I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Debbie Reber, founder of TiLT Parenting, an online destination with a blog and weekly podcasts on parenting “differently wired” kids. Our podcast interview was on assessing and supporting twice-exceptional learners.
TiLT is a terrific resource. Recent podcast topics include: Using a Strengths-Based Approach to Support Differently-Wired Kids and The Connection between Creativity and Neurodiversity. Debbie is a New York Times bestselling author, life-coach, and speaker who worked in children’s television before she moved with her family to Amsterdam where she home-schools her son, Asher. She’s a mom-blogger/website doyenne with a highly professional approach. But what I find most impressive about Debbie is her story, her courage, and how her attitude developed into the philosophy that guides TiLT.
Debbie reacted to the frustrations, stress, and challenges of raising her 2e child by deciding to radically shift her parenting attitude and her family’s experience.
Like many of us, she started down the parenting road with no idea she’d soon have a lot more to handle than she’d expected. A year of colic followed by an intense and strong-willed toddler-hood, with regular notes home from preschool teachers about problems, made Debbie and her husband begin to wonder what was going on.
I love this paragraph about her son at age two:
By his second birthday, our little guy was regularly turning heads, both with his ridiculous vocabulary and his apocalyptic conniptions. Anyone who spent any time with Asher couldn’t help but notice that he talked in complex sentences pretty much nonstop. And the tantrums? They just seemed somehow bigger than typical toddler fare. When other parents witnessed an Asher tantrum go down, I’d see shock and awe in their eyes.
For the next four years they scrambled to find a school fit (three schools in three years) while they pursued one evaluation after another. The conflicting labels left them more confused than ever. They piled on the support, only to find little in the way of improvement. Meanwhile Debbie was growing increasingly frustrated, isolated, and struggled with “a fierce sense of personal incompetence, guilt, and failure.”
A realization that this just wasn’t working for their family was well-timed with a move abroad. This provided the opportunity to start over with a different approach. Debbie and her husband decided to: “toss out everything we thought we knew about parenting and education and forge our own path.” Their home-school adventure began.
Debbie realized in the first few months that her biggest source of conflict was with her own thinking about what her life as a mom should be like. She still struggled with occasional feelings of jealousy of friends who were raising “normal kids,” and still worried about her son’s future, but gradually her thinking changed from what she thought her life as a mom should look like to what her momhood could look like.
Debbie’s family is thriving. Now, she’s “on a mission to change the experience we as parents have in raising these kids so that they can go through their lives and interact with the world around them in a way that will help them thrive.” Her philosophy is summed up in the TiLT Manifesto which proposes “a new parenting paradigm, one that embraces difference and uniqueness in children, says no to fear and guilt and isolation, and celebrates and supports our kids, and us, in our experience.”
What’s the take home message? Parents of children who are different can make a conscious decision to stop trying to parent the child they thought and dreamed they would have and instead parent the child they do have. It’s hard, because we all have expectations about what parenting will bring and it’s tough to let that image go. It takes a lot of courage to accept that what might be best for your family is to reject what everyone else is doing. Forget about traditional school and team sports. Stop trying to “fix” your child and help them fit in and instead try to change your child’s environment to fit them.
Debbie is an inspiration. We can't all move overseas and home-school like Debbie does, but there is wisdom to be gained from her story and great information on her website. Check it out.