What It Means to Raise an “Orchid Kid”

This guest post is written by Jen Dryer who is a parenting coach for parents of neurodiverse children and mother to two neurodiverse children, and has previously written an informative piece for Beltway Bambinos which helps parents navigate early intervention resources. She will be co-leading a class again called Raising Orchid Kids: Practical Strategies for Parents of Neurodiverse Children beginning January 13. She will lead the class alongside Gabriele Nicolet, MA, CCC-SLP, a family communication specialist, speech therapist and parent coach and founder of SpeechKids Therapy.

My 9-year old son, Max, and I go for a hike every weekend in a section of Rock Creek Park that’s a 5 minute drive from our house. He puts on water shoes and a bathing suit when it’s warm and rain boots and a jacket in colder weather and we ford the shallow stream alongside the official trail. We started this tradition in the early, desperate days of the pandemic, as a much needed break from online school and from the anxiety produced by Covid life.

We took the exact same path every time. Every. Time. When his brother came along and would beg to try a different route, Max would hunker down and yell, “Noooo!!!” as if his brother were about to attack him with a baseball bat. It seems, for most of us with neurotypical brains, that this reaction to a simple route change request is absurd and unfounded. But Max is autistic, and deviating from his expected path without preparation or advance notice felt much like being attacked by a bat-wielding older brother. So, we stayed on the path that day. But it pushed me to think about the ways I could encourage flexibility. I advance planned with him to shift our route ever so slightly, joining the same path at a different entrance in the spirit of what well-known autism advocate and author Temple Grandin calls a “loving push.”

That loving push helped set the stage a few weeks ago, when Max, his brother and I went for a hike and found an entirely new path. We even lost the path at some point, forging our own route along the stream. Max had to scramble over branches, balance on fallen trees to cross the stream and find his literal and figurative footing in an unfamiliar path. He did not yell once, actually enjoyed many of the challenges before him, and felt proud of his accomplishment.  We were thrilled. Until his brother slipped on a rock in the stream, got wet and scraped his knee, and we had to abort the mission. We backtracked, and I tucked in a lesson on the fly on empathy when someone you care about gets hurt and feels frustrated about it. Now Max is much more open to trying new routes (as long as we sometimes go back to the familiar one!).

Raising Max has pushed me to work to understand and respect why and when his challenging behaviors arise, and to identify strategies that I keep in a mental toolbelt to best support him in working through challenges in a positive way. I share all this because I want others raising neurodiverse, or Orchid Kids (those challenging kids with behavioral, developmental or learning differences who, like the flower, can thrive and blossom given the right conditions and supports), to know that it’s easy to get stuck and, at the same time, there are real strategies to help them break free from patterns that can trigger meltdowns and cause stress for all.

These are exactly the supports and preparation tools that experienced speech and communication therapist Gabriele Nicolet and I teach in our Raising Orchid Kids: Practical Strategies for Parents of Neurodiverse Children class, with the goal of making life less stressful and more joyful for those families, and to help parents find effective avenues to help their neurodiverse child thrive.

Raising Orchid Kids participants have universally noted how incredibly helpful it is to find your “parenting tribe” who can relate to what you’re experiencing, while getting support from experts and others who are on that same path. The work that we have been doing to support parents of neurodiverse kids has been truly inspiring to witness, as we guide parents toward strategies and insights into how to better support their challenging child and help them thrive.

Our next 6-week session of the online livestream Raising Orchid Kids: Practical Strategies for Parents of Neurodiverse Children course starts Thursday, January 13, and runs for 6 consecutive Thursdays from 12-1:30pm. For more information and to register, click here.

By Jen Dryer, co-founder, Raising Orchid Kids