it line by line, I pulled out my phone and asked him to tell me about the recycling sorting robot he built last year, the one that won honorable mention at the local science fair. He talked for 10 minutes straight, no pauses, explaining how he messed up the motor three times before he got it right, how he wanted to build more things that helped people cut down on waste. I transcribed what he said, then we went through it together to cut it down to 500 words. He fixed the parts that didn’t make sense, and I left all the spelling mistakes as they were. Then we attached a one-paragraph note to the application, explaining his dyslexia, that the spelling errors aren’t a reflection of his ideas or his work ethic.
His guidance counselor told me not to get our hopes up. Most kids who get in have straight A’s, she said, and his reading scores are still below grade level. I get where she was coming from— most schools prioritize test scores and grades above everything else. But that’s the second thing I’ve learned: always ask for what your kid actually needs, don’t just accept the default accommodations. Extra time on tests is great, but if your kid struggles to get thoughts out on paper, asking to let them record a response or speak their essay first isn’t asking for an unfair advantage. It’s asking for a chance for them to show what they can actually do. And being upfront about their struggle, instead of hiding it or trying to cover it up, works more often than not.
My son walked in the door 10 minutes after I got the acceptance email, shoes caked in mud from skateboarding at the park, grabbed his burrito, and leaned over my shoulder to read the email. He didn’t scream or jump up and down. He just nodded, said “cool,” and texted the news to his friend who also applied. His friend didn’t get in, so my son is going over to his house later tonight to help him look at other programs.
We still have hard nights. Some weeks, he refuses to do his reading practice, his grades dip, and I have to remind myself not to panic. He’ll start the program in the fall, and there will be lots of reading and writing that he’ll struggle with, and we don’t know how it will go. This isn’t a story where all his struggles are fixed, or he suddenly became a straight A student. But this news was proof that when you stop centering a kid’s struggle and start centering their strengths, they can surprise you. It doesn’t fix everything, and there’s still a long way to go, but right now, that’s enough.
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