Featuring insights from Connected Families Certified Parent Coaches Marni Love and Taylor Irby.

🎧 Prefer to listen? This content was adapted from a podcast episode.

If you’ve ever opened an email from your neurodivergent child’s teacher and felt your stomach drop, you’re in good company. You can become a powerful advocate for your child at school, and you don’t have to figure it all out alone.

One parent in our community shared this message:

“Andrew’s teacher is regularly asking us for help with how to handle Andrew in the classroom. He often jumps out of his seat to welcome his friends or do something. When they do movement activities in the classroom, his movements can quickly get bigger or louder than what meets her expectations. He is quite impulsive and struggles to raise his hand before speaking or forgets to ask permission to move or go somewhere.”

So many parents of neurodiverse or sensitive and intense kids know this feeling. There’s worry. There’s grief. And there’s the deep, protective desire for your child to be seen for who they truly are, not defined by what’s difficult for them.

Want to learn to advocate for your neurodiverse child at school with grace and truth?

In a real and relatable episode of the Connected Families Podcast, host Stacy Bellward sat down with two Connected Families Certified Parent Coaches — Marni Love and Taylor Irby — who have walked this road both professionally and personally. Marni is a former public school teacher and homeschool mom to three boys with various learning differences. Taylor is a former music educator and mom to five kids with what she calls “alphabet soup” — a mix of ADHD, autism, sensory differences, giftedness, and learning disabilities.

Drawing on their professional backgrounds and their own experiences as moms and Parent Coaches, here’s what they’ve learned about advocating effectively for a neurodiverse child at school.

Why does school advocacy start with the parent’s heart?

Before you can advocate well for your child, you have to do some inner work first. This is the “Foundation” of the Connected Families Framework™ — when parents learn to ask, “What’s going on in me?” That will look like seeking to understand the underlying emotions and beliefs that a parent may be feeling regarding the diagnoses or the needs that their child has, working to replace any toxic beliefs with grace-filled truths, and leaning into God’s presence with them.

As you do that work, you’ll be better able to grow in empathy and understanding for how your kids are wired, and you’ll be better equipped to advocate well.

“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” — Psalm 139:23

For Marni, that meant accepting “the child of my reality”: not the child and life that she had imagined before parenting began. For many parents, there is grief and fear in recognizing that your child’s life will look different than you pictured.

Taylor described a similar shift:

“I just had to stop and take a step back and say, this is my child. [The diagnosis] changes nothing about them. The diagnosis unlocks doors to help.”

Some parents may avoid those uncomfortable feelings, worrying that they mean they’re disappointed in God or their child. But God is strong enough to help us deal with our reality. When we can be honest with ourselves and with God about our fears and beliefs, we can choose grace-filled truths—what God says about these things—to hold on to.

For instance, “I can’t do this,” can become, “This is hard, but not hopeless. Jesus is enough to get me through.” Or, “My child’s behavior is my report card/reflects badly on me,” can become, “Jesus is my report card. To the degree that I can be ok when my child is not, I give my child a very freeing gift.”

This shift in perspective matters because it communicates safety to your child. When your child senses that you really see them for who they are, not just their challenges, they can begin to trust that they are safe with you. That trust becomes the Foundation for everything else.

What common school situations overwhelm neurodiverse children?

Many school environments are built for a narrow range of behavior: sitting still, raising hands, working quietly, and transitioning quickly. For neurodiverse kids, these expectations can feel impossible to meet without support.

Common school situations that can overwhelm neurodiverse kids include:

• Being asked to be still and quiet for extended periods
• Test-taking under time pressure
• Unstructured social time
• Losing recess as a consequence
• Transitions between activities

Marni shared how she prepared her son for situations that required more stillness, like church, library story time, or homeschool co-op classes:

“I had lots of different backpacks filled with different things to do. If we were going to a restaurant, we had a restaurant backpack. If we were going to church, I made sure I had all quiet activities. For co-op day, I made sure I made myself available. I was in class with him. When I could see that he needed a break, I would talk to the teacher ahead of time and just let her know, sometimes we’ll step out, give him the break that he needs, and we’ll come back in. We called them a walkabout.”

Noticing what overwhelms your child and then building in strategies that help them regulate is one of the most practical ways to advocate. It also gives you concrete tools to share with teachers.

How can parents build a positive partnership with teachers?

One of the most important things you can do as an advocate is help teachers understand a foundational principle: what we focus on is what we grow. Here at Connected Families, we say “focus is fertilizer.”

Taylor learned this the hard way when her child began school for the first time:

“I just kept getting phone calls every other day, saying what my child did, or meeting my child at the school and the teacher being there and telling me what my child did wrong again — in front of this child. And I’m so grateful for Connected Families because I knew the term ‘focus is fertilizer.’… I realized that this teacher was complaining about my child in front of my child after she had already dealt with the issue.”

Taylor’s solution was kind and clear:

“I politely said, ‘I really want to hear what you have to say. Can you please tell me negative reports by email or phone, and never in front of my child? He needs to hear what’s going well so that he can repeat it.“

Both Taylor and her child really benefited from hearing what was going right! Hearing the good moments gave Taylor the energy to keep advocating. And she knew her child thrived on positive feedback and praise, as many children do! When parents and teachers can “fertilize” positive behaviors and attitudes, those are much more likely to grow and thrive.

How can parents help teachers understand their neurodiverse child?

If your child has a stack of evaluation paperwork, you already know how overwhelming it can be for you and for the teacher who has 20+ other students to think about.

Taylor’s solution: a beautiful, one-page summary she created for her child’s teachers.

“If you have a child with a lot of needs, you’ve got stacks of paperwork. No teacher is going to read through all of that. I summarized it into one sheet that was visually appealing, where they could see all of it at once.”

Her one-page summary includes:

• A photo of her child (humanizing and warm)
• His strengths
• Strategies that have worked
• Things that don’t work well
• What helps when he’s struggling

Marni, drawing on her background as a public school teacher, confirmed how valuable this kind of document is for educators:

“Having been a teacher, I can say that would have been so helpful if a parent had handed me that.”

This document helps set the tone: we’re partners, working together for my child.

We’ve partnered with Taylor to provide this one-page summary for you!

What is the difference between a medical diagnosis and a school IEP?

A parent in our community asked: What’s the difference between a medical diagnosis and an IEP, and which should come first?

Taylor’s experience offers a helpful answer:

“If a teacher is the one who first says, ‘There might be something going on here,’ you need to follow what she says. She’ll probably write something up for the school psychologist, and you’ll go through the school. But if you are sensing something that’s going on, I highly recommend getting some sort of evaluation through a child psychologist called a psychoeducational evaluation.”

Taylor noted that while a quality outside evaluation often isn’t covered by insurance, it can be extraordinarily valuable:

“The evaluator we hired was amazing. She sat with my son for three days and wrote up a stack of everything that was going on… At the very end, the most valuable thing for school was, ‘This is the support this child needs to be successful in school.’ She just wrote out the bullet points.”

That document allowed Taylor to walk into her child’s school, request a meeting, and have her child’s 504 plan put in place quickly, with supports the school respected and implemented. (A 504 plan is a formal plan for accommodations that help a child succeed in the general education classroom.)

A few practical guidelines:

• Ask for recommendations when choosing a psychologist. School psychologists often carry large caseloads. A highly recommended outside psychologist may give you a more thorough evaluation.
• An official diagnosis often opens more doors. Schools may hesitate to provide full supports without one. As Taylor put it: “That piece of paper is treated like gold in our system.”
• Both pathways have value. School and medical evaluations can complement each other.

How can parents be both kind and firm when advocating at school?

Advocating for your child sometimes means having hard conversations. You may need to ask a teacher to adjust an assignment, modify expectations, or change how they communicate with your child.

Stacy, Connected Families Podcast Host, shared two examples from her own journey with her daughter who has dyslexia:

“In kindergarten, the reading program required 30 minutes every single day to get a sticker at the end of the week. My girl is a hard worker, and this was just taking everything out of us every single night. I had to just say, ‘We cannot do this whole program. Here’s what we can do.’“

Later, with weekly spelling tests, she had a similar conversation:

“We were studying for hours, trying to get these spelling words, and the test would come back, and it was so discouraging to my poor baby. I remember going in and saying, ‘We need to do something different. Let’s figure something out.’“

Being kind and firm at the same time isn’t about being demanding. It’s about honoring both the teacher’s expertise and what you know about your child. Taylor offers this gracious script:

“I know that the issues that present with my child can be really challenging. I see the extra work it takes and the care you’re giving my child. Here are some things that could help.”

Who should be on your child’s school support team?

You weren’t meant to do this alone. Both Marni and Taylor emphasized the importance of building a team around your child — and around you.

That team might include:

• An occupational therapist (OT)
• A speech therapist
• A physical therapist
• A child psychologist
• A parent coach
• Other parents walking a similar road

Taylor shared how powerful it’s been to have therapists who collaborate with each other:

“Whenever I think, ‘I don’t know what to do about this thing,‘ I remember I have a team. For example, I asked our OT, and she wrote an entire page for our teacher on ideas that could help our child. You don’t have to be alone in it.”

Marni emphasized that finding parents on a similar journey can be just as valuable as professional support:

“Not only the professional team, but also people to walk alongside you who have the same shared struggle… that’s so helpful.”

Why are you uniquely equipped to advocate for your child?

You know your child’s heart, strengths, and unique wiring better than anyone. While educators bring valuable classroom expertise, your daily connection gives you the unique insight needed to help the school support team see who your child truly is, ensuring they receive grace-filled, effective support.

Advocating for your neurodiverse child at school isn’t about being adversarial or aggressive. It’s about doing the inner work first, partnering with teachers as allies, equipping yourself with knowledge, and building a team that supports both you and your child.

Your child needs to know they are safe with you. They need to know they are loved no matter what. They need to know they are called and capable — that the way God wired them is good. And as their advocate, you get to communicate all of that to both your child and the adults who teach, coach, and care for them.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to take the next step.

“The name of the Lord is a fortified tower; the righteous run to it and are safe.” – Proverbs 18:10

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