Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review. reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle. We're here today with Chris Martin talking about neuro diversity, and how to parent neurodiverse teenagers, whether or not your teen has been diagnosed with ADHD or autism or any kind of neurodiversity. Really, all teenagers are neuro diverse in some way. What does it really mean to be neurotypical? Chris thinks that all kids are neurodiverse. And as we get older, as we move into the teenage years, we start to start to narrow down our sense of possibilities about how our mind is supposed to work and how we're supposed to think and how we're supposed to interact with other people and the world. Some people end up fitting into this neurotypical box more than others, but really all of us, to some extent, are kind of faking it. Chris is a poet, and in his work with non speaking autistic children, he has developed a really, really deep and fascinating understanding of how to communicate with kids, whose brains work in all kinds of different ways. I am so excited to speak with Chris today about his stories and experiences from his work with non-speaking Autistics, as well as what his insights mean, for parents today. How can all of us get our kids to open up and feel more comfortable talking to us about the ways that they think what can we say to teenagers who are having a hard time really fitting into the box of the neurotypical dominant culture? That's the conversation we're about to have today with Chris Martin, the author of the book, may tomorrow be awake on poetry, autism, and our neuro diverse future. Really excited to dive into all that, and a whole lot more. Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Welcome to the talking to teens podcast.

Chris Martin
Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

Andy Earle
I'm just so grateful to have you. I've been really, really loving your book over the past few weeks. And it's gotten me just so thinking about so many really interesting topics. And I'm really, really looking forward to speaking with you about neurodiversity. There's a lot of things coming together in this book poetry and autism and really listening kind of listening on an on a deeper level than most of us really do. I think there's so much for us to dive into here. I'd love to hear a little bit, you know, from you about sort of what or what inspired the book or, you know, kind of what, what led to you writing? May tomorrow be awake?

Chris Martin
Yeah, thank you. I think, originally, I had written I'm a poet, first and foremost. And that's largely how I've primarily identified since I was a teenager. And early on, I kind of grasped onto that as like, Oh, this is how I can describe who I am in the world, and how I want to move through it. For me, it's always been more than simply the writing of poetry, but felt like more of a way of being in the world, and maybe an ethical relationship to the world. But after a decade of working with neurodivergent students kind of haphazardly, it wasn't something I intended to do. It's just something that happened over and over again, and seemed to be my most fulfilling teaching relationship. At the time, when we were starting the organization, prevailing notion about autism was that the only strengths came in the STEM fields, right? That's kind of what the stereotype is. And you know, still is in many ways. And then on the other side, you have poetry, which is just has been become so alienating to so many people, even though I think of it as like a foundational kind of human art form. But the way it's taught often alienates people, it makes them think that they're not smart enough to do it, which is this ridiculous idea, right? Because we think it's okay to teach to like kindergarteners. And we think it's okay for the people like the ivory tower, but no one in between, which doesn't make any sense. So So one of the things I had to do was write some articles basically convince people that this could be a thing and was the thing I used the experience of my 10 years of teaching to kind of illustrate that and I found that I really liked writing about it. And as the work grew, and our organization grew, and especially as I got to work with more and more nonspeaking autistic writers, it just felt like I was sitting on a treasure trove of both home but also concepts and ways in which to meet the challenges of this world in a more thoughtful, kind, intelligent way, and resourceful way and creative way. So I kept writing the essays. And it was an interesting opportunity for me to look back at both my journey as a teacher, but also, my journey as a human being is ongoing. And being neurodivergent. Myself, it's been such an incredible gift to work with these writers and to kind of deepen into my own neuro divergence and into my understanding of it through through my neurodivergent friendships, you know, so, and it's just like, you know, one of the things behind that name, unrestricted interest is that every autism diagnosis carries this idea of a restricted interest, right, which is supposed to be of abnormal intensity, or, you know, sometimes they're described as obsessions. And to me, they're just passions and areas of devoted study. And after a little while, I realized, you know, neurodiversity and neuro divergence was what I want to think about it all the time. And I can't have I haven't found a better framework for, like, how we might evolve as a species to meet the challenges of have this kind of tenuous and often fraught future.

Andy Earle
You reframe a lot of things in your book, you talk on page 53, about how when you tell people that what you do, or the you know, they hear that you're, you know, you work with autistic people, then the kind of a lot of the responses that you get are, oh, I could never do that. Or you're, you're really doing God's work, you should be really proud of yourself. I can't imagine how hard that must be. I think that's just you're trying to say something affirming, and you're trying to say something nice, but it's so steeped in sort of this bias that we have that sucks. Yeah, that must be that must be really bad, or you don't make it sound bad or hard in the book. It's really sounds inspiring, and uplifting. I just, yeah, it just really hit me when you mentioned that just how ingrained this narrative is that we have of like, oh, how Wow, or as a parent, how, you know, you're really hoping your baby is normal. I really hope my baby doesn't have, you know, XYZ fill in the blank. But it's like, what? Why not? When that enrich? Like, wouldn't that enrich our family or our entire experience of life to have more more diversity in the way that we process information and think about things and relate to other people? And well, I mean, what we pay lip service to it in our companies that, oh, we want more diversity and diversity is good. And it gives us you know, better it's better for business and stuff. But like, but obviously, we don't really believe that, because this is how we think about it, you know,

Chris Martin
right there in the world isn't built currently to hold it in the right way. Right? Because diversity isn't something we need to get more of diversity is inherent to our world, every single gathering of people is diverse. And every single gathering of people is neuro diverse. And when I use the term neuro diverse future, it kind of sounds science fictiony, like, ooh, in the future, everything is going to be neurodiverse. But the truth is, right now everything is neurodiverse. Because all that means is that we have different minds and different body minds, and that we move through the world in different ways. And that what we don't have is a vocabulary to express that neurodiversity, except for a medical pathology model. And we don't have spaces to hold that neurodiversity in affirming ways. So yeah, it's always those encounters are so difficult for me, and increasingly more difficult, because I'm really good at masking my neurodiverse ways people, when they say things like that, they're not only demeaning the relationships I have with these writers, but they're also like explicitly denying my own neurotic divergence, which is really hard. Like, like, where do I start in a conversation like that, like one, I'm also neurodivergent to, these are some of my best friends. And they're my mentors, and three, like, I literally have the best job in the world, I cannot imagine a better possible job. It's really interesting to take those like the pathology models and turn them on their heads because everything in an autism diagnosis has a extremely positive upside. If you just tilt the way you think about it, right? So you take a restricted interest you think about it as a passion. What is often seen around autism is this difficulty to socialize, right on one hand, that's because autistic people actually pay attention to a much wider range of the phenomenal world so that they're not just focused on on what's going on among the humans, right, they're interested in what's going on among the animals and the plants and the air and the objects around. They live in this animus world in which they really care about everything in this inclusive way. Rather than just saying, like, I'm gonna tune everything else out and just focus on how people are socially interacting, right. And we need that right now, we're moving into this really intense period of climate change and climate catastrophe. And we need people who can illustrate for us how to see and hear differently when we approach the natural world and how to understand ourselves to be a part of it in a different way. Right? If you think about another, you know, hallmark of autism is sensory dysregulation. And that's true, like, I experienced it a lot, I think it's gonna be way too loud or chaotic. For me, it's made it very hard, in some ways to be a parent of two extremely high energy boys who were just like me when I was a kid, you know, I think that, you know, the flip side of that sensory dysregulation is if we can find the right conditions, right? If you can find a world that isn't so neuro typically chaotic, intense autistic people can really tune in to what's happening and situation and smell things to feel things that other people don't. And, you know, the majority of autistic people are synesthetic. So they have these experiences that are overlapping, which is really exciting. Please smell you know, the colors, they taste sounds. This is like a real thing that happens among most autistic people. I've always been extremely jealous, because that's I don't I'm not synesthetic

as a poet, I mean, that seems Yeah. That's only going to be helpful. Yeah, come on, give me that superpower.

And then there's these great theories that people have that that autistic people were the first because they link synesthesia with metaphor, right? If you experience one thing as another thing, that's the foundation of metaphor, there are these theory, these great theories that, you know, among early hominids, there was some artistic leg, you know, cave person, and they were the first person to like, come up with metaphor, we only have poetry because of autistic people. So I love thinking about that kind of stuff.

Andy Earle
You're kind of reframing so much stuff. For me, that's such a common belief about autism is, oh, it's, yeah, you're really obsessed with kind of one thing, you get really sort of focused and fixated on one thing. And you're not kind of just noticing everything else that's going on or something like that. But really, that's not it at all, it's just that you're not so tuned into what the dominant culture really seems to care about of, you know, status or kind of superficial relationships, or you talk so much about kind of how aversion to small talk or BS kind of encounters that just feel they don't make sense or something like that. And I think in a lot of ways, yeah, just how, actually, what, what you really got me thinking about is just how, how, how neurodiverse people actually see a broader, they see more, because because we're, you know, in neurotypical culture is so kind of focused on what what what you know, is valued. And we're what what we what we see as important that kind of, we miss a lot of a lot of the other things that's going on, you know, you talk about kind of the, the more than human world or this, this sort of, like, looking beyond that, it's just as I was reading your book, I was walking down the street, I'm in Boston, and really, a cold day, I went by this little, little baby tree that someone had, like, knit a little sweater and put it put a little like sweater on history, you know, it was really powerful moment to me of just, you know, I don't know, if it's, you know, someone, you know, with some kind of neurodiversity or something, but somehow someone who really just has such a broader sense of empathy for the world that, you know, to actually like, care about this little tree, that's, that's gonna get cold, you know, and to take the time to sort of like create this sweater that's like little and it would fit it and just like how we would typically kind of, it's, that's kind of silly or something like that, or it doesn't make sense, but, but why not really, it just Yeah,

Chris Martin
absolutely. Yeah, that and that empathy aspect is so important, I think for people to understand because that's another thing that's been clearly flipped on its head. Whereas when I first started working with autistic writers, you know, almost 20 years ago now, the prevailing notion was that autistic people lacked empathy, which is which was an incredibly destructive stereotype. And mis misperception turns out that autistic people actually experienced more empathy than their neurotypical counterparts. It's just the empathy has three parts to it. There is the emotional empathy, like the initial feeling of it that part for us. To stick people is significantly higher than it is for neurotypical people. And because of that autistic people often feel kind of become kind of paralyzed. And because it's so intense that it overwhelms them, so they never get to the second stage, which is intellectual empathy, where you can really process understand that that's the feeling you're having, right? And then the third stage is performative empathy where you can actually make it clear to someone else, that that's how you're feeling? Well, for autistic people, it often gets cut short at one of those stages for various reasons. But through through brain imaging, scientists have made clear that autistic people actually feel more empathy than others, but often get overwhelmed by it. So that's one thing I love. The other thing that's so interesting about what you just said, is how a neurotypical world is a narrow world, it is a small world is a way to inhabit, what is this wild, you know, completely unbelievable existence into this very narrow track to satisfy certain, you know, aspects of our society, you know, and one of the things that one of my favorite anecdotes is that one of the writers I work with a min Mikayla, who's a non speaking autistic writer from Toronto, we met a friend Sara Wheeler, who teaches teachers in the Bay Area as she had a man and I come in to talk to them about neuro divergence and about teaching neuro divergence students, and one of the teachers asked him and how did you know you could trust Chris? Like, how did you develop trust between the two of you and a min wrote, Chris was ready to meet me at the periphery, when I think about that narrow neurotypical world, right, it drives right through the middle when you meet someone else, who's neurodivergent, and who's ready to meet you at the periphery, skip all the small talk and go right to like, the most amazing, exciting out there stuff that just like, it's the best feeling in the world. And I and you know, the kinds of conversations that can have at the periphery with these writers are, are the kinds of conversations usually wait years to have, and I get to have them almost every day, which is just amazing.

Andy Earle
One really powerful example of that, in the book is this kid you're working with who really is just in love with the Planet of the Apes, and knows everything about the film, and has seen it so many times and can recite kind of every scene and you work with him to sort of pull out this really long kind of poem that goes through all of his thoughts on it, and sort of relay kind of some, some some depth and really his thinking about it, and pass it around to his teachers. And there's really a powerful passage in here, where you're no, just just kind of watching the teachers react to seeing this thing written by this, this child that they had maybe sort of kind of passed off or had not really seen as having that much depth to him. And I love some of the some of the things you're saying here, which is that I believe in that moment, they were really seeing Matteo for the first time, they had walked through an invisible door and gained entry to his planet, probably maybe one of the most powerful lines of the book is my most uncomfortable suspicion. And I'm hesitant to put it in these terms was that some part of them hadn't actually believed he was fully human. And I think I think that's, that's so true. And it goes back to what you were saying before in terms of kind of people's response to oh, that you work in this field. And while you work with people who are not really fully human, that's really that must be really hard. But kind of the juxtaposition of that to the the fact that really, they are seeing the greater world the more than human world and sort of how these, these two truths kind of really collide in your book in a powerful way. Yeah,

Chris Martin
I mean, my work with that student was the first kind of the first autistic student I got to work with over many, many days when I was just a young teacher in an after school program in South Brooklyn. And it was so it was so exciting to go back and write the essay about that experience, because I had held on to that epic poem for a long time and to that story, and it felt like a foundational story to my teaching journey and career and to really think about the film, The Planet Of The Apes, and the ways in which humanity, that our concept of what constitutes humanity is turned on its head and that movie, and that, you know, the apes are all like, these unintelligent creatures, like how could they ever know something worth worth listening to for for him to pick that movie? And he picked you know, the old one, as I say in the book, the new one had just come out and he wanted no part of it like the remake by I forget what his name is. Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton, the Tim Burton remake had just come out and he had just, he wanted nothing to do with it. He only wanted to talk about the old one, you know, which was of his parents generation, or even older, actually, his grandparents generation, but he just saw something in that film that he I'm connected to and it brings up so many larger questions about how we define humanity. Because the truth is, is that we define humanity in two ways. And both of them are really actually, I would say violent. One of them is against the animal, which is ridiculous, because we are animals. And in forgetting that we are animals, we separate ourselves from nature. And nature becomes this thing that's part of a, you know, a beautiful landscape that needs to be preserved, rather than reckoning with the fact that like we are nature and we need to be engaged with nature on the most fundamental levels, rather than having to be this thing apart from us, right. And the other thing is that when we say someone who is like fully human, when we say even the word human, we don't think about all humans, what we really think about whether we want to admit it or not, is someone who looks a lot like me, someone who is white, someone who is male, someone who can pass as straight and able and neurotypical who has generational wealth, everyone

Andy Earle
else's kind of varying degrees of human sort of underneath that somewhere

Chris Martin
that everyone else is, is a step down. Right. So and it's another way in which a neurotypical world is a narrow one is that we actually have narrowed the definition of what it means to be human, and everyone else is punished for not being able to approximate that. That's another thing I'd say for that I think is really important that hits home really, intensely for me is this idea of there are lots of us who are on the cusp, you could say of autism and other forms of neuro divergence. And for us, we have the privilege of passing right, we can move through certain aspects of society because we're close, we can approximate close enough. As my friend Mark says he was a non Speaker I talked about in this book, Mark calls me the greatest failure them all and it first killed me, he went on to explain that like, Not only have I mastered neurotypical masking, but he also thinks of me as almost like a gateway drug for neurodiversity, because if I can be neuro divergent, then so many other people can think about how they might be neurodivergent. And the, the dark side of that is that the more you mask, the more your body breaks down, because it is emotionally and physically strenuous. It's a great stress to not be yourself. And this is one of the things that once you start really diving into it, you realize it's true for everybody, because neuro typicality isn't so much an identity but a practice, we practice being neurotypical and we're taught to practice it from a very early age, one of the things I believe deeply is that all children are neurodivergent, as we so called mature, that we are forced to put on the armor of neuro typicality. And it's an armor that hurts all of us and the wearing of it, it wears us down. Because we don't get to be ourselves, we we have to perform a particular stuff in itself that isn't very interesting. Like, there's nothing wrong with performing, right, there's nothing wrong with really meeting the world, in in different ways in different masks in you know, you know, in a kind of free theater. Like if you're creative around it, that's great. But if you can only perform this one particular way of being and a way of being that almost none of us can live up to especially because, you know, disability is something that we usually have put in a corner and stigmatized but at some point in our lives, all of us will be disabled, this is not a thing that we that is unique experience. This is actually everyone will become disabled at some point in their life. You know, none of us can live up to this idea of what it means to be fully human, we have to create new ideas of what it means to be fully human.

Andy Earle
We're here with Chris Martin, talking about how to parent neurodiverse teenagers, and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Chris Martin
Being neurodivergent, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, was really different than it is now it's still not great, but it's there's just immense community to receive autistic people right now. You could really congratulate someone when they're diagnosed with autism, rather than it being like it used to be delivering like a death sentence or something like now it's like, oh, actually, you're gonna have some great friends. And I know a lot of people who have been diagnosed as adults after their kids were diagnosed. And actually that's what happened to me when I was a kid. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 18. And my mom in the process was like, Wait, this is seems hits really close to and she got diagnosed, take a hard loving look at yourself and how you might have already experienced a lot of this stuff, and how you actually might be able to To talk from a place of identification, rather than have this like contrast like Well, now that means we're different. The moment when I first started practicing neuro typicality, which I traced back to around sixth grade, I really had no social framework. Until that moment, I experienced some bullying in sixth grade, and then started really studying neuro typicality. And it made me very sick for many years when I was a kid, really, there's what I have to do, I have to like, think about how other people are thinking about me constantly. And I have to perform this particular version of what a person is, and a kid is so be accepted. Like all of it felt so sickening. Luckily, through this work, and through the community that I take part in every day, I was able to kind of reverse that if we're trying to fit in. What are we trying to fit into? Are we trying to fit into some like beautiful flowing dress? Or are we trying to fit into some kind of like torture box? One of my kids who is neurodivergent has a series of tics. At first, I found that like, really difficult, I couldn't even pinpoint why I found it so difficult. When the tics started, I check in with him every once awhile, I always says no, I love my tics. Like they, they make me feel like calm. I started to really think back to the fact that I had tics when I was a kid that I totally forgotten about. And that I got made fun of for it was a real challenge for me to not try to correct my son's tics too, because of what I had experienced. But the truth is, he's I don't think he's ever gotten made fun of at his school, like he's totally accepted. And it's hard for us to imagine that the world has changed so utterly that that could be possible, but it really is a different world already.

Andy Earle
Want to hear the full episode, head over to talking to teens.com/register for a free trial of our premium podcast, you get exclusive access to loads of great content with no obligation and your membership supports the work we do here at talking to teens get started today with a free trial over at talking to teens.com/register Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.