“Is there any trouble at home?” My son’s nursery teacher asked me. He hadn’t said a word in school for weeks. During break, he would focus all his attention on the movement of caterpillars across the playground. But when he spoke, he expressed himself uniquely.
This beautiful boy, ours to love and cherish, reframed how I live in this world.
During his first years in Kolkata, he went to an inclusive school that championed values over pedigree (few NCR schools yield such inclusion through access and affordability). As a preschooler, it was hard for him to follow instructions, maintain eye contact, and endure loud noises. At the same time, his specific interests ran so deep they could be a subterranean river, carrying mineral-rich, life-affirming ways of seeing.
A pattern emerged. A reluctance to engage with peers. Hours spent striking marbles and observing their patterns of dispersal, as if decoding a complex life mystery. A need for perfect silence during meals. No mixing of textures.
These initially manifested as problems. So many parenting challenges are grounded in a failure to observe. It took us years to get to the root of his unease in the world. So much well-meaning but unhelpful advice. Then, in NCR, we found diagnostic and counselling support for him.
We have grown through occupational therapy, psychological counselling, classroom breaks, and a dearly defended idea of leisure. Through years of advocating, he is a secure, grounded child. That advocacy can look like a hundred emails to teachers, repeated phone calls to counsellors, frequent appointments with them, walks in nature, shunning noisy environments, and always looking for conducive ways of living.
Neurodiversity often shows up as heightened observation: Seeing details others gloss over; connecting a smell to its first memory; meeting everything with intensity. Look closer, and it yields a deep appreciation of the ordinary, often understood only after years of being knocked around by life. My son has taught me to live with bravery, depth, and determination.
A has a habit of affixing. He creates words that didn’t exist before. This suggests new ways of living in relation to things, and not distinct from them. How he thinks is something that is being erased in the Anthropocene: Of being human as a continuum of stone, rock, earth, tree, insect, creature. A still chastises me for stepping on a snail four years ago. An acknowledgement of the right of all life forms to exist is a lesson for our times.
It is expected that children are naturally social beings, that without markers of a conventional childhood, they will not flourish. Acclimatising people across institutions to the needs of a neurodiverse child is a lifetime’s work. Helping them self-advocate with the right tools that put forward their needs is the best armour for the future.
It is important to nourish yourself. There are battles to fight, some internal. People have sometimes attributed my son’s neurodivergence to my being a working mother. This tells me how much harder we must work to mainstream any understanding of difference. Deviating from prescribed social scripts makes people uncomfortable. To borrow the words of Donna Haraway, one must stay with the trouble.
My child is the alluvium where I deposit the things I fetch from the depths. I ferret away precious resources to lay at his banks. I leave him virtual paper trails to discover the many people he has been as he grows. I hold space for us to grow together. My biggest parenting joys are when I step back. To witness and celebrate the wisdom through which children engage with life is one of the biggest acts of service a parent can perform.
Raising a neurodivergent boy involves braiding: Taking wisps of preferences and weaving them into a symphony that is light on its feet. It has involved massive dollops of unlearning. I’ve learnt not to make a big deal about birthdays. That eating dinners together — that prized family ritual — often causes sensory overload. That not all kids play in the park.
I’ve taught him to lean into his intuition and stand his ground about his core beliefs. He faces the challenges all 10-year-olds do at a time filled with instant gratification, violence, and depravity. To read the tug of the undercurrents that radiate through him, to reinvent myself to relate, I learn about Minecraft servers, Skibidi toilet, Obunga, and brain rot.
The only way to raise your boy in a world whose foundation has turned on itself is to learn the language of his inner world, tease out what he feels, how he mediates what he absorbs. And underneath it all: love, acceptance, radical empathy.
The writer is a researcher and communications specialist. She works at the Ashoka Centre for a People-centric Energy Transition, Ashoka University
