Raising One, Teaching One
Parenting and educating broadband kids.
CHAPTER 17
Raising One, Teaching One
Almost everything written about parenting a child with this wiring is written from the adult’s side of the desk. Strategies for managing the behavior. Techniques for getting compliance. How to make the day work.
I’m going to do it from the other side, because that’s the side I was on.
I was the kid with the desk in the hallway. I can tell you exactly what those interventions felt like from the receiving end, and which ones did damage that took thirty years to undo. That’s the one qualification I have here that most authors don’t.
What the hallway actually taught me
The desk in the hallway was a reasonable solution to a real problem. I was disrupting the class. My teacher wasn’t cruel and she wasn’t wrong.
Here’s what I learned out there, though, and nobody intended to teach it:
I learned that I was the kind of person who couldn’t be in the room.
Not “this behavior doesn’t work in this setting.” That’s what the adults thought they were communicating. What an eight-year-old receives is much simpler and much more permanent: everyone else is in there and I’m out here, and that’s what I am.
That’s the thing to understand about every intervention you make with a kid like this. They are not primarily learning the lesson. They are learning what kind of person they are. And a child who gets corrected many times a day — for talking, for moving, for forgetting, for losing, for not listening — is assembling a verdict about themselves out of thousands of small pieces, none of which any individual adult would have chosen to deliver.
By the time I was twelve I had the verdict. It took me until my thirties to seriously question it, and the questioning isn’t finished.
So the single most important thing you can do — more than any technique in this chapter — is this: make sure the correction lands on the behavior and never on the child.
Not “why can’t you ever remember anything.” Rather: “the folder needs to go in the bag — let’s put it by the door.” Same outcome. Completely different thing gets built.
I know that sounds like standard parenting advice. It isn’t, quite. Standard advice says it because it produces better compliance. I’m saying it because I lived on the other end of the other version and I’m still carrying it at fifty-four.
What actually helps, from the kid’s side
Let them move. Not as a reward, not as a break they earn — as a default condition. Standing, pacing, fidgeting, sitting on the floor. I have solved more problems walking than sitting in my entire life. A kid who is moving is not failing to concentrate. For a lot of us, the movement is the concentration, and stilling the body stills the thinking with it.
One instruction at a time. “Go upstairs, brush your teeth, get your bag, and put your shoes on” is four instructions, and what arrives is roughly one and a half. This isn’t defiance and it isn’t not listening. It’s a working-memory limit, and it’s the same limit that had me forgetting what I walked into a room for at forty-five. Give one. Then the next.
Make it visible. Everything Chapter 13 said applies double to children. Lists on the wall, not in your voice. Timers they can see. Pictures for younger kids. You are not lowering the bar — you’re supplying the external structure their internal version hasn’t built yet.
Find the thing they’re good at and make it non-negotiable. This is the one I’d fight for hardest. Every kid like this needs at least one place where they’re competent, and it almost never happens in a classroom. Sport, music, building things, animals, code, anything. It functions as counter-evidence — the one exhibit against the verdict, on the days when everything else is confirming it.
Mine was the shop, and it arrived too late to save my childhood. If somebody had put my hands on metal at ten instead of twenty, my twenties would have looked very different.
Protect the thing they hyperfocus on, even when it’s inconvenient and even when it looks like nothing. That’s not time-wasting. That’s the one place their system is running at full capability, and it’s where they’ll find out what they are.
For teachers
Briefly, because you have thirty of them and I know the constraints are real.
The kid who can’t sit still is not challenging your authority. I promise you that. I liked most of my teachers and I still couldn’t do it.
Three things that cost almost nothing:
Let them stand at the back. They’ll take in more standing than sitting. It looks like disengagement and it is the opposite.
Give instructions in writing as well as out loud. The verbal version doesn’t survive the trip. This costs you one sentence on a board and it saves that child a daily experience of failing at something they never received.
Find one thing they’re good at and say it in front of the others. Once. Publicly. A child who is the class problem being publicly good at something rearranges how they see themselves and how everyone else does. I remember, with complete clarity, the two teachers who did this for me. I could not tell you one thing I learned in third grade.
If you have it too
There’s a decent chance you’re reading this as a parent who was diagnosed because your child was. Chapter 16 mentioned that route in — it’s extremely common.
That puts you in a hard spot nobody talks about: you’re being asked to supply external structure for a child while running the same shortage yourself. Build their routine, remember their appointments, keep their systems consistent — with the executive function that this entire book has been about not having.
Two honest things.
Your systems have to serve both of you or they won’t survive. The visible family calendar, the launchpad by the door, the timer — build them for the household, not as something you administer on top of your own chaos. The version where you’re managing their system while your own is on fire lasts about three weeks.
And you are going to model failure in front of them, repeatedly. You’ll forget the thing, lose the form, blow up over something small.
That’s not the disaster it feels like. Because what you can do — and what nobody did for me — is narrate the repair. “I forgot that. That’s the thing my brain does. Here’s what I’m putting in place so it doesn’t happen again.”
A child who watches an adult fail, name it without shame, and fix it is learning something more valuable than a childhood of watching someone never fail. They’re learning that this is manageable and that failing at it doesn’t make you a bad person.
That is the exact lesson I didn’t get, and I would trade a lot of good advice for it.
The question you actually want answered
If your child has just been diagnosed, the question at the front of your mind is probably about treatment. Medication, most likely.
I told you at the start of this book I wasn’t going to go there, and I’m holding to it — especially here. Someone else’s child, someone else’s clinical picture, from a steel detailer with no medical training, is the furthest thing from what I’m qualified for.
What I’ll say is this: it’s a real decision with real considerations on both sides, and it belongs to you, your child, and a clinician who knows them. Not to a book. Be wary of anyone confident in either direction who has never met your kid — that includes authors, forums, and relatives.
What I’d have wanted said
I’ve thought about this a lot. If one adult had sat down with me somewhere around ten and said one thing, this is it:
“You’re not bad at this because there’s something wrong with you. You’re bad at this because this particular thing needs the one part your brain does differently. There are whole worlds of work where what you’ve got is exactly right, and we’re going to go find them. In the meantime, here’s a way to get through the parts that don’t fit.”
Nobody said it. I worked it out at fifty, and wrote it down, and here we are.
You can just tell them. It takes eleven seconds and it might save them thirty years.
Next chapter takes the long view — what this looks like at eight, twenty-five, fifty, and seventy, and why the thing you’re dealing with now is not the thing you’ll be dealing with later.