Redefining Success for Neurodivergent Children, with Dr. Emily King

Debbie: 

Hey, Emily, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Emily King:

Hey Debbie, thanks so much for having me.

Debbie:

Of course. I actually, I can’t believe you haven’t been on the show before. We’ve known each other for a very long time and I follow your work and love the focus that you’re taking in your work and just what you’re doing in this space. So welcome, official welcome to the show. And I’ve read your formal bio, but could you introduce us in the way that you like to talk about the work that you do kind of centered around your why and your passion for this community.

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, so my why is I always come back to this intersection of education, mental health, and neurodiversity. And it’s evolved as it all does with all of us over our careers. It’s evolved over time, but I started my career as a school psychologist really fascinated in learning and schools. I originally wanted to be an English teacher, so I wanted to be in schools from the very beginning, but then I realized I did not want to teach Shakespeare. That was like my line in the sand for some reason. And then I just fell in love with psychology. And when I discovered school psychology, I was like, OK, I can put together education and psychology. The more and more I worked in schools, the more I saw all the things that interfere with learning in terms of, you know, at the time we called everything behavior. Right. This was 20 years ago, all the behavior that was getting in the way of learning and all of the I was doing so much consultation with teachers.

And then that of course evolved into my private practice work after I was in the schools, then getting into just the mental health pieces underneath as we know from our dear colleague and friend Mona Delahooke, everything underneath the surface of the iceberg and it is not just behavior. And so over time, I have really fallen in love with all of these awesome neurodivergent kids that I work with and they’re just completely unique experiences of intelligence, but also their interests, their nervous system experiences, and how that’s not aligned with how we traditionally structure and teach in school. And so over time, it’s become a huge passion of mine. Anyone who’s followed me before also knows that I’m raising two neurodivergent boys who are now 11 and 17, and that life as a parent has been parallel to my clinical work, but also obviously informed where I spend my energy, what I feel like is important to fight for. And we, I know we were talking about this right before, but also the edges of not pushing so hard that we reach defensiveness in groups where we’ve got to be collaborative because we won’t reach any type of progress for our kids if we don’t. Those are some of my passions in a nutshell, but I do feel like I’m in this moment of all my interests coming together and so much interest from parents and educators to learn more about how our kids are struggling to learn within the current system of education we have set up for them, which historically has been designed to meet the masses, right? But as we all know, our children are incredibly unique. They all are, but especially our neurodivergent ones.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, and just listeners, Emily has a book that’s gonna be coming out in a couple of years, in 2026, which we’ll have her back on the show. We’ll talk about that and it is more focused on education. But before we pivot, I wanna talk with you just about that a little bit more. Just curious to know, how receptive, like what is kind of the climate in schools when you go in and talk with educators in school communities and administrators about neurodivergence? Because I feel like, you know, when Differently Wired came out, we were just talking beforehand, there was so much defensiveness and understandably, right? And still when I speak to communities that have a lot of educators, there is this like, okay, I hear what you’re saying, but I’ve got 30 kids and I’ve got 10 of these kids in my classroom. What you’re telling me to do is impossible and I never quite know what to say to that. So I’m just wondering what do you experience when you are talking with teachers and administrators? 

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, I do a planning call with administrators before any speaking engagement because of this, because every single staff is really at a different place along this journey. There are some, you know, entire school staffs that are starting with what is neurodivergence? How is this different from special? Isn’t this just special education? And then I have some that are deep in the weeds of understanding the nuances of this and I don’t need to cover that. And I’m covering really specific nervous system science about how a kid’s window of tolerance has got to be open to get the learning in. So it varies greatly. And we’ve got lots of different types of schools in America, right? We’ve got lots of different sizes of schools in America, every state is also different. And there’s gonna be, I think over time, a trickle down effect of where we put our funding, right? We could do a whole nother hour on education funding, but how I see it is to best educate neurodivergent kids, you have to have more people because we are co-regulators, right? So just at the basic needs of especially elementary school students. Let’s say we’re, you know, in my book we’ll be focused on just elementary because at this point, because it was too much to cover more ages at this point, but kids are still at that age, you know, whether it’s autism, ADHD, twice exceptional, there’s still nervous system regulation milestones to be met. We are not seeing kids come into school ready to regulate themselves and having the executive functioning to handle what we used to. And I think there’s a myriad of reasons for that. I think the pandemic is part of it. I think that technology is part of it. But the reality is that so many strategies we have always used for accommodations, whether it’s a 504 or through an IEP, all of those are good for all students … students educated in a general education class without support. They just might not need to access those so much.

So the answer to teachers who are feeling so overwhelmed first of all, I see you I work with you I talk to you and your peers a lot and there will be some things that I suggest in a training let’s say that Is not feasible yet, but my goal is over time that administrators and teachers see that it could be feasible and that could we start working more on getting more teacher assistance, more staffing into these environments where teachers don’t feel like they can’t do what they know is probably best practices. Yeah, so it just comes down to how much support, honestly, teachers feel like they have. The climate I feel like is that teachers are hungry for information. They want to know. And then some of them feel like I love all this information. However, I don’t have the bandwidth to do it. And that doesn’t mean we don’t continue talking about best practices. It means we solve that problem, the bandwidth problem, right? So I also am talking, you know, I talk a lot with administrators and I have my opinions about where public schools spend their money and things like that because over time it’s gonna benefit everyone when we can fully staff our schools and have full access to things. And just as an aside to answer that, if anyone’s thinking like the neurodivergent special ed question, like our systems of how we talk about this in public schools are very much starting to feel outdated with all this new clinical and really cultural lingo we’re using now, but the system still very much is general education and special education and then within special education we only have 13 ways to identify a child for support in schools, which of course we know there are way more than 13 identification categories for whether that’s diagnostically or developmentally. So it’s not a perfect system, but we use what we can to get access to services. So it’s really all the same thing, but we define it differently to get kids what they need.

Debbie:

Gosh, I can’t wait for your book. We’re going to have a good conversation. I’m scribbling down all these things. I’m like, Debbie, do not go down that path. I’m going to rein it in. Okay, so we are gonna table the conversation about public school education for one or more episodes in the future, and also to talk about your book when it comes out. But for this conversation, we wanted to center a talk and a discussion about success. What is success? How do you define success for neurodivergent students? So I guess that’s where I would wanna start. When we are even talking about this idea of success, how do you think about it in the context of neurodivergence?

Dr. Emily King:

And this is where my background in mental health comes to the forefront because for me, success for kids I work with involves what lights them up, what is joyful to them, and what makes them feel effective, whether that is with a skill they have, whether that is an accomplishment, a goal they’re achieving. What I see when kids get down and sad and bummed about stuff. They feel like crushing overwhelm. They don’t feel effective, right? And then when kids feel like they have no time for fun, I mean, this happens with all our kids, right? At different times, big school deadlines are happening or like exam week for even a neurotypical child, when that light is not burning in their face of like, can’t wait to do this thing. You know, that has to be there too. And so I always think about that balance of effectiveness and joy, which is essentially kind of a work-play balance, what we’ve called culturally a work-play balance. But I think when we talk about quote unquote work, there’s so many things that we’ve been told our work, so many things our schooling has conditioned us to think is work or our culture has conditioned us to, you have to do this to make the money, and this leads into success, right? So many people talk about success being money, right? Or success being achievement within this system that, you know, rewards grades and numbers and letters. And so if there’s anything that’s gonna challenge our definition of success, it’s raising a neurodivergent child, right? Because I just have always felt like they’re the canaries in the coal mine of like, this is not working for them. And we don’t have a choice other than to pivot and do what they need to be healthy and happy. Because that’s where we all land. Every parent wants their child to be healthy and happy. But what does that look like for them? And every single child is gonna be different. And every single child not only might be different from their peers, but is probably different from how your parents designed success, which is the first thing we all have to let go of as parents raising kids that could be on a different path to success. So it’s not just, my kid is into the arts and I was hoping they were a sports kid, right? It’s so much more complex than that. If that is lighting up your kid, then we follow those breadcrumbs. And what’s challenging, I think, to many parents is your kid could be into mechanical things. Your kid could be able to take apart computers and put them back together. And you’re like, is this relevant to English class? So we have to somehow figure out our kids that have these really cool strengths, figuring out where that fits into our society and our culture, because they’re gonna get messages of like, that’s great that you’re good at that, but that’s not how the world works, right? And so we’ve got to help them navigate that and figure out how that can not feel just really soul crushing to them in that moment.

Debbie:

Yeah, so I just have to share another little pivot. Just earlier today, I was watching, I don’t know how this reel showed up in my Instagram feed, but it did. And it was an American young adult, probably mid-20s, who lives in the Netherlands and he did a reel about how the work culture is different in the US versus the Netherlands. He had 13 things he had identified. And he really did tie it a lot back to just the priority we place in the US about where you went to college and all of these exterior markers. And it really comes down to money, prestige, all of these things. And that is, it’s not a thing here. People don’t really care where you went to college. It’s not about making as much money as you can. And so it is, you if we kind of peel this back, it’s so, especially in American culture, it’s so ingrained that there are these very kind of key markers of success. to kind of undo that is so hard because we get reminders constantly, especially with the neurodivergent kid that we are not hitting these milestones. This is a different path. This looks different. And so we are forced to redefine success, but it’s hard to even know where to begin. I’m wondering how you encourage people and you’re a parent of neurodivergent kids as well. So what do you think about success? I love this idea of effectiveness. That’s really cool. Effectiveness and joy, what a great formula. But how do you actually begin to dismantle all those ideas about it?

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, so I’m gonna use the example of driving because I also think that that is culturally very American because we’re far away from everything, right? And so one of the things I notice, and again, I have a 17 year old. So when your kid is 17, everyone asks you, they’re driving, how is that? Well, my kid is not driving. There are several reasons he’s not driving, but in addition to lots of attention, executive functioning things, he also has epilepsy. So it’s so interesting because they’re people who know our family and would not ask that question because they know our family. And then there are people who are making small talk, right? And it’s the small talk that I feel like parents are so worried about. They’re like, well, what do I say? You know, and so a lot of this worry about living up to a cultural definition of success, and that might be your family’s culture, it might be your country’s culture, it might be your community. But a lot of that fear comes from what do I say when people talk to me about this? And I deeply understand the balance of representing your kid without sharing too much because they’re a teenager and they don’t want everyone to know about their life. But also speaking your truth enough so that people understand that that’s not your plan, that’s not your path. And the perspective I have on how to start dismantling this is, you know, reminds me of how people, and you may have had this experience too, how people talk to you about your kid being ready for kindergarten. So somewhere in elementary school, this didn’t happen to me as a parent. It was like, everybody’s just in elementary school. No one worries if you’re behind or ahead or whatever. But whenever you go to kindergarten, lots of small talk about where are you going? When are they going? Are they old for their grade or young for their grade? Like all that business. And then I feel like that question went to rest for 10 years. And now here we are with like, are they driving plus graduation, college, job, all the things, right? So now that I’m back in this space though with a teenager, I’m a different person than I was when he was going to kindergarten. And I feel so much more confident now just saying to people, that’s not our plan, you know, or, you know, are you doing college tours? Not our plan right now. And usually it’s fine. And you just share with people a little bit more. Or if it is our plan in the next year, no, we’re definitely not touring 10 colleges, but we are looking at ones that seem to be a very good fit for our kid. 

And so the way we, I think, start dismantling this is really getting, really looking at how we define success. And then when are we worried people are gonna ask us about our kid’s success? Because those are the moments we’re either going to step in and define our kids’ success in an accurate, authentic, loving way, or we’re gonna avoid the question and ignore. And it may depend on the person you’re talking to, right? So there may be some relationships you don’t wanna bring into your circle and some that you do. But I just feel like all those little moments matter. When I think about it from a mental health standpoint, for us as parents, it’s almost like a little bit of exposure therapy every single time we’re worried about someone asking us about our kids’ success because a lot of it is ingrained culturally in what we think people think of us or our kid. And as we all know from research, we are not all thinking about each other as much as we think people are thinking about us, right? So we have to just recenter on what’s important for our kid. I feel better at that now than when, so anyone listening and your child is five, know that you’re gonna grow and you’re gonna grow in confidence and you’re gonna grow in just, you will be so habituated to, by the time your kid is 17, so habituated to confidently feel like, this is my kid and he’s awesome and I will work to figure out his path and you’ll be able to embrace that. And yes, as an aside, I go to therapy every week. I talk about this every week. These are things that I have deconstructed for myself because I was a very high achieving student, which I’ve written about before as being a perfectionist and being exhausted about working so much. I loved school so much. I got a doctorate in the psychology of school. So I see school very differently in my skills than my kids. And so that’s important too. That my definition of success is related to my skills and my interests, but so is theirs. It’s just a different story.

Debbie:

Right. I love first of all, I love this idea of mini exposure therapies. I never thought of it that way. But that’s exactly what it is. You know, that’s not our plan right now. Like I’m such a proponent of having some scripts ready for those questions, which will inevitably come up. So I really appreciate what you said too, you’re the parent of older kids. Now you have a 17 year old, my kid is 20. I’m definitely in a much different place and have let go of so much control. Well, I have no control. I think that’s become abundantly clear to me. I have no control over who my child is. But, you know, I think it’s true that when our kids are younger, a lot of us can be really committed to trying to get our kids back on this path that feels safer because it’s more known to us about what things should look like and how we would ideally want things to unfold. When I talk with groups of parents about this topic of success, I focus a lot on zooming out and thinking about the way that I want my child to feel as an adult — self-determination, self-actualize, understanding strengths and knowing how to advocate for and ask for what they need to create a meaningful life. What do you think about it in terms of zooming out? What does it mean to live a successful life? And you talked about effectiveness and joy, but kind of even zooming out further.

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, mean, so zooming out that balance of effectiveness, what does that look like for the balance of your child’s skills and interests? So we know, let’s just take autistic children as an example, we know that it is so much harder to engage them and to teach them about things they’re not interested in. And their executive functioning increases, their anxiety goes down when their interest is aligned with what we are teaching them. We all know this in our work with them, educators know this. And what’s hard about education is the lack of flexibility in the curriculum. What’s awesome about life is that we actually have more freedom to help our child or young adult figure out what they need and how it can be aligned with what you’re interested in and what you’re good at. So I would take effectiveness and tease it out into skills and interests. And of course, some of those interests will be joys as well. But it’s hard to, I would love anyone listening who is autistic to chime in about, know, in my experience with autistic teens who can talk to me about this, it’s really hard for them to even feel effective if it’s not interesting to them. And I think we, in a neurotypical world, we often think of interest as completely being aligned with joy only, play only. That’s what we’re interested in. But for all of us, this is why I’m like, we can learn so many lessons from our autistic, wonderful people that share, mean, my gosh, my son has taught me so much, right? So thinking about how we can align interests and skills. And I think of it more as, when we think about self-advocacy, I think about it more as, alignment, which reminds me of the window of tolerance, right? Which in Dan Siegel’s work, when we think about window of tolerance as, you know, staying in a regulated state, we’re not overly stressed, we’re not shut down, but zooming out on a macro level of what is, you know, a job, an activity, a relationship that’s going to help my kid feel like they’re living in their window of tolerance, right? So we’re balancing that regulation. But then what is involved in that is teaching our kids how to know that they’re on their edges of their window of tolerance. And we do a lot of work with OTs and with therapists to help them have that self-awareness of what their body feels like paired with the communication that they need and the trust they’ve got to have with other people in their lives. A lot of people also align success with independence but I always push back a little bit and say, none of us is independent, okay? So we all, if my kid breaks their arm, I can’t fix it. I’m completely dependent on the orthopedist and have been down that road several times. And so we all have limits to what we know and what we can do. It’s knowing our limits, knowing who to ask for help. That is a successful, what I would put in quotes, independence, that is successful self, we all self advocate. So for our kids who have weaknesses perhaps in interoception and recognizing their stress inside their body, and then in communication weaknesses or in social weaknesses that they may have to practice more about communicating and asking for help, those are the things from a macro level that I think of when I think of self-advocacy and teaching that, because we all want our kids to be as independent as they can, right? And that looks different for everyone, but I always caution with that word independence. It’s really more about helping your kid effectively self-advocate and recognize what they need.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, that’s great. being like having autonomy, right? Being able to, yeah, yeah. So just to talk about when our kids are younger than two, because they also, you know, they’re living in this culture that we defined and described earlier and where there are, again, these certain markers or symbols of success that our kids may not be reaching in a way that’s visible to other people or they may feel less than in certain environments depending on what their school is like and the culture of that community. So how do we help our kids embrace a different definition of success and really feel empowered and motivated to kind of create the life that they want again on this kind of alternative path?

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, mean, this definitely, the younger we go, the more we have to think about how we talk about success. And some of that is how we present either worried or okay with things. So the example that comes to my mind is social success. We all have lots of different definitions of this. And I can’t tell you how many parents I sit with in this therapy office who are so worried about their child not having any friends. For instance, my child just wanders around on the playground, they dig in the dirt, they don’t talk to anyone, they talk to themselves on the playground. And I usually follow up with teachers and I talk with parents a little more and I want to know what their mood is like at that moment? Are they feeling okay with that? Because many of them are taking a sensory break. Many of them are distancing themselves from the crowd because it’s too much and they’ve been in a room with all those kids in the crowd for the morning. We feel like we would be sad if we were digging in the dirt. And I talked to so many kids who were like, I love it. No one bothers me. No one interrupts my plan. It is so great. And so this is where I started instead of social success using the phrase social satisfaction. Is your kid satisfied with their social interactions? And sometimes when kids are tweens and teens, they’re not satisfied with how many friends they have. And then we’re getting towards figuring that out. But it’s coming from a place of your child’s perspective and their definition of what feels good socially, not our worry about them not meeting a bar that we’ve set in our minds. The other example that comes to mind is the frustration tolerance that so many, especially bright but impulsive kids, or bright but inattentive kids can have, where they don’t experience a lot of time being frustrated because things come to them really quickly. But then once they get older in school, there’s so much work to keep up with. These are the kids that never study for a test until it becomes too many things to remember. So they have no study skills, they reach some cap of how much they can hold in their brain. So teaching that frustration tolerance is, and we talk about this as emotional regulation or growth mindset or things like that, but it’s all kind of the same thing. Again, those are the edges of their window of tolerance bumping up against that, we need to normalize that and say, okay, you’re telling me you need something different in this moment. You need a strategy, you need extra time, you can do it, but you need to split it up into smaller parts. So then we’re getting into the problem solving of it, which we’re all doing for our elementary kids, right? And hopefully we have a school team that’s doing it as well.

And those are the conversations we have to keep having with our kids so that they know we just haven’t figured it out yet. We’ve got a problem and you’re being asked to do something that’s not aligned with how you learn or your interest. So we’ve got to figure out how to make this more accessible to you, which is the whole idea of special education, right? It’s just that the way we have done it in the past, is, okay, let’s pull you out of this class and teach you over here. And when I talk to schools, I’m talking to everyone. I mean, my trainings are most effective usually for the general education teachers who have, you know, as a push for inclusion, all of these really average to above average intelligence, bright, maybe ADHD or autistic students. And they didn’t receive this training in graduate school. So those are the conversations I’m passionate to keep having and we have to be even more open than we are already about what makes a kid feel not only socially satisfied, but proud and satisfied of their work too. And not just because of a grade, it might be because of a grade. We could have a whole nother conversation about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, but I think that we have to just find what is motivating for that child. Sometimes that’s interest, sometimes that’s a relationship, sometimes it’s not. To really help them drive that feeling of success that’s not just reacting to what I think a grownup wants me to do. And of course, our autistic kids shine a light on this because they’re, generally speaking, they’re not socially motivated, they’re interest motivated. So it doesn’t matter if a grownup wants them to do it.

Debbie:

As you’re sharing that, I’m thinking of when we would talk about the self-esteem movement, we want our kids to have self-esteem, and then we kind of pivoted to talking about self-worth because self-esteem is based on other people’s perceptions of you. You feel esteemed because of another person’s praise, whereas self-worth is how you feel about yourself. I love all the nuances in that. I also, yeah, we could go down a whole rabbit hole of what actually motivates us. And I’m thinking of Damn Pink’s Book Drive, which I love, where, you know, talking about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. But I also just want to go back to what you said of how important it is that we do our own work. And, you know, this is what I do a lot of here at Tilt is just helping parents really make sure that they’re not bringing their own anxieties, concerns, fears into the dynamic with our kids and this idea of social satisfaction. I love that language. You have so many great little tweaks of concepts, which are really, I think, helpful. But it is so important. I hear the same thing from so many parents about, you know, my kid doesn’t have friends. And that’s always my first question. Is your kid OK with it? Because we bring a lot of our own stuff into this. So gosh, I’m thinking of a good way to kind of start to bring this conversation to a close. I’m just wondering, going back to the school piece, is this part of your work too is helping schools not just kind of accommodate and help students be quote unquote successful in the classroom, but having their needs met, but also talking about this bigger shift of what are we actually doing here? What is the goal with educating kids at the end of the day?

Dr. Emily King:

Right, and so that pulls in the joy and the effectiveness and also the self-advocacy and the autonomy, right? The hard part about the way that the history of our nation, I’m speaking of America right now, has designed education is, which is wonderful at the time, which is inequality. Everybody gets the same thing. We have to remember it’s still a very young system. We haven’t been educating everyone, I mean, but only for 50 years. And so in 1975, we finally included all students with disabilities. And then prior to that, tons of history of racial inequality. So we really are young in this education experiment, let’s say, and I feel like the neurodiversity movement is pushing us, it’s pressing us one more pain point to say, okay, we’ve got these two systems of general education and special education, but we certainly are not two systems of thinkers. I think about it more in a dynamic approach of all educators need to know all the strategies. And yes, there are going to be times when a general education classroom is overwhelming from a sensory or nervous system standpoint for a child and we need smaller environments, but we don’t need to pull kids to smaller environments because of the way they learn. It’s really more of the way that they regulate. And so this nervous system science that of course we didn’t know more about until the 90s, right, is now starting to get into the mix of all of us talking about this child can’t learn until they’re in that window of tolerance, until they’re emotionally regulated, until they trust the person teaching them. And of course, we know from Polly Bagel theory, if anyone wants to go in on a rabbit hole of reading Stephen Porges work, that when we are in that dysregulated state, it’s the social engagement that brings us back into the window of tolerance. The tricky part in my work and when talking with teachers is that for autistic students, it’s not always just the social engagement. It’s the trusted person that makes them feel safe, but sometimes their interests make them feel safe. Sometimes, I’ve worked with so many parents and sometimes teachers who say, I was able to get the student regulated by talking about physics. And they’re like in fourth grade, you know? So they’re different things we can try to regulate children and it’s starting to all come together. But where this lands with my work and collaboration is that parents are gonna know these little tricks from trial and error are like, you know, a fourth grade teacher is never gonna think to talk about physics to regulate a kid. You wouldn’t know unless a parent told you, right? And then a teacher might say, you know, teachers always joke with them, like they do not have time to enable anybody. So if a child is not you know, doing a skill consistently at home. And it’s really only because the parents’ anxiety might be triggering you to step in a little too soon. Like you’re worried you’re going to be late or you’re worried they’re never going to do it correctly or something. You know, I always say ask your teacher if they can do it at school, because I promise you the teacher’s not doing that for them unless it is a skill weakness and they can’t do it. But if it’s an emerging skill and it’s like I don’t wanna do this cause it’s hard. That’s where we can communicate with each other about figuring out the level of emerging skills, which is completely a moving target with our neurodivergent kids. I always say to families that I work with, throw the milestones, the paper the pediatrician gives you out the window. This is your child with their milestones and they’re gonna be some that are above. I have a kid who taught himself to read at three. I knew what I was looking at, but that was not expected, you know? And then I’ve got one that, you know, learned to read on time and his older brother was like, what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you read when he was five? I was like, okay, this is actually when neurotypical brains read. But then that was before, you know, ADHD was a big part of our life at that point after that. So anyway, I know all of these presentations, both personally and clinically, and we just have to keep sharing our stories, because every single kid, as we all know, and everyone knows listening, is unique. And so is our success, when you feel like you’ve reached a moment where you’re so proud of your kid about something that you can’t believe you’re proud of, but you are so genuinely proud, you’ve reached a moment where you’ve redefined success. And that’s so important.

Debbie:

I love that. And I will share that moment for me or a moment for me came a few weeks ago when my child who is a freshman at university now in another country did laundry and I didn’t even get a text about it. I was like, my God, holy milestone.

Dr. Emily King:

Right? I mean, we all have our things. We all have our things where like, when you look around, sometimes, like, okay, mine this week was my 17 year old sent me an Apple Note, like on his phone. He made a note and then shared the note with me. And it was a bullet point list of everything he wanted his IEP team to know. And I was like, okay. And this is a kid who would not walk up to anyone in person and say that, but is an excellent communicator in writing and has figured that out for himself. So I was able to just cut and paste that to the team. And I was like, yes. And so you don’t, if you have a young child, you don’t even know what you’re gonna be proud of in 10 years.

Debbie:

True. Yes. I love that. I love that. That’s so cool. Okay. We are going to wrap this up. I want to just remind listeners, first of all, you have a podcast. It’s called Learn with Dr. Emily. It’s excellent. I’ve been on it, but that’s not why it’s excellent. You talk to tons of great people and you’re such a good interviewer too. I just have to say, I think you’re really good. And I would love it if there’s other places I know you have a substack. Like where would you like listeners to connect with you?

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, so if you want to dive into my Substack, that’s at learnwithdremily.substack.com. And all my blogs are on there. And then I do monthly parent workshops there as well. They’re live. If you want to come live to get the Q&A, our group does the Q &A at the end. But there also are replays for all of those. And then if you’re interested in any of the school speaking stuff that I mentioned today with training, that’s on my website at learnwithdremily.substack.com.

Debbie:

Awesome. So listeners, as always, I will have all the links in the show notes pages, as well as some of the other things that came up in this conversation. My conversations with Dr. Mona Delahooke, which if you haven’t heard them, are a must listen and very integral to what we’ve been talking about today and some other resources. So thank you, Emily. I’m probably not going to want to wait until the book comes out to have you back on the show. But congratulations on that. I’m excited about that. And I just really appreciate the way that you are supporting our families and helping with this paradigm shift in schools. So thank you.

Dr. Emily King:

Yeah, well thank you so much for having me. I will come back on and talk more anytime.