From Holidays to School Days: Navigating Flexibility and Boundaries with My Neurodivergent Son

Many of my friends with neurodivergent children say that they find school holidays a struggle as their children find the lack of their regular routine unsettling. For us it’s the other way around: my son loves being at home and finds it tricky (understatement) to fit back into a schedule that someone else has implemented. At home we’ve always had more of a pattern than a routine – things are kept flexible enough to accommodate for how everyone is feeling that day. We negotiate: “do you want to do this now or in 5 minutes?” We compromise: “You can watch the end of your YouTube video if you get dressed straight after.” We try to stay calm while giving time updates of how long we have left before we leave the house. Because even in the holidays we still have to stick to other people’s

timetables occasionally, if we have a fun activity booked for example. A fun activity that my son will want to do, will be excited about doing and yet will still need chivvying out of his bedroom and in to the car if we’re to make it there.

Returning to school leaves a lot less time for him to do the things he wants to do. He regularly tells me how many hours he spends at school and that it’s a “waste of my time”. He has many other things he’d much rather be doing. Like going outside. “I need fresh air” he told me last night at bedtime while he was trying to unlock the front door in his pajamas. Because as much as I’ve always tried to stick to a rigid bedtime routine, he has never liked going to sleep. He spends hours in the garden (during the day, not at bedtime) running around the perimeter chatting to himself. He likes to run the boundary of any new outside space – I think it’s because he likes to know where boundaries are (both physical and abstract), he likes to construct the rules of a place and the outer boundary is a

part of this. Much as he loves playing games like hide and seek, he often likes to spend time in the garden by himself.

With my son I’ve learned to pick my battles. If it doesn’t seriously impact on what we should be doing or on anyone else then I let him do what he feels he needs to do in that moment. But last night at bedtime I did say no to going outside. And he accepted it. It wasn’t always the case, at one point this would have triggered a meltdown but we’ve really worked on communicating with each other and he understands that co-operation is required on both sides. Getting him through the school gates happily in the morning, however, that is something we’re still working on.