Six books, forty tabs, and no idea where to start

You’ve got visual timetables in one browser tab and somebody saying visual timetables are a demand in the next. You’ve got a sensory diet, a reward chart you’ve been told to bin, three podcast episodes and a friend who swears by a weighted blanket. Meanwhile bedtime is still two hours long and you’ve got work in the morning.

If you’ve got too many strategies for your neurodivergent child and you’re asking where do I start, here’s the filter I use. It takes about ten minutes and it saves months.

The short answer

Don’t choose a strategy. Choose a moment.

Pick the single hardest twenty minutes of your week, work out what’s making it hard, and take one thing out of it. Strategy shopping keeps you comparing ideas in the abstract. Picking a moment gives you one small problem you can actually solve.

Step 1. Pick the moment, not the problem

“Meltdowns” isn’t a problem you can work on. It’s too big and it’s everywhere.

“The twenty minutes between coming through the door and getting a snack” is a problem you can work on. So is getting into the car on a Monday, or the stretch between teeth and lights out.

Choose the one that happens most often. Frequency beats severity here, because a hard moment that comes round five times a week gives you five chances to learn something, and it’s usually the one draining you most anyway.

Step 2. Ask what’s in the way, not what’s wrong

Before you pick anything to try, spend two minutes on this question. What is my child being asked to do in that moment, and what might be making it impossible right now?

Refusal almost always means something’s in the way. Not enough processing time, a body that’s had too much sensory input, executive function that’s run out, or a demand landing on a nervous system with nothing left. It’s a can’t, not a won’t, and the strategies that assume a won’t are the ones that make everything worse.

It also helps to ask what you need in that moment. If you need them in the car by 8.15 because you’ll lose your job otherwise, that’s a real need and you get to name it. If you need the shoes on before the coat because that’s the order you’ve always done it, that one can go.

Step 3. Choose the smallest subtraction

Now pick your strategy, and make the first one a subtraction rather than an addition.

Adding means a new chart, a new timer, a new routine to teach and maintain. Subtracting means the same outcome with one less demand between your child and it.

• Put the drink in the bag rather than asking them to fetch it
• Lay the clothes out rather than asking them to get dressed
• Tea on a tray in front of the telly on the days school has emptied them
• Say “I notice it’s nearly time to go” rather than “get your shoes on”
• Cut the questions about their day, or move them to bathtime

Subtractions are free, they work immediately, and they cost neither of you energy you don’t have. If a subtraction doesn’t do it, then reach for the visual, the timer or the tool.

Step 4. Give it two weeks and change nothing else

This is the step everyone skips. One change, two weeks, and leave the rest of your life alone.

If you change four things at once and things improve, you’ve learnt nothing about your child. If you change one, you’ll know. And your child gets a fortnight of predictability while they work out that this is just how it goes now.

Tolerance shifts week to week, so judge it across the whole fortnight rather than on Wednesday when everyone was ill.

A quick filter when two strategies compete

Still torn between two things you’ve read? Run them through these.

1. Which one takes something away rather than adding something in
2. Which one can I do when I’m tired, on my worst day, without preparation
3. Which one respects my child’s need to feel in control of their own body and time
4. Which one am I choosing because it’s right for us, rather than because somebody would approve of it
5. Which one can I start tomorrow morning

Whatever wins on those five is the one to start with. The other one will still be there in a fortnight.

When everything genuinely is urgent

Sometimes it is. School’s on the phone, sleep has collapsed and you’re all frayed. In that case the order goes safety, then sleep, then everything else.

Safety first because nothing else works without it. Sleep second because it’s the thing that quietly makes every other problem bigger, for your child and for you. School, routines, food and the rest come after, even when it feels like they can’t.

And if something needs a professional in the room, ask for one. A blog post can help you choose where to start, but it can’t see your family.

You can’t get this wrong

Here’s the reassuring bit. There’s no strategy so wrong that starting with it ruins anything.

You’ll try something, it’ll half work, you’ll adjust. That’s the whole method. The mamas who get to a calmer home aren’t the ones who picked correctly first time, they’re the ones who picked something small and stuck with it long enough to learn from it.

Pick your moment. Take one thing out of it. See what happens.