“He doesn’t care about your box! Get rid of the box!”
The “collage” that wasn’t…
My youngest was 6 years old when I went to pick him up from his Montessori classroom. I stood there waiting, watching his classmates file out, each holding their newly created collages. Some had pasted together pictures of cars or trucks, others had sparkly collages with butterflies and trees, all had pictures and colors pasted haphazardly all over their base paper.
Then out came my boy, holding his work. Except it wasn’t a collage at all. He had created a 3D sculpture out of paper of the space needle, replete with a moveable "elevator”. Now…you may think “Wow! What ingenuity! What creativity!” and you’d be right!
But I’m going to be very VERY real with you - my first thought was “gosh, why didn’t he follow instructions?” As parents around me chuckled and commented that my kiddo was “his own person” I smiled and acknowledged, but inwardly wondered what the heck was going on.
It was one of many times that he made it very clear to me, he had absolutely no need to play by “the rules of someone else’s game…” (*little Wicked reference for all my fellow theater nerds). He wasn’t mad that we asked him to try…he just wasn’t inclined to do so.
A year later when we discovered he has dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a general language learning disability, everything began to come into focus. Despite having the answer to “what is going on”, I still struggled to support him in all of his out-of-the-box ways. Until finally, a wise friend and mentor literally said to me (as I was tearing out my frazzled hair), “Niki! Stop trying to fit him into the box! He doesn’t care about your box! Get rid of the box!”.
I wish I could tell you it was easy - it wasn’t. Not because he was difficult, but because as a neurotypical person, I was so accustomed to the “right” way to do things and the “expected” pathways. Parenting him has taught me over and over again, that the road less traveled (a poetry reference too? I’m on a roll…) is the way he operates, and at the end of the day he is not only succeeding, he’s thriving. All I had to do was get rid of the damn box, and instead, find the tools to help him make his own map.
Now I’m here to offer the insights I’ve gained as his parent, as a career coach, as a mom of college kids, and as a social worker to anyone who could use some support, a sounding board, some tools, some resources, or an example of a different road map. I hope you’ll join me.