A Conversation with Dr. Naomi Fisher on Neurodivergence, PDA & Self-Directed Learning

Debbie:

Hey Naomi, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

Hello, it’s lovely to be here.

Debbie:

It’s lovely to be in our virtual room together and I’m really looking forward to exploring your work, which there are so many things we could get into, I realize, as I was prepping for this interview. So we’ll do our best to hone in on a topic. But before we get into the meat of our conversation, you kind of just introduce yourself in your own words, maybe? As part of that, your personal why, like how did this become the focus and passion that you move through the world with?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

I’m Dr. Naomi Fisher. I’m a clinical psychologist. and I think I am passionate about helping children learn in the ways that work best for them. And it’s so complex how it became what I do. What I do now is there are so many different things going on, but I think one of the key experiences that I had myself as a child. I moved, my parents moved around the world a lot. And I went to 11 different schools when I was growing up. And that left me with a healthy degree of skepticism, I think about schools, about how we educate children, but also what we think is essential when we educate children. Because one of the things I noticed even as a child and a teenager was that all these schools operated in very much the same way, but they also had certain things that they thought were really important and essential. And without that thing, the whole stuff would, know, education would fall apart and yet they were different things. So just like in the UK, we’re really in school uniform. You know, I went to schools where our skirt length was measured and you were sent home if you had the skirt that was too long or too short. And then I went to other schools where there was no school uniform, no monitoring of anybody’s clothing and clothing wasn’t really an issue. Just stuff like that made me think, start to question. And then when I had my own children and saw them growing up, I started to think, wow, a lot of, so I’d already trained as a clinical psychologist at that point, a lot of what I learned about psychology and about child development and how they learn isn’t really reflected in how we educate our children. And there seems to be this disconnect between the developmental psychologists and what we know about how children grow and learn and what’s actually happening in our education system. And often when those two things collide, when the children don’t fit into the education system, what’s happening is that that problem is being located in the children. So it’s saying these children aren’t doing things right, or they’re not behaving correctly, or they’ve got mental health problems. And then they’re sent to see somebody like me, a clinical psychologist. So, and that was something that in my professional world was making me think, hang on a minute, do I want to be in this position where I’m being asked to effectively treat these children, like fix these children so they can go back into a system that I just really feel isn’t based on their needs and isn’t based on what we know about developmental psychology. So all those sort of personal and professional came together. Yeah, and resulted in me doing what I do now.

Debbie:

So I’m wondering, did you make kind of a formal pivot? You were having these students come to you and you know, what was that moment like? And when did that happen when you realized, wait, I’m gonna kind of take this in a different direction?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

A different direction. It’s a good question. I would say the pivot probably really happened for me when I had my own children. I think I was already a developmental psychologist. did a PhD in autism before I did my clinical psychology training. I was actually working in our national health service with adults. I specialize in trauma and in EMDRs we might talk about. And then when I had my own children, it was the first time I got this really up close observation of how children grow and learn. And I think that’s the case for most of us. You can study children, you can work with children, but when you actually have your own children, you’re like, okay, this is a this is quite a lot more intense than I thought it was going to be, for example. And there’s a lot more going on than I necessarily appreciated. And I think that this is that I was like, I had these different heads on when I was with my children, I was like the psychology head and the parent head. And then there’s me as kind of just 

person and I’m trying to bring all those three things together. And I realized I was thinking a lot when I was watching my children learn about how this fits into what I think as a psychologist, my training as a psychologist, but also to what’s going to happen to them as they go through the school system. And do I want that to happen? And I think the real pivotal moment for us was when we decided that we didn’t want that to happen to our children. And so we didn’t send them to school at the stage that they would normally be going to school. So that actually meant for me that I quit the job that I loved. I quit working in the National Health Service at that point so that I could be at home and home educate my children. When they were four and one is when that happened. And they’re now almost 14 and almost 17. So that was quite a while ago. Yeah. But I think from then on things started to go in quite a different direction from that moment.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. And I’m wondering, you you said you home educated your children. I homeschooled my kiddo for I think, how many years was it? Six years maybe. And it started as homeschooling and it just every year it changed to be less structured. And I’m wondering if that was the case for you as well.

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

Yes, exactly. Yes, I think I never started structured because it was really clear to me that my son, who’s my elder child, was not going to respond well to that. But I definitely felt at home. So my children are now in school, and go to a democratic school. But it was definitely a process of watching of learning very much learning with them how they learned, which I didn’t anticipate. You know, I think most of us, when we’ve been to school, we think of education as a process of doing something to the child, delivering something to the child. And I definitely thought that we would be doing reading and doing maths and going to classes to study, to do different things. I thought that was what it would be about. And it absolutely wasn’t about that at all. It was really different. And I think as I watched them learning, I became more and more aware of how important agency was in their lives, how important it was for them to be choosing what they did. And actually, my whole concept of what they were learning and what children are learning through education changed. I stopped thinking about it as being about reading and maths and the things that we all think of as education. And instead, I thought about it as them coming into relationship with learning, how they saw themselves as learners and how they felt about themselves as learners. And I felt while I was home at home, when you’re you’re right up doing it with them, you see that so clearly in a way that you just don’t really in a school when there’s a whole group of kids, you know, you can have a, when you’ve got 30 children in a class and one teacher, half of those children may be not at all engaged with what they’re doing and you carry on. Whereas at home, you know, you have a child who’s not interested and it’s an unusual parent who’s going to persist doing the stuff when they can see that the child is not engaged, not interested. And the child has so much more power at home. The child can literally say, know I’m going and walk out, which they can’t do at school in the same way. So I think it leads to such a different relationship with education. I didn’t appreciate that starting out at all.

Debbie:

Yeah, same. I definitely had a lot of plans and a quote unquote curriculum and things I thought we have to do when I have to tick these boxes. Even if there’s freedom and flexibility over here, there’s still these other things. But I did, you know, over the years I learned from my childhood about what needed to happen in school. So would you take a minute then? I mean, you shared what I would think would be some definitions of self-directed learning, but how do you define it just for listeners for whom this is a new concept?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

So for me, self-directed learning is learning where the learner is the one who decides what they’re going to learn and they decide when they’re going to stop learning it as well. And they decide how they’re going to learn it. But that how, to me at least, doesn’t have to be them creating that for themselves. So I would see something as self-directed learning if a young person says, you know what, I really want to learn how to speak French. And I think the best way for me to do that would be to find a tutor who’s going to help me learn French. And I can do that. You obviously need help from your parents to organize that. But if there’s that relationship where we know that the child has chosen to do it and the child can stop doing it when they want to do it, then I see that as having the essential elements of self-directed learning. I think that includes a huge umbrella of learning literally from, you know, playing in the mud right through to studying an advanced course in something. I think it’s about the relationship between the learner and what they’re doing, rather than necessarily what it looks like from the outside. So I would say, say in a class of children studying maths, you could have some children in that class who are self-directed learners and some who aren’t, and they all look as if they’re just in a class studying maths. But those children who know, I’m here because I want to learn this and I can stop doing it if I want to, they’re self-directed. Whereas the children who are, I’m here because I’ve been told I’ve got to be here. I haven’t got any choice and I have to go through the motions. They are.

Debbie:

So the definition that you just shared with us, that idea of control, is, and we’ll talk about neurodivergent learners specifically and why this could be such a good match. But do you find that taking away that control, what does that do to the lifelong interest in learning or the pursuit of information? What have you found?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

So what I have found is that, well, I think that all young children are self-directed learners, basically. If you see a young child, they are out there exploring the world. You essentially cannot stop them unless you try really hard, but they are out there exploring things and learning from things all the time. And really what I see that we’re doing in self-directed learning and self-directed education is we’re essentially preserving that relationship between the child and learning. So young children, It doesn’t occur to them to think, I want to learn something. I better get an adult to come and tell me about it. You know, they want to learn about, Imean, obviously they don’t think about it quite this way. They want to learn about different textures. They’re just going to go and get their hands in there. They want to learn how to bake something. They’re going to go and get the flour and the sugar and mix it all up and see what happens. You know, they don’t wait to be told what, how to do things right. And I think that if we can preserve that kind of, I’m the person who is in charge of my learning, who is responsible for my learning, if we can preserve that through to when they become teenagers, then something really special happens in those teenage years. And it’s quite hard to preserve that during the younger years, because what children want to do is typically not what adults would like children to be doing in terms of learning. So, you know, I say that there are things that adults value, like reading and maths and history and social studies, whatever it is. And then there are often in the earlier years, things that children value and they tend to be more things like Pokemon or video games or, playing outside or bouncing or riding my bike or being with my friends. They’re all things like that. And sometimes adults get this idea that that means that we have to constantly pull children away from those things that they enjoy in order to make them do the kind of important things, the worthy things that we think they should be doing instead. And I think that each time we do that, we give children the idea, well, what you want to do is less important than what I think you should be doing. And that bit of you, which says, I’m really interested. I really want to know. Isn’t actually that important. Isn’t something that we should be listening to because maybe you’re getting it wrong. 

And I think children often get that message that their interests are a waste of time. You know, parents inadvertently can give their children the message that the things that you really choose to do are much less important than things that I choose for you to do. And then by the time they get through to teenagers, they’ve learned that. And you see that in school teenagers where they basically say, you offer them interesting things and they say, will it be on the test? They’ve learned that this isn’t about learning really. This isn’t about interest. It’s about how I am going to perform in this test, which is important. This isn’t about what we’re doing. So when I talk to self-directed teenagers, and I asked them, you know, what about, what would you say, I’ve asked some of them, what would you say to parents who say, you know, my child just wants to play, my child just wants to play video games. And one of them, a 17 year old, was so insightful. He said, you know, I just basically played games and video games until I was about 11 or 12. And he said, I think I was learning that I was the person who made decisions about my life, that I was the person who could follow an interest. I was the person who could make things happen. And now he is learning so much stuff. He’s learning languages, he’s learning maths, he’s learning coding, and he brings that same attitude. So he brings that same feeling of, can trust my judgments, I want to do things, I’m going to learn how to do things. And I think that there’s a big shift that goes on neurologically as children become teenagers, as they go through puberty. Essentially, they become able to think about the future and to think what would I like to do in order to get to this point? I’d like to go to college. What am I going to need to do that? Younger children just can’t really do that. 

That’s why when you ask a younger child what they want to be when they grow up, they’ll tell you, you know, anything. I want to be Spider-Man. I want to be at the level that they’re working at. They’re not kind of yet thinking realistically about what I really want to do. I think that makes parents panic because parents go, my goodness, what if they never sit down and want to focus on their reading. What if they never see the point in studying something? What if they stay in this stage where it’s all about the Pokemon and all about what we do every day? Help. I have to make them change. I have to instill this in them. I don’t think we need to. I think it’s something that happens as they grow up. And in fact, yeah, I kind of see it as the opposite. Instead of kind of instilling this in younger children, I think we need to sort of preserve that time when they’re younger children and when they want to play all the time make the world interesting to them, bring adults into their lives, bring stuff into their lives, but we want them to become teenagers with this idea still intact that my choices matter. I’m the person who’s responsible for making my learning matter, making my learning count.

Debbie:

Yeah, I mean, to go into teenage hood, that age with that sense of agency and control, you could just see how that would be so important in every aspect of life, right? To realize that I matter, I get to be in choice. That’s what we want, right? And the pull is so strong. You said, do you hear from parents as do I, like, how do I get my kid to do X, Y, or Z? I’m like, you can’t, you cannot get your child to do anything. But that idea, even for parents who are really on board with this, they’re still always that like, yes, but we still have to do this, this, and this. How do you respond to those? I mean, you write in the book that the question many people will have when thinking about self-directed learning is, does it work? And how do we answer that question? how do you answer that question?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

Yeah. So it depends what you mean by does it work? Doesn’t it? Because sometimes parents really want when they really want their child to be doing the things that children would do at school, but they wanted them to choose to do it. So they think of working as you know, my child loves maths and they sit down and study all the maths workbooks and they’re right up with where they would be with other schools, with school children, but I don’t have to make them. I think that’s the ideal for lots of parents. Unfortunately, that isn’t the deal. You can’t have that. Essentially, if you’re going to really get into self-directed learning, you need to accept that your child will learn different things from school children. They will do things in a different order to school children. They may not learn some of the things that school children are doing until a lot later. And that takes a lot of nerve as a parent and certainly with my children.

Reading is the big thing that everybody’s worried about. What if they don’t learn to read? What if, you know, I homeschooled them and they come out as non-readers, wouldn’t that be terrible? And I think the way around that is to talk to people with older children, because the confidence I gained when my eldest child learned to read was huge. So he didn’t learn to read until he was aged between eight and 10. And he learned to read from road signs and from Minecraft. And the way I knew that he’d started to learn to read was that he looked, we were driving in the car one day and he looked out the window and he saw a sign and he said, does that say zombie? And I looked over and it said zone. And I was like, yeah. So I know why you think it says zombie because in Minecraft, everything has a word attached. It says zombies say zombie on them. And now you are clearly working out reading because you’ve got the Z and the O and the E and the middle bit is a bit fuzzy, but I was like, wow. And that was how his learning developed. And he’s now an avid reader. reads adult, he reads nonfiction, he reads all the time. And my daughter was much slower to learn to read. So she didn’t learn to read till she was about 11. And I was, if I hadn’t had the experience of seeing my son learn, I think I would have been really anxious at that. I mean, I was, I’m not, I’m not lying. I was worried. I was like, is there something, is there a reason here why she’s not learning to read? And what happened with her, which was interesting, was she got to about 11. And I do think one of the reasons she didn’t learn to read was because my son was reading and was good at reading. And she was like, that’s his thing. I don’t want to do that. But she got to 11. And I could see the shift that went on in her at that point. You were talking about the shift to be a teenager. And I could see that she was starting to think about the future in a different way. And she was seeing that reading was going to be a useful skill in her future. And she said to me, I’d really like to learn to read. Would you help me learn to read? And I did help her learn to read. Even with the help you had to learn to read, I thought we might get a reading book, a scheme or something. She was like, no, I know how you want to help me to learn to read. I want to read these chapter books called Toto and Silver, which we’d already read together. We read with her. She said, I’ve listened to the audio books. You’ve read them to me. I know them quite well. I think they’ll be a good book to start with. They’re chapter books. They’re not a beginning reading book at all, but that was where we started. And at first she couldn’t read any of the words, but we were going through them. I was telling her what they were. She was doing it and she learned to read. And, you know, so I think I wouldn’t have gained that. I wouldn’t have had that confidence to let her come to that in her own time. And she’s now almost 14. She loves reading. She reads all the time. She reads her way through, you know, she’s now reading well in excess of her age, like what the, you her developmental age. And she says, when I asked her about it, she says, I think that reading was never ruined for me. And I actually think she’s right, but I also think that she’s someone who would have struggled to learn to read when she was younger. So I think if I had really pushed reading or if she had gone to school, I think she would have found it hard.

And I think that’s one of the reasons she didn’t learn to read until she was about 11. She finds phonological awareness hard. She’s very visual. She’s an artist. Reading was just not something that was on her radar when she was younger. And I think we could have ruined reading for her. I really think we could have done. I think when I see that, that’s what kind of helps me keep the faith and kind of keep my mouth shut when I was saying, know, yes, I do think this is really important. In fact, I think it’s so important I don’t want to ruin it for you. I want to give you the chance to come to it in your own time.

Debbie:

Well, as you said, that takes a lot of bravery to do that. But you really, you you’re trusting in the process and that shows so much trust in your child too, which must feel really great as a kid to know that my parent, my child, you know, my parent believes in me, my parent trusts in my ability to figure this out when I’m ready. That is such a gift. But one of the things that you say in your book, and by the way, listeners, we’re talking about one of Naomi’s books, A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education, which is, you know, she goes really deep into the concepts we’re talking about today. But one of the things you say is that we have to allow for diversity of outcome. So you say for the young person who sets up their own business at 16 or another who takes exams at the age of 20, the diversity of outcome makes self-directed education hard to evaluate and certainly impossible to compare with more traditional forms of education. for parents who, and I’m always talking about, we got to zoom out, look at the big picture. What are we doing here? We’re raising humans. We’re raising people who we hope to be adults who know themselves well and have the tools they need to create the life they want. How do you define what the end goal is or success would be for this?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

You’ve just, you’ve just defined it beautifully. I think the end goal for me is that our young people get to the point of adulthood, seeing themselves as capable people who can go and make choices about their lives and who can learn the things that they need to learn. So even if a young person gets to 20 or 18 and they haven’t, they haven’t learned skills that they need in the future, that happens to many people. That happens to many people at school. It happens to many people outside school. And I think the difference that I would hope with a self-directed young person is that they think, okay, I would like to get here, I need to do this, and I have faith in my ability to learn. Because that sort of faith in your ability to learn is just fundamental. And I meet lots of young people, particularly neurodivergent young people who go through the school system. And whether or not they end up with qualifications, they often leave with a profound sense of themselves as someone who isn’t very good at learning or who can’t do that. And that follows them through life. So they restrict themselves because they say, well, I wouldn’t be able to do that, or I can’t do that, or I’m no good at doing that. And that’s what I think the gift that we can give with self-directed education, particularly for young people who would really struggle in the school system. So they don’t learn to think about themselves as lesser really, that they learn to think about themselves as the capable, amazing people that they are.

Debbie:

So I would love to spend a few minutes talking about neurodivergent learners and PDA. I’ll just mention that I know you work with Eliza Fricker. And she illustrates many of your books. And she’s wonderful. We’ve talked with her about her book, The Family Experience of PDA. So tell us a little bit about why self-directed learning is such a good match or can be such a good match for broader neurodivergent learners, but specifically PDA.

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

PDA. So PDA stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance and it refers to children for whom the demands of everyday life provoke overwhelming anxiety, which leads them to avoid, to try and get away from them. The thing about children with PDA and they, so children with PDA are on the autistic spectrum generally, have a lot there. PDA is a profile of autism, although since I started talking a lot about PDA, I’ve had lots of other parents come and say, my child’s demand avoidant, but they’re not autistic. So I think that’s a really interesting area, which we don’t really know enough about. But for children who are demand avoidant, the pressure of being asked to do something or made to do something, the expectations of other people provoke more anxiety than for other children. So it feels like a threat. So that means that the school environment is intensely stressful for them because the school environment is full of expectations and pressure, even positive pressure. So even when you’re, you know, offering a child a reward for doing something that can be perceived as a threat as well. That can feel to a child with PDA, with a PDA profile as I need that, that makes me feel really anxious. I need to get away from that. So if you have children, a child with that kind of profile, you put them into a conventional school or homeschooling environment with lots of demand, lots of instructions, lots of, need to do this and then you can do this. What happens is they are in a state of high stress a lot of the time. And when a child is in a state of high stress, it’s not a good place to learn. You can’t really learn well when you’re perpetually in a state of high stress. 

So when I’ve talked to parents whose PDA profile kids have gone to school, they’ll often say either they’ll say that they were completely really compliant during the school day and then they got home and completely exploded and you know, it was just really difficult to manage every evening the next morning and then they would go to school and they would be really shut down again. Or they say that their behavior, the child’s behavior at school was seen as bad behavior and was seen as disruptive behavior. So one mother said, that I’ve talked to her son, when he got really anxious and stressed, he would throw chairs and the school saw this as bad behavior and they would punish him for it. And the more they punished him for it, the more anxious he became and the worse his behavior became. And so children could really easily get stuck in that vicious cycle where the way they express their distress and their anxiety is through what schools and parents sometimes see as in quotes, bad behavior. And so that bad behavior gets responded to in a kind of punitive way, and that increases the anxiety and that makes the behavior worse. So quite quickly, I hear lots about lots of children for whom things go downhill really rapidly because of that cycle, I think. And I think if you don’t understand that cycle with the demand avoidance, then it’s easy to get trapped into it with a child because you’re often told as parents and also as a school, you know, that you need firmer boundaries. need to, people will say things like, they just haven’t got the message yet, or what can we do so they get the message? And it’s always more pressure. 

And with children with a PDA profile, it’s this really counter intuitive thing where you need to take pressure off. You need to lift off that pressure, lift off the expectations as much as possible, because as the child’s stress level comes down, their threat response comes down and they come into a place where they’re more capable of learning. And that’s what you want. You want your child to be in a place where they’re capable of learning. And it feels so weird as parents because it does mean you just have to lift your hands right off and say, okay, it’s okay if you say no, it’s okay if you don’t do this. And one of the things I often say is kids demand avoidant children. They need to know they can say no to things before they can genuinely say yes. And schools really often expect that you can pressure children into saying yes that you can say, we’re going to do maths now. You don’t want to come when you have to, you know, it’s up to, there’s no choice. You have to come to school. You have to do this. You have to do that. And for a demand-avoidant child, that has immediately made it much harder for them to learn because actually they need a “maths is here. You can come and try it. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. You know, we’re doing this now. You can join in or you don’t have to.” And it’s that you don’t have to, which enables them to join in because they need that escape hatch. They need to know that this is not, I am not being forced to do this. And that’s why I think self-directed learning can be such a good fit for them because you can offer opportunities whilst saying, that’s what I always say to parents, you offer the opportunities, but they are opportunities. They are not obligations. Here you are, you might like to do this, but you might not like, you might not want to, that’s okay. 

And what I find with children is that particularly when they’re initially coming out of school, they’re often in a very highly aroused state and it’s just no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to everything. And that’s what I call the automatic no, which is like a shield that they’re holding over themselves, protecting themselves from all these demands. And what you want to help them learn is that they can lower that shield a bit because their no will be respected. It’s things like taking your child somewhere and saying, well, go and give it a go. We can leave when you want to and then follow through with that. seeing that as a success actually, so I sometimes talk to parents who are like, you know, we spent all this time getting out to this place, we really wanted it to go well. 10 minutes in, the child says, I want to leave now. And I’m like, you know, it’s a failure. And I’m like, no, that’s not a failure. That’s a success. You got out there, the child said they want to leave now and you did it. That is amazing. That child has learned, we can leave when I need to leave. And knowing that you can leave when you need to leave is what will enable them to stay. And that’s why, and you’re kind of building that trust with them where they know they can go, which actually as adults we have, right? It’s one of these weird things, whereas as an adult, when we’re, when we’re somewhere, usually we know that actually if we need to, we can get up, up and walk out. You know, I just went to a conference. If I really feel this is too much, I don’t want to be in this room anymore. I can stand up and leave. We don’t give that privilege to children. We expect them to stay where they are and they can’t leave. And I think that creates so many more problems for children than we need to. Yeah, so that’s why I think we can do that with self-directed education. And that is why it works so well for demand avoidant children.

Debbie: 

Yeah, mean, the way you described it, it feels like a dance, right? And you wrote, self-directed education with these children is an art form. Is that kind of just being really attuned to what’s happening? I mean, it’s both attuning to them, attuning to ourselves, right? So that we can not get triggered by whatever is happening with our child. Are there any other ways we can kind of bolster ourselves for that art?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

It’s, it’s also, it’s also learning not to get triggered by the gaze of others. Because I think that’s the thing that really makes things so stressful for parents. When I talk to them, you know, they’re like, well, yes, it’s okay. You know, I can manage it when I’m just alone with my child. But then when I am at the playground or at the supermarket and my child is saying, I need to leave now, I see everybody watching me and I’m going, they’re going to think I’m a rubbish parent. They’re going to think I’m, and sometimes people will even say that, won’t they? People will unhelpfully say things like, well, I do, we’re going to give you, she’s going to have the idea. She’s always in control if you give into her or cause that behavior is going to be like that. If you do this. And I think that judgment from others is so powerful for parents and it can really, it makes parenting in public intensely difficult, but it also can make it really hard to just attend to your child and to what they need.

Even when I’m talking about being able to go home after 10 minutes, that takes quite a lot of planning. Because if, for example, you go out with another family, you’ve got this responsibility. Now, when you came out with this other family, and now we’re saying we want to leave, and is that going to be an issue? And what’s going to happen? You know, there’s so much other stuff going on that makes it hard to just say, okay, we’re just going to go with this right now. So I think, again, you need the support of others, but also one of the things I found really helpful, actually, someone said to me when my children were young, when things are tough, just take a deep breath and remind yourself, what is the most important relationship in the room? And it’s always going to be with your child. The other people, you know, they’re important, but you want this relationship, this relationship with your child is fundamental to your life, to their life. And you want it to be lifelong. You want, you know, you want them to, you want, you want to still be with them, still be deeply involved with their lives in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whereas that isn’t actually the case for all the other people who you’re surrounded with. They actually do matter less. And so if you can kind of channel that and just focus in, that can be really helpful.

Debbie:

Yeah, I so appreciate that because I mean, everything we’re talking about today is unconventional, right? And when you are parenting in an unconventional way, you are going to be judged and get looks from people. You know, I get asked that all the time. How do I deal with, you know, the judgment of others that I’m doing this wrong? And it takes a lot of work to not get, you know, make that mean something about ourselves and we have to practice self-compassion. But I love that question. What is the most important relationship here? Because when you ask that, it’s a no-brainer. We know what really matters here. So there’s so much we could get into and I have many questions we’re not going to touch upon, but I’m just going to name your most recent, actually, you have a new book out for educators too, I believe, which I’d love to hear about. But the book we’ve been talking about today is A Different Way to Learn: Neurodiversity and Self-Directed Education. there’s so much in there. You talk about screen time. You talk about, you’ve actually adapted Ross Green’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model specifically for these learners, which I thought was great. You have a Safe to Learn pyramid where you kind of talk through how to actually build up safety so learners are more available and open. So it’s just a wonderful resource. But before we say goodbye, yeah, would you tell us about the new book that you’ve just released and what you hope it does in the world?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

Do you mean, so there are actually a few new books about that. So there’s when, so the book with the book that I just wrote with Eliza is When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse. Do you know that one? So that one is specifically for demand avoidant parents, parents of demand avoidant children when the naughty step, and this, but it’s not about education. So it’s about parenting. It’s about parenting demand avoidant children. And it’s all about these dilemmas that we’ve been talking about. has a whole chapter on other people. What about other people? So because I think parents, lots of parents were coming and saying, you know, we really need, we really need more about parenting and the different way to learn is about education. So it’s about self-directed education. I see the two as very much enmeshed, but I think you can come at it from different angles. And sometimes parents come from the parenting angle and sometimes they come from the education angle. But yeah, but the one for the book for educators, which is also with Eliza and was with my sister, Abigail Fisher, who’s an educational psychologist. So that was because we, I was, we were talking to parents, running things for parents and parents were always saying, yes, but we need schools to know this as well. We need, you know, it’s all very well for it to be us, but our schools don’t understand and don’t know that things need to be different. And I think it was also born out of my own school experience, those 11 schools I attended, but in a couple of those schools, I actually had a really bad time. I really disliked them and I was called a school refuser. Well, I was refusing to go to school. And so I think that gives me a particular perspective on children who struggle with school because I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that. And that book is very much about all the different ways that we see children who struggle with school and how often it’s very judgmental and very shaming the way that we behave towards children and their parents. There’s such a lot of conversation about how parents need to be firmer. We have articles in the press in the UK which say things like, you know, parents, since COVID, parents are allowing their children to stay home on Fridays because they work from home.

So, you know, they’re just basically the parents who are lazy, can’t be bothered to get their children to school. And that’s so far from the reality when I talk to parents and children. I just think anybody who’s writing articles about how it’s easy to have your children at home when you work from home has never had a child at home when they’re trying to work from home, because it’s always easier when you’re trying to work from home not to have your child with you in my experience. But yes, anyway, yeah. So that’s what we’ve been working on.

Debbie:

There’s so much we could get into and I really was interested in dipping our toe in the conversation of EMDR, but I realize this wasn’t the conversation for that. And perhaps you’d be willing to come back and talk with us about that another time.

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

Absolutely. I’m always happy to talk about EMDR.

Debbie:

Okay, awesome. All right, so we’ll make a note to do that because we know that our kids, especially in everything you’ve shared about what they experienced at school, there’s a lot of trauma that happens at school and just very interested in getting into that more with you. But before we say goodbye, where would you like listeners to go to learn more about you and connect with you?

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

So if you go to my website, which is naomifisher.co.uk, you will see all the different places I am. I’m on Facebook at Naomi Fisher. I am also on Instagram, I think also under @naomifisher. And I have a free substack, which is called Think Again, Making Childhood Fit for Children. And if you sign up for my sub stack, that’s the one for people who don’t necessarily want to be on social media. You get a short email from me every week, just a few thoughts about children, school, neurodivergence, whatever comes into my head.

Debbie:

Oh, awesome. I’m such a fan of Substack, so I will definitely check that out. I love that so many people that I learned from are on Substack now, because it’s such a nice way to engage. Yeah, for sure. Well, Naomi, I just want to say thank you so much for everything you shared today. Fascinating conversation. And again, we could have gone on and on, but we got so many great nuggets in this half hour together. So thank you so much.

Dr. Naomi Fisher:

Thank you so much for inviting me.