Speaker A: Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast.
Speaker B: We’re here to bring you helpful information from leading experts and give you effective tools and support. I’m Jason Grygla, a licensed counselor and founder of Techie for Life, a specialized mentoring program for neurodiverse young adults.
Speaker A: And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parent to our own atypical Young Adults Friends.
Welcome. I want to talk to you today about decoding behaviors. And this is an important topic, and I see a lot of you, a lot of the parents that I’m coaching and working with struggle with their interpretation of behaviors, and it’s creating a lot of stress and frustration for many of you. And so I want to help you have a different lens, a different way to look at this, to be able to decode behaviors in a way that’s more accurate and more helpful.
And I want to give you an example of this. So we’ve just come to the end of the school year. My kids have finished school, my girls. And my experience of that end of school year time was so different than what it was with my boys, because my three older boys are all neurodivergent in different ways, and they also had traumas and different things that played in. And what would happen is you’ve got tests coming up at the end of the school year, and we’re checking grades. And my boys did not come to me. They didn’t communicate. They didn’t advocate for themselves. I had to go to them, right? I had to go and be always checking on them, checking their grades, talking to them.
My one son, we had concerns whether he would graduate, and it was teaching him how to think about it every day when he got home. What homework assignments do you have? What’s due? What do you need to get done today? Let’s chunk this down. Kind of helping him organizationally and then also managing a schedule, because he was sports and different things. And if I wasn’t right in front of them and talking to them, they weren’t bringing it up. It wasn’t on their mind. They would forget, or they would get anxious or if they asked for help. It was very intense and stressful.
Totally different experience than with my daughter who comes to the end of the semester, and she’s like, mom, she would come to me and update me. She want to know, hey, I’m working on this, and I’ve got this grade. This one’s low, but I know I can get it up if I get a couple of these assignments turned in or if I do a test retake or what have you. And at the end of the semester, she’s like, mom, go check my grades. And I went in to go check them, and I realized that the app was not loaded on my phone. It had been so long since I had actually gone in and checked her grades and she’s like, mom, you don’t even have it on your phone. I’m like, I haven’t looked, I haven’t checked up on you. I trust you. I know you’re on top of it. You’re communicating it to me, and I don’t worry about you.
So different than what I was doing with my boys. And the difference isn’t that my boys wouldn’t or didn’t care about grades or were defiant. It was that they develop mentally, had different skills and had some weaknesses. Where my daughter naturally has developed organizational skills and time management skills. And she’s really good at utilizing her time well because she’s in a dance company and she spends a lot of hours at dance and she only has a little bit of time to get homework done. So she has to be really efficient and get focused on it and get it in, get it turned in, know what things she can just kind of it’s good enough, turn it in, and other things that she needs to spend more time on. But she knows how to manage her time, she keeps track of all the different things that she has going on and then she also knows how to get her social emotional needs met. And she has a level of maturity at a young age that my boys struggled with in those areas.
And so what I want to talk to you about is how to decode these types of behaviors and see them through a lens that’s actually supportive to you and to them, that can help you know how to best. Support your young person and to do to be able to interpret behavior in a way that you can best support their overall development and their overall sense of well being, their their level of stress management, if you will, and not get lost in the wrong things, interpreting things wrong and losing sight of the big picture. Okay?
So being able to have a framework to be able to interpret behavior and then what to do with it, how to help, how to support. That’s what I want to go into with you for this episode. So there’s a lot of different developmental models and things that show different stages. So, for example, there’s Ericsson’s stages of development. And you don’t have to know all of these things to be a good parent. But it can be helpful to recognize that there are stages and you can’t just sort of skip over things or when there’s gaps or differences in how someone has developed through those stages, there’s an impact on their life and how capable and how functional they can be.
For example, with Erickson’s stages of development, you’ve got infancy, where a baby is learning to trust the adult in their life and depend on them. And some babies don’t get that. They don’t have consistent quality care happening. And so there’s like this distrust that starts to become part of their development and then when you get into toddlers and toddlerhood where they’re starting to develop their own autonomy and do things for themselves, that’s a really important stage. And we all joke about it, oh, the terrible twos. But that’s a really important developmental stage where a child is starting to like I want to do it myself. No, I do. Right? And if they aren’t able to do that or if they’re shamed for how they did it, they start to develop more of like shame and doubt about their ability versus confidence and a little bit of a sense of autonomy.
And in preschool they’re starting to take initiative and try new things. And if they’re not successful in that or if they’re in an environment that is harsh or shaming, they start to just feel guilt instead of like initiative. And so it goes through these stages, right? Elementary school, they’re learning new skills and they’re learning how to be successful. And so that’s an important stage where they’re either getting confidence, gaining confidence or they’re getting like becoming more insecure in adolescence. They’re starting to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their life. And at that stage they’re forming their identity. And other kids, if they aren’t able to develop in that stage, they’re actually experiencing a lot of role confusion, maybe gender confusion. And who are they and what are they in the world? They don’t have a place. They feel confused about that insecure.
And then in young adulthood that’s when they’re starting to make big life decisions about where to live and what job they want to have. And it’s also that stage where they’re starting to look for more intimacy in their relationships. And when that’s not taking place, when that development isn’t happening in a healthy way, that’s where you can see a lot of feelings of isolation and a lack of intimacy, a lack of connection with others. And middle adulthood is when you’re starting to focus on helping others and making a difference in the world. Like Jason and I are really in that stage where we just really have these strong desires to help others and make a difference, make a big impact. And this is where we’re generating ideas and approaches and helps and supports. And others in this young adult time or middle adulthood are maybe feeling lost and not having that purpose.
And in late adulthood there’s either this you look back on your life and you have a sense of pride and accomplishment. And if you’re not having that, if there’s regrets, then there’s going to be maybe you experience a lot of despair. And so when you look at these stages of development in the context of understanding that these layer on each other, right, being able to have some confidence with things that you do in a sense of autonomy is like moving you towards when you can develop your own identity. But if you haven’t developed well through those different stages, you’re going to struggle as you go along. And when you look at our autistic and our neurodivergent, young people, they don’t follow those stages the same way or maybe in the same order, or they take longer in the different stages. And so they might be just barely for a lot of our young adults. So that’s when they’re starting to maybe feel more autonomous and feel a sense of accomplishment and where they’re really starting to form their identity, it’s a little bit later.
And so it’s important to understand that these developmental stages play into how they’re going to show up in how they act and the way that they behave. And then there’s other stages of development that play into things, especially for our autistic and our neurodivergence. Things like executive functioning, where it’s your prefrontal cortex and where this is the part of your brain that is responsible and does the planning and time management and organizational skills and where problem solving happens. Working memory, emotional regulation, all of these things happen in the prefrontal cortex. And for our autistic and our neurodivergence, they have some dysfunction and they have struggle with their executive functioning skills. The brain isn’t communicating to the other parts of the brain as well or as efficiently.
And so when you look at the development of, say, time management, a toddler’s sense of time is very, very basic. In fact, it’s like, I want this now very immediate. And then in elementary school, maybe like neurotypical children are getting more of a sense of when recess is going to be or how long something might take. And then in adolescence, time management might look like what I was describing earlier with my daughter. Like, I’ve got this and I have this to do and I’m going to be here a dance from this hour to this hour. And so I have this much time to get homework done and how can I get this assignment done quickly. Like more complex time management, planning, working, memory happening. And if someone struggles with that, they are maybe at a lower, more basic stage of the executive function skills. And so you want to be aware, and you don’t have to go into all the details of all of it, but you want to have some understanding about planning. There’s different levels and complexity of planning.
There’s different levels of time management and understanding of time. There’s different levels of problem solving skills and ability. And then you add in things like emotional intelligence and emotion regulation skills which I’ve talked about on previous episodes. And a young person who’s autistic or neurodivergent is going to maybe need more support, longer to be able to develop those skills. And their behavior, that’s going to be reflected in their behavior, their ability to manage their emotions, to manage their time, their organization, problem solving. These are all developmental skills that take time and build on each other.
And so when we’re looking at behaviors and understanding behaviors, I highly encourage you to make that shift into viewing behaviors through a developmental lens. To not see it as a case of they won’t do something and they’re being defiant and being bad, but to view those behaviors not from won’t, but that they can’t yet, that they haven’t developed that skill yet. And to keep in mind the different factors that play into successful development or the continued growth of development and what we typically think of development. It’s their age. Well, we know neurodivergence their age is not going to be indicative of their developmental stage. Their development is indicative of where they’re at developmentally, not their age. But we tend to have these biases when we interpret behavior that a three year old should behave a certain way or an eight year old should be behaving a certain way or a 15 year old should be behaving a certain way. And that’s not accurate. Sometimes our bias is their size. And I’ve maybe mentioned that before, but I’ve got like a daughter that’s super tiny and so people think she’s going to be younger and behave younger than she is. And then you get to know her and you realize she’s really mature and really socially capable and very bright and she’s actually probably developmentally ahead of her chronological age and for sure than her size, right?
There’s also developmental experiences. Development happens over time through experience. And if you haven’t had broader experiences, you’re not going to have that broader development. So that plays into it. What kind of experiences has someone had? And then you look at their actual disabilities and how that plays into their development and what stages in development are they at? And it can be kind of all over the place. That’s why you can have an autistic kid or a neurodivergent kid at a really young age. Like they’re the toddler that’s like doing math problems and can count and do kind of upper level math at a really young age. But then socially they’re having meltdowns and they’re missing social cues and they think everyone’s against them or they’re bullying them when it’s just normal child play. Or maybe they are getting bullied because they don’t know how to stick up for themselves. And so there’s like social things happening that don’t match their math academic ability. Like there’s a discrepancy there. And so we want to break that up a little bit and not just put every eight year old in an eight year old box, but actually start to interpret things through a developmental lens of where they at developmental, where are they at developmentally. And there’s different variations in that. And to start noticing those things and then to start looking at their behaviors as a clue to where they’re at developmentally.
And so, for example, we’ll have students that come to Techie for Life and they can talk a big game. They’ve got big goals and they’re very articulate and they can talk circles around people, but then you look at what they actually do and that paints a different picture. So just because they can talk, it doesn’t mean that they are actually capable of doing it. They might know the right things to say, but they actually haven’t developed the skills to do the thing that they’re talking about. And so we have to actually look at what they’re doing. And then you want to look at how are they doing it, what does it look like as they’re doing something? So are they super stressed when they’re doing the thing, when they’re performing an act or when they’re engaging in an activity? What’s their stress level? That’s going to really give you a clue about where they’re at developmentally because if they’re highly stressed in doing something, that means they’re really being stretched to the max.
This isn’t something that’s like a skill that they’ve really nailed down, right? You know, someone’s developed a skill and they’ve got it because they can do it consistently and they can do it non-stressed, like relatively speaking, right? But if they’re just doing it once in a while and they’re stressed when they’re doing it, you know, they actually haven’t developed that skill. I can jump on a bike if I’ve never ridden a bike, and I can focus really hard and tense up and look like I’m trying to ride a bike. But if I’m super stressed and I’m putting all this effort into riding that bike, I have not developed into a bike rider yet, even if I can pedal a few feet. Right. How do you know someone’s developed the skill of riding a bike? Because they get on the bike and it’s effortless and they’re looking around and they can go fast or slow and they can stop and they can make the turns and they can ride their bike in circles and go up on things and it’s effortless. They’re enjoying it. Maybe they’re putting a little bit of effort going uphill, but they can get on a bike and they’re not thinking, oh, how do I keep my balance? It just has been relegated to their subconscious. They don’t have to be efforting. It in a strained mental capacity way.
So behaviors are clues. And when you look at it through a developmental lens versus like a behavioral lens where you’re looking at, oh, they’re behaving badly, so I need to punish them or reward them to make them behave or do the thing that I want them to do, which is not accurate. If they’re not doing a thing, most often it’s because they can’t yet not because they won’t. When you look at through developmental lens, you’re like, oh, they just haven’t developed that skill. How can I support them? Where can I guide them? Why are they not able to do this skill? What’s behind that? What are they struggling with here that’s going to give you so much better information and direction to go off of. And so it helps inform your expectations when you look through things, through a developmental lens, because development is messy, like getting on a bike. To learn how to ride a bike, a kid will overcorrect one way, and then they try to balance the other way and they’ll fall down and they scrape their knee and they’re crying. And then we try again and it’s scary and they’ll start to get it, and then they might freak out.
And development can look sometimes like, two steps forward and one step back. You’re like, oh, we were just getting it, and now we’re going back. Well, it’s probably because they were really efforting it, and then they’re a little tired, or it might be because they’re overcorrecting or they’re trying too hard. A lot of times, it almost looks like a pendulum swinging back and forth, and we try too much one way, and then, like, with friends, we try too hard to be friends, and then all that didn’t go well, so we back off, and now we don’t have any friends, and then we try back again. And how do we engage socially? And that can look kind of messy and with lots of fails and mistakes, that’s actually a normal part of development. And for development to happen, there’s got to be a little bit of stress, a little bit of discomfort. And we don’t want to judge our young person when they’re in the middle of that discomfort, right? When they’re in that kind of muddy middle where they’re kind of struggling through and trying to figure it out. That’s part of development, and there’s no rescuing them from that discomfort. But there are things we can do to be supportive.
And one of those things is actually understanding what development actually looks like and starting to look at their behaviors through that developmental lens instead of a behavioral judgmental kind of lens, but, like, from an assessment lens, where are they at developmentally? Then you can be also looking at things through, like, Maslov’s hierarchy of needs and recognizing are they having their basic needs met? Why can’t they do this behavior today? Or why are they so emotionally dysregulated? Well, have they eaten? Are they hangry? Are they tired? Are their basic needs being met? Do they feel safe or unsafe? Do they feel judged or loved unconditionally? Are their social needs getting met? Do they feel acceptable? Do they have friends? Do they have connections? And then you’re, like, moving up the ladder, right? What would be the next thing? Are they being able to have opportunities to have success? Are they being able to build evidences that they are good enough and you just keep moving up that ladder?
So when we’re looking at why they can’t well, I certainly can’t perform my best when I’m hungry, when my blood sugar levels dropped, or if I haven’t had a good night’s rest, I certainly can’t perform my best. I can’t think as straight, I can’t manage my time or my boundaries or do as much as I can do when I’ve had a full good night’s rest. So when we look at what are we seeing behaviorally? We’re looking at what are they needing? What’s behind this? Is this a need, basic need, not being met? Or is this just where they’re at developmentally? And how can I support a sense of safety and well being and opportunities for growth and development and to have success in their growth and development? I highly encourage you to start viewing and start trying on this lens of viewing behaviors through that developmental lens. And when you notice behaviors, what are you seeing and what does that tell you about about where they’re at developmentally and what might they be needing? And is there something you can add some support or not? I hope this is helpful.
This is a game changer for me. I wish that I had had this lens to view my boys behavior when they were younger. It would have completely changed the way I interacted, the level of demands and stress that I put on them, the level of stress and demands that I put on myself. And I think it would have had a much more enjoyable experience raising them when they were younger than I did. And that’s what I want for you. I want you to be able to have a positive experience, to be able to really delight in the young person that you’re parenting or working with. And a big step in that direction is trying on this developmental lens where you’re viewing those behaviors and you’re decoding, what are these behaviors telling you? And we’re moving away from that negative, oh, they won’t and they’re being bad, and I’ve got to make them do this thing to, oh, this is where they’re at developmentally. That’s interesting. What do they need to be able to move forward or to be less stressed? It’s amazing. Just that little shift just opens you up to a whole new way to look at what supports are needed and what those can look like.
So try on that lens and keep showing up here. And if you’re finding this information helpful, do me a favor. Go in and give us a five star review. Maybe make a comment about something that’s been helpful or an insight that you’ve gained that helps other people find this. And that’s really what we want to do is we want to help as many people out there that are wanting to do a good job parenting and are struggling with it. We can do better for our kids and they need us to do better. We can grow and develop as the people influencing them. And this is our effort in that. And we would super appreciate you helping us in that effort. To rate this podcast and share it with your friends and by all means.
If there’s certain topics or things that you’re needing, I’d love to hear from you. You can email us. You can reach out to me on social media. I’m on Facebook and Instagram. I’d love to hear if there’s certain things that you’re struggling with or you’d like to hear us talk about. Let’s make a difference. Let’s change the trajectory for our kids and for us and move in more positive directions that are actually supportive and actually get better results in the end. Hope you have a great week and take care.
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Autism and Neurodiversity with Jason and Debbie. If you want to learn more about our work, come visit us at JasonDebbie.com. That’s JasonDebbie.com.
