Giving Compass' Take:
- Ariel Gilreath reports on a study indicating that neurodivergent students and their parents experience greater back-to-school stress than their peers.
- What are the root causes of neurodivergent students' heightened back-to-school stress? How can donors help support neurodivergent students and their parents?
- Learn more about key issues in education and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on education in your area.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
The start of the school year can be stressful, but parents of neurodivergent children are more likely to report back-to-school stress, feeling overwhelmed, unprepared and scared than other parents, according to a new survey shared with The Hechinger Report.
About 2,100 parents answered the survey this summer from Understood.org, a nonprofit that publishes resources for people with dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and other learning differences. Those with neurodivergent children say they were experiencing back-to-school stress about their child’s social life, whether the school would meet their child’s needs and whether their child would have access to adequate resources to succeed in school. About 82 percent of those parents said neurodivergent students are often misunderstood by their peers, and 76 percent said they are often misunderstood by teachers.
Elementary-age children who think and learn differently may struggle more with the back-to-school stress because they have a harder time expressing their needs than their older peers, said Andrew Kahn, associate director of behavior change and expertise at Understood.org. “You’re much more likely to see this in behavior, and in avoidance and escape.”
Teachers can help ease the transition to school by looking for those signals and breaking down lessons and tasks early on, Kahn said. Simplifying activities step-by-step early on will benefit all children, he added.
“Some of this is getting teachers and parents to think broadly about how can we provide the smoothest way of instructing kids who are different — and who are neurotypical — in a way that’s going to decrease their sense of feeling different,” Kahn said.
Last fall, my colleague Jackie Mader wrote about the experiences of young children with dyscalculia, a learning disability that makes it harder to process numbers, and how a lack of awareness about it results in delayed diagnoses. The earlier a child gets diagnosed, the sooner they can get early interventions to help them succeed, Kahn said.
Read the full article about neurodivergent students' stress by Ariel Gilreath at The Hechinger Report.