Parenting’s a lot. Especially when you’re a lot

In this episode of In It, hosts Gretchen Vierstra and Rachel Bozek welcome parenting coach Mary Van Geffen. Mary offers online classes including a special one for moms of what she calls “spicy ones.” She also shares fun, funny, and relatable posts every day on Instagram.

Mary talks with Gretchen and Rachel about parenting spicy kids and how to know if you, too, are spicy. What does it mean to be spicy? Are you spicy? And what should you do about it?

We love hearing from our listeners. Email us at init@understood.org.

Related resources

• Parenting tips when you and your child have ADHD

• Body doubling for ADHD: What it is and how it works

• 5 oddly specific ADHD strategies that help me work

• Listen: ADHD and: Parenting fails

• Listen: Double trouble: ADHD moms share what it’s like to parent kids with ADHD

• Mary Van Geffen: Parent Coach for the Spicy Ones

Timestamps 

(1:10) Defining “spicy ones”

(4:41) Parents’ worries about themselves as parent 

(7:36) What impacts children most

(8:59) Dealing with sensory overload as a parent

(16:51) Organization challenges for parents with ADHD

(18:55) Body doubling

Episode transcript 

Gretchen: Hello and welcome to "In It," a podcast for families with kids who learn and think differently.

Rachel: Here you'll find advice, camaraderie, stories of successes and yes, sometimes failures from experts and from parents and caregivers like you.

Gretchen: I'm Gretchen Vierstra, a former classroom teacher and an editor here at Understood.org.

Rachel: And I'm Rachel Bozek, a writer, editor, and mom who has definitely been in it. Today, we're getting parenting advice from someone who's worked hard to figure out what gifts and talents she brings to the table as a neurodivergent parent.

Gretchen: Mary Van Geffen is a parenting coach who offers all kinds of online classes, including a special one for moms of what she calls "spicy ones."

Rachel: She's got a big following on Instagram, where she's funny and real about the challenges of being a parent.

Gretchen: Well, Mary, welcome to "In It."

Mary: Thank you. Good to be here.

Gretchen: We're so happy to have you here. And you're a parenting coach. And in your work, you often talk about raising kids who are what you call "spicy ones." So, what exactly is a spicy one?

(1:10) Defining "spicy ones"

Mary: A spicy one? I am a spicy one. My mother was a spicy one. I raised a spicy one. These are human beings who feel things intensely and express themselves in big emotional outbursts, usually louder maybe, than a typical person. More rage, more joy. Not a lot of in-between. It's all good, all bad. And they have a fierce drive for independence. These kids are not afraid to take up space and disappoint others, which can be really offputting for a parent.

They negotiate with an adult up until the point where they realize there's no give, and then they just lose it and have these big emotional outbursts. They have a deep sense of justice, and they're going to be the world changers, the activists, the poets, the athletes, the change makers. But to parent this personality, it's really hard because they have more loyalty to their own soul and what they believe is important than to what you, the adult, thinks, even though they have no experience on this earth.

Rachel: Right. I love that and I have something to throw in. I have had conversations with pediatrician about a child who displays a lot of these characteristics that you just described. And this is going back to like age three, four, I remember the pediatrician saying, do not squash it. Right?

Mary: I got to tell you, that's an unusual story you're telling me.

Rachel: Yeah. I know. I will never leave this pediatrician.

Mary: Oh, yeah. You must not. Yeah. There's something so equipping and supportive when another adult, especially one in authority, says to you like "There's nothing wrong with this kid. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, it's hard." Yeah, it's, there's going to be a lifetime of wrestling with who's in charge, but it just is so freeing. Most of us don't have that. We have a lot of voices that have said, like, "Wow, leave her with me for a night. And I bet I could get her to do it.

Rachel: Right.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Mary: It has kind of like a veil, like there's going to be some violence to get them in line. Or we get, like, the silly advice, like, "Have you told them no?" Like, "Oh, thank you."

Rachel: Right.

Mary: "I'm so glad you could tell me this profound advice. Like, yeah, we told him no." No doesn't really work. Instead, you find the yes, you find, you work with them because what's amazing about spicy ones is when you figure out how to parent them, like teenagehood becomes a lot easier because you've been doing it all along. You've been giving someone autonomy who doesn't have a prefrontal cortex and has strong opinions, and you've figured out how to kind of co-exist, and also to let go of control of some things that are just not yours to control with this particular human.

Rachel: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. So, a related term that we sometimes hear when we're talking about learning and thinking difference and neuro spicy, and I've seen this in like groups on social media, and I've heard parents use this term kind of throwing it around. And it usually refers to someone who maybe has ADHD or sensory challenges. And in our conversation today, we're hoping we can offer some advice for parents who are maybe spicy, maybe neuro spicy, and are really worried about how that might affect their parenting.

(4:41) Parents' worries about themselves as parent

Have you had parents share anxiety or concerns about that? Like where they think that maybe they just aren't cut out for this whole parenting business because of what they're struggling with?

Mary: Oh, for sure. And in my heart goes out to them because I am ADHD and I'm going to say autistic. I'm kind of on a journey right now, and I know those feelings of like, "Well everybody else seems to have a manual that I don't have," and a lot of that stems from with ADHD, really difficulty creating structure and being consistent. And all we hear all day long is like, "Just be consistent. You set these boundaries with your child or limits and then stay."

Well guess what? We're not really good at staying consistent. And so, we're going to have to work off a different playbook, which is I'm going to choose to always be connected with my child, to be creative with my child. And I'm not going to be the most consistent person, and they're going to learn a lot of things from that, or I'm going to outsource some of that structure and consistency. But yeah, it's very normal to feel like you're not giving your child 100% of what they need.

And I would say they are learning amazing things from you. And there is a playfulness that a parent with ADHD can bring when they're not infuriated and rage-filled because they've been interrupted so many times. And the more that you know yourself and understand how your brain is unique, the more you don't take personally some of the things that you're unable to do and some of the ways you operate, and some of the things you're going to see in your child.

Because often we're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want this for my kid" because we haven't done some of the work to sort of forgive ourselves for where we fall short of our own expectations. And then we see that same attribute in our child like, "Oh, they're procrastinating. You must not procrastinate." It's like one thing I think we really need to remember is that none of our trajectories that got us to this point right now, like if you think about right now what you're most happy with about your life, what you are most proud of, what brings you the most joy, I can promise you at 18, you didn't go, "Yep, I'm making that choice. I'm going to do that. And it wasn't this straight line…

Gretchen: Right.

Mary: Where you've got, it's been this crazy roller coaster. I personally graduated from college and got my CPA and became an accountant. I am the farthest thing from what somebody would think an accountant would be. And guess what? I hated it, right? But I did it because I thought you were supposed to, right?

Gretchen: Right.

Mary: I can't remember where I was going. Can someone catch me up?

Gretchen: I think it's just that, like, as a parent, you shouldn't be so worried about every move you make having an impact on your child, right? That your child is going to be who they are, and you're there to support them. But like, you can't really, you can't mold them, right?

(7:36) What impacts children most

Mary: Right. Well, what they show has a lot of like, in terms of research, what impacts the way a child ends up, a lot of it has to do with the family culture. And we set that through the way we communicate, the way we apologize and repair. Repair is going to be really important for neurodivergent parents...

Gretchen: Yes.

Mary: And their children. And guess what? So, much intimacy comes. Like if you think about your best friends, if they're your really good friends, you at one point had a conflict and instead of pretending it didn't exist, you moved in, you moved towards them, and you worked through and somebody said, "I'm sorry," or somebody was able to listen to the other. And so that's where great intimacy comes from. And I actually have a little PDF on how to do a healing apology because we get it wrong. I mean, we tend to say like, "Do you forgive me? Can you say you forgive mom?"

Gretchen: Right.

Mary: Like, that's not an apology. Or we add a bunch of excuses on it, or we say, "I'm sorry that I yelled at you and you shouldn't," and that's not an apology either. Like we didn't grow up being apologized to. So, that is a skill that will be important.

Gretchen: Yeah, for sure. And I think we actually have a similar type of handout on Understood about how to teach kids to make a good apology. But parents can learn that too. For sure.

(8:59) Dealing with sensory overload as a parent

You know, one thing we hear from parents who may learn and think differently, who may be quote unquote neuro spicy, is that sensory overload can be a worry. So, you know, as parents, right, you're dealing with a lot of clutter, a lot of noise, kids grabbing you going to parties, other kids, other noises. How can parents who struggle with sensory stuff kind of prepare themselves better for all of this, or manage it while it's going on?

Gretchen: First, and just like I'm so sorry because I feel, I feel that. I am highly sensitive. And what that means when someone is a highly sensitive person is that they process inputs at a deeper, more thorough level than someone else. So, I will hear a sound and be like, "Huh, I wonder if there's a large piece of machinery broken down the street because this high-pitched sound," and my husband will be like, "Oh, I didn't hear that. Now I do. Thanks for nothing." And I'm like, what? I mean, if we're always there.

Gretchen: Right.

Mary: So, what we know about sensory overload is that it's easier to pre-protect against it than to like, fill yourself up afterwards.

Gretchen: Right.

Mary: Which means like you need to eke out that time of nothing earlier in the day versus trying to solve it at 8 p.m., right? So, making that a part of your family's kind of routine where it's like "We all read it this time, and I turn on the sound machine," so that there's, kids sometimes need some kind of visual, that this is different time than other time, and you do too. It really helps with like sleep hygiene as well, but.

So, turning on a sound machine, deciding every day like if you're, if everybody's up at 6 a.m. and you got young kids, then maybe you decide at 10 a.m. to 11, I always put in my earplugs and there's so many earplugs on the market now where you you can still hear things, but at a much more muted amount. That's not abandoning your child, to say, "I actually have super good hearing. I don't need to hear all of this." So, earplugs, very important.

The number one thing that helps overstimulation is sleep. And so, please be kind to yourself. If you're in a stage of your family's life where somebody is always waking up screaming in the middle of the night, then you, it makes sense that your nerves are just frayed because you need sleep. And so, that can be the first step is to make sure that you get sleep.

Rachel: So, for some people with ADHD, emotional regulation can be a challenge. And even if they've worked on it a lot, when you add sleep deprivation, which we just talked about, or stress into the mix, it can be really, really hard. I know deep breaths can come in handy. What are some other things people can do.

Mary: OK, I do want to say I have a 75-minute self-paced class called Calm, and that gives you the steps for coming up with your own calm down recipe because everybody is different.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Mary: So, what's going to work for you is not going to work for me. Like, I might want deep pressure and a heavy thing on me like, "Hey, honey, come lie on top of me. No funny stuff. I just need your heaviness on my body," where somebody else is like, "Oh my gosh, I would feel trapped, right?"

Rachel: Right.

Mary: So, I want a name that everybody is, you got to do a little bit of trial and error here. One thing that I always like to correct when I hear someone say, "Oh yeah, deep breaths or lots of breaths," is actually taking a deep inhale is part of a startle reflex. And it actually signals to your body that there is stress or danger. So, when you are working on breathing, which is a great way to calm down, most of your emphasis, you want to be on the exhale.

So, a longer exhale than an inhale. That's what signals "Oh, look at me, I'm safe" to the body. So, want to say that. But two things I will say for the ADHD parent who's listening to this to calm down. One is like, do not underestimate the pause. And basically deciding I'm going to reduce customer service levels in this house. I have been...

Gretchen: I love it. Customer service levels.

Mary: Like can I do my Alexa impression? From now on, customer service will be declined due to excess volume. That's all I want to do is my Alexa impression for you. But, yeah. So, like having a sit down with yourself, you're not going to tell anybody else. Maybe you tell your spouse like "I'm going to start reducing how quickly I respond to things. I'm going to allow for a pause to bloom in between what some and I call it the conscious pause. Like something just happened, it doesn't feel good immediately. I can tell my body's reacting, but I'm actually going to give myself some time before I respond.

I also call this sloth parenting. Like that good old sloth at the DMV in Zootopia. They were all in a hurry, and they're like, if you could just give us the name, that'd be really great. And she was like, "Of course, I will." And you could see the rabbits, and that's going to send your ADHD kids into hyperdrive. That's OK. Part of their learning journey is to have tolerance for other people's slower brains.

Gretchen: Yes.

Mary: And I raised a spicy one who would be like, "Hello? Hello. What do you think?"

Gretchen: Oh my God, my kid does this to me all the time.

Mary: So rude, isn't it?

Gretchen: And I tell her "My brain does not move as fast as yours. It really doesn't."

Mary: Yeah. And I want to encourage you to not even get into defensive mode. Just hold your finger up and say, "Hold, please." And you're just thinking, right? You're taking a moment to expand the time. So, basically, the parts of your brain that are rational can come back online because that immediate "What?" that brings up your inner monster, that part of your brain thinks in verbs like "Hit, run, stop," that's not your best thinking.

So, that's why we want to buy ourselves some time with that reduced customer service, expanding that pause between the shitty thing your kid did and your reaction, that would be your knee jerk reaction, which is not good. It's usually not a good reaction. The second thing is I want you to explore controlled destruction, and this is a little term I came up with for basically ripping, breaking, twisting, screaming. The things that feel to our body like we are actually in charge and we are not stuck.

Something awful happens. Your body starts sending you a cascade of cortisol and adrenaline, and if you just sit there, you aren't completing the stress cycle. Your body needs you to do something. So, maybe that is you go punch your pillow violently for three minutes and we tell kids to do that, but we've got to model it, right? Or you rip up a piece of paper, and doing this with your kid is really cool too. When you're teaching it to them, you don't, you can't be upset at that time. You have to be more like, "Hey, you want to do some controlled destruction?"

Gretchen: Right.

Mary: Maybe it's throwing ice at the wall and hearing it just sort of shatter. And just imagine me gritting my teeth as I'm doing it. There is something about that that lets that angst and that electricity out in a different way.

Gretchen: OK, well, let's switch gears for a minute and get back to something that you talked about a little bit earlier.

(16:51) Organization challenges for parents with ADHD

Let's talk about being organized and how that can be hard for parents with ADHD, especially, you know, now with social media and you see mommy blogs and Pinterest with the "How to pack the perfect lunch for your child" or the systems, you know, the cubbies, the the beautiful pantry, like, the backpack system. So, how can parents who aren't good at organization not feel terrible about themselves all the time?

Mary: Well, you might have come to the wrong person because I can't figure any of that stuff out either. But I think you almost need to start a list in your phone of the things I know I am talented at and that I am teaching my child just by existing. And one of those is like flexibility and resilience and adaptability, and making it like just make your thinking visible when you can. And that just means putting things where the things you want to happen. You are putting in writing and putting out there for others to see, whether that's a checklist.

And then, knowing that like two weeks from now, you will have all forgot about the checklist. Now one thing that might help with that is an alarm to check in every day in this thing until we get this new habit. But I think you just have to not compare yourself to very neurotypical, I don't know if you guys know the Enneagram, but through the Enneagram, one who comes in and makes peace out of chaos, that's not you. That's not you.

And whenever you can partner with someone who can provide that, like I am married to a consistent, predictable, he calls himself boring sometimes. I would not call him that to his face. And so, he is providing like he will be like, "Well, we need this thing needs to happen and this" and I realize what it must it would have been like to have an IEP growing up. Like to have somebody who was holding some of that executive function.

(18:55) Body doubling

And for some of us, it might mean body doubling, like if there is something that needs to happen and you do have a hard time doing it, then partner with other parents to take terms on Zoom where you're doing it together.

But I mostly, you just can't compare yourself. You are a Ferrari that takes like three weeks of training to be able to drive other people who are just driving around in a Pinto, and it's real obvious how to do it. You're just you're on a whole different plane.

Gretchen: Right. Yes, I love that. And the body doubling tip. Yeah, I've seen a lot of that. Even my daughter, every once in a while, she'll put on like a "clean with me" or something and like, do it together, you know, like.

Mary: Yeah. Someone would just do it with me? But also don't undersell that, like you showing up weird or your unique self is opening so many doors for people. It's giving other people permission, ground-shaking permission to be their own playful or silly self. And there's so many people who are afraid to be playful because they weren't, they were sort of knocked out of them growing up. And when you are your full self and that's weird and different, you just give the rest of humanity the signals that it's safe to do that. And they were now better off. I mean, it's it's world changing stuff.

Rachel: So, I wonder if we can talk about your own experience for a couple of minutes.

Mary: How dare you?

Rachel: So, looking back, can you remember what you were thinking or feeling about becoming a mom? Like when you first found out that you were going to be a mom? Was there anything you knew about yourself at that time that made you worried about what kind of parent you would be?

Mary: I don't think I was personally worried because I just didn't even think about all the things that could go wrong. So, for me, I had more of like a really rosy picture, like, "I'm going to have an angel baby." And she was for the first like 15 months, and we're going to dress alike and I'm going to heal all my mother wound issues by being her best friend. And what I was really unaware of was that I had, like access to a lot of rage and like an inner monster that I had never seen until she was 2 or 2 and a half or 3 or 4 those ages, and had her own will, and I just could not fathom. And I assumed it was I was doing something wrong because I couldn't get her to do what I wanted her to do.

Gretchen: Yeah. Is there anything you wish you would have known then that you know now?

Mary: Yes. Wonderful mothers can have wildly disobedient children.

Gretchen: I love it. I feel like a lot of mothers of the past need to hear that.

Mary: Yes. And looking back, what I would have thought as disobedient was just being a kid. Yeah, time, we can't, we can never believe this until we arrive, but time smooths out the edges of all this stuff that felt so stressful and felt like we were being judged. And my daughter, I believe, was sent here to knock out the parts of me that really cared what other people thought and because of her and her wildness and brazenness. I can be more wild and brazen and be fully who I am, and it's miraculous.

And she ended up, by the way, being completely neurotypical. Super boring. But when she was little, I thought, "Oh, there's something so wrong with her, I need to get her diagnosed." So, I don't know if anyone else can relate to sort of projecting your own stuff onto a kid.

Rachel: Oh yeah. Yeah. That happens. We hear that for sure. One thing I think a lot of parents with ADHD or who are neurodivergent in some other way, do is they worry that their child may be, quote, like them or, you know, in a bad or not so great way. And, that's kind of what we're talking about here. And it's like they're kind of looking for it, right? They're watching for signs of that. Is that something you see?

Mary: Yeah. And I'm looking up this word because I'm obsessed with it, now my hyperfocus is, the reticular activation system. Do you guys know about this?

Gretchen: No.

Rachel: No.

Gretchen: We'll call it the RAS system. In your brain, is this basically an algorithm that because we're getting so many inputs a day that we couldn't possibly process every single one. We have this reticular activation system that is filtering for us. So, the thing that we voice out loud and say is important to us, our brain serves up to us. So, for instance, if you're like, you know, I think I might get a red car. I just don't know how I feel about red cars. Suddenly, every car you see on the road will be red because your brain's like, "Oh, this is what you want look at."

And it's also used for kind of like, I don't know if we want to talk manifesting or goal setting. When you say, "I intend to be a calm mother or I intend to find things I'm grateful for," your brain is like, "Oh, OK, here you go." Like, that's what all that mindset work is, right? And I think when we haven't done our own healing about the parts of us that we do not like, we are more apt to see them in our child and kind of write their story. And so, I do see that a lot.

And I think we also can get caught up like, you know, if we have ADHD and we find that we're very reactive and highly emotional and we don't like that about ourselves. Well, all children are highly reactive and emotional, and that's sort of part of the developmental process. And so we can see that and think that we got to put like the kibosh on it and step on it. Or as your doctor told you not to, to squash it. And I think that is a disservice to both of us, because your child having so many emotions is actually going to help you become more tolerant of your own emotions.

Because so many of us are like, "Oh, I don't want to feel that" or "It's not OK to feel that." And here's this kid that doesn't come with any of those rules or boundaries pre-installed. And so, we can hate seeing them experience some of the emotions that we were not allowed to feel. So, if our parents were like us, stop whining or stop feeling sorry for yourself. When we see that in our child, we're like, "Oh no, no. Everything in my body knows that's not OK. That leads to being rejected or abandoned."

And so, some of that is we haven't done the work to figure out what it was like for us to be little. And I do this in "Moms of Spicy Ones," the eight week course I teach, to figure out what was...you like that?

Rachel: I did.

Mary: What was your story, how were you raised, and what narrative have you taken from what was said about you or to you that actually isn't true anymore? And I think that's the beauty of the, of matrescence or in the becoming a mom is to do it most effectively is to go on our own journey of understanding ourself better.

Gretchen: And that can be hard, right?

Mary: So hard. So painful, too.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Mary: Yes.

Gretchen: Sometimes, just want to put it under the rug and I think about it.

Mary: Yeah, I call that Scarlett O'Hara, "I think of that another day.".

Gretchen: This is really have been eye-opening in many ways and fun too. So, is there anything else that you want to share with us about being a parent, you know, who may be spicy or raising a spicy one?

Mary: Yes. Almost every skill is like YouTubebeable, right? Is...there are people that will teach you almost every skill, but there's very few people in your life who will ever fully delight in you. And that is your job. Your most important job, especially with a divergent child, is to find out how you can delight in them, how you can have unconditional, high positive regard for them when they walk in the room so they can feel like my mom likes me. She's not just loves me, she likes me. So, prioritize that.

That is way more important than this kid graduates high school and knows how to cook. They really can learn that in other places, but they will never find someone else to delight in them. And if they don't have you doing it, we can go down a whole rabbit hole of poor relationships trying to find that validation.

Gretchen: I love that, and I love the word delight.

Rachel: I love delight as a verb.

Mary: Please delight in me, Rachel.

Rachel: I am, I have been.

Gretchen: Yeah. This has been so delightful.

Rachel: Yeah. This was so fantastic. Thank you so much.

Gretchen: Yeah, seriously. So fun. And, I learned a lot.

Mary: You guys are gassing me up. I want you guys to be my crew that comes behind me.

Rachel: Your hike women?

Mary: Yes, my hike women.

Gretchen: For more information on Mary's classes and coaching, go to maryvangeffen.com.

Rachel: Thanks so much for listening today. If you have any thoughts about the episode, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at init@understood.org.

Gretchen: And check out the show notes for this episode, where we have more resources and links to anything you mentioned.

Rachel: This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you'd like to help us continue this work, donate at Understood.org/give.

Gretchen: "In It" is produced and edited by Julie Subrin, with additional production support from Cody Nelson and Samiah Adams. Justin D. Wright mixes the show and Mike Ericco wrote our theme music. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

Rachel: From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. Thanks for listening.

Gretchen: And thanks for always being in it with us.