Debbie: Friends. Hello. Welcome. I am so glad you’re here. Jason and I just celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary, and I can hardly believe it’s been 28 years that we’ve been married and I’ve been with this guy. We had a really fun weekend.
We went to Brian Head ski resort, and I’m recording this, and we went in August. So obviously there wasn’t any snow, but they switch out the ski lift and turn it into a bike lift, and Jason and I like to mountain bike.
I’ve just started to get into that with him. And so we took the bike lift up and mountain biked down the hill, and it was super fun. It was a little slightly terrifying. I haven’t ever biked on that kind of terrain, and it had rained the day before, so there were puddles, and it was in and out of trees and some sharp turns and all, like, a lot of downhill, but it was really fun.
Anyway, I’m super grateful to have found Jason, and I can’t think of anybody else that I would want by my side through the years and the challenges and things that we’ve been through and overcome and now doing the work that we’re doing that we love doing together. Anyway, so fun to share that.
Anyway, so for this episode, I want to talk to you about something that you may be doing that I used to do. And I see parents and sometimes even professionals doing it’s, causing frustration and getting in the way of development for neurodivergent young people. And this is a nuanced concept that I find really useful to understand.
So we have a tendency to assess capability based on our child, our teen or young adult’s best day. And it makes sense, right? We see that they’re capable of something. We think, okay, now we know what they can do. Maybe we think we’re being positive to focus on their best performance.
And the problem with this is that there are many things that have to align perfectly for someone to have their best day or perform their best, okay? They’ve got to have good sleep and be eating nutritiously and exercising and getting their social needs met and have the right supports and everything going well and just no big stressors happening and the stars are aligned and there’s no full moon.
There’s, like, a lot of things that align for someone to perform at their very best, or if they’re having a best day, it’s because they’re using all of their mental and emotional resources and are super focused and giving it all they have almost will-powering to be able to do it.
And when you think about those two scenarios coming together, someone’s best day is not really indicative of their level of development or their developmental stage. And do you know what is? What they can do consistently, and this is really important, what they can do in a non-stressed state. Okay, so I want to give you an example of this. Let’s say someone’s roller skating, okay?
When someone’s learning how to roller skate for the first time, it can be scary. You’re nervous. You’re worried about falling. You’re worried about people looking at you and looking funny. All of a sudden, the ground is not what it’s always been and what your brain has perceived it to be. And you’re rolling, and you’re trying to, like, balance, and it looks really super awkward. And then you start to get your balance, and you start to kind of move around a little bit, and then maybe you go a little faster. And it takes some time to develop the skill of roller skating, especially if this is brand new to you.
And then someone that’s been roller skating a long time and they’ve developed the skill, it just comes second nature to them, right? They’re able to just flow and do it, and they can dance and do tricks, and they don’t even have to think about it. They’re not efforting. It it’s just fun and amazing, and they might fall sometimes, but the skill of roller skating, they’ve developed that skill set, and they’ve become someone who, when you look at assessment and you’re looking at if someone’s developed a skill, it’s something you know that they’ve developed it because it’s not taking tons of effort in.
It’s not taking tons of mental and emotional energy, generally speaking. And it’s something that just almost becomes relegated to their subconscious. Like, it just becomes habit or natural flow. And they could even do it like someone that’s good at roller skating could still do it even if they were stressed or tired or hadn’t had good sleep and there’s a full moon and there’s no friends or they just got rejected. They could still get out there and roller skate.
So their stress level isn’t affecting their developmental ability or where their developmental stages at. Okay, so assessment based on someone’s best day or best performance, when we assess based on our best, it sets us up for a lot of false expectations. It can lead to a lot of suffering and heartbreak for us and kind of an atmosphere of shame. So I encourage you, and I’m telling you, don’t use their best day or their best performance as a should weapon against them.
This sounds like, well, you did it yesterday or last week. What’s wrong? You should be able to do it today or why can’t we do this? I know you can do it. I know I’ve seen you do this. Why can’t you do it? What’s going on like we’re using their best day against them.
And while we’re at it and talking about this, I encourage you to not use your best day or your best performance against yourself either. When you’re stressed and having a hard time, don’t use your best performances as evidence that you should be able to do better. I normally can do this. What’s wrong with me that is so unkind to ourselves?
So I encourage you to give yourself some grace, and if you could be doing better, you would be. And your neurodivergent child, teen or young adult would be doing better if they could too. We can learn. We can make adjustments, try different things, and take care of ourselves. Of course. I mean, that’s development. That’s what it’s all about. Trial and error and practice until we get it. But it’s when we adopt expectations based on our best or IQ or egos that we trip ourselves up.
And we actually slow development because we’re not accommodating for what they need when they’re stressed or when they’re still learning or when they’re just simply not able. And we slow development because we’re pushing, we’re pressuring, or we’re expecting things that are beyond their capacity, and then they get overwhelmed and shut down and quit, and we do the same to ourselves.
So good assessment is examining their main or their typical mental, emotional, behavioral states. It’s getting curious. It’s being like a scientist and gathering facts and data. It’s looking at where they’re at.
Judgment is when you get emotionally involved, you have dramatic thoughts and stories and beliefs about what you’re seeing, and those might be coming from your past or how you were parented or societal expectations.
We had these thoughts and stories and beliefs about a mental and emotional behavioral performance that we see it’s making it mean good or bad things about them or about you as a parent or their mentor. When we make assessments based on their best, we often then judge them based on their worst.
And there can be a big frustrating gap between their best and their worst. And it really sets up for it sets us all up for an unfair and completely unrealistic expectation for what they can do and where they’re at.
Jason and I encourage parents and mentors to do the opposite. If you’re going to judge, judge them on their best day. That’s who they are. When there’s no pollution or interference or huge stressors, and then assess your expectations and what supports and helps are needed based on their worst days or performance.
An example of this that we do at our school, Techie for Life, is we understand that our students are likely to get hired for their strengths, their talents, their abilities, their strengths, but then they’re going to get fired because of their weaknesses.
And so we’re looking to build their strengths and do our best to minimize those weaknesses that they have. And it’s the same thing I think about myself now and what I’m capable of and what I can do and perform and accomplish, even when I’m under lots of stress or haven’t had enough sleep, or haven’t had good food that day, right?
My best and my worst are on a totally different level than compared to when I was a teenager or a young adult. Like, what I was capable of doing even without stress, is so different now.
On the worst day, what I could accomplish is very, very different. So that is development, that is looking at where we at developmentally and the supports that I needed when I was younger or different than what I need when I’m older.
So if you want to practice honest assessment, you want to meet them where they’re at in their strengths and their weaknesses. And especially with autistic and neurodivergent young people, you want to include consideration of their typical mental, emotional and behavioral states and their stress tolerance and how much stress they’re under, how much is being expected of them, and then look at what expectations and helps will support healthy mental emotional states.
And as always, your best parenting and mentoring is when you go first. So assess your capabilities, your mental and emotional capacity, and your stress levels, and then meet yourself with curiosity and compassion. And then accommodate, support, and adjust your expectations of yourself accordingly.
It’s kind of like the business advice of Under Promise and Over Deliver. Have you heard that one? Always under Promise and then Over Deliver and your clients will be raving fans.
But if you Over Promise and Under Deliver, your clients will be frustrated and disappointed and fire you. The performance could be the same, but your ability to manage expectations is what makes all the difference for what someone’s experience of your business service is.
Except in the case of mentoring, if we’re constantly disappointed and frustrated in our neurodivergent young person, we’re adding to their stress, and then their mental, emotional and behavioral capacity is actually likely to decline in reaction to our disappointment.
And if you’re constantly disappointed in yourself and your own capacity to parent and mentor, your capacity is going to get depleted too. You’re going to deplete it with that disappointment.
So let’s work to judge ourselves on our best days and assess how we can accommodate our needs on our worst days and spread a little more curiosity and compassion for ourselves and others, because we’re all doing our best with this human gig.
I hope this nuanced perspective on assessment and development is helpful. And I want you to know we’re your biggest cheerleaders and we love you and we care about you and we hope you have a great week. Take care.
