Resisting
neuro-normativity
when parenting
neurodivergent
children

A frame that stops trying to fix the child and looks at the household instead

Sophie Goldingay and colleagues at Deakin University have published a paper in the Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work proposing what they call the REBEL framework — Relational Ecosystemic Belonging through Equity and Liberation — for social work with neurodivergent young people and their families. Strip the acronym and the frame is straightforward: work with neurodivergent children has tended to focus on changing the child, and the authors want to look at the family as a whole system instead, situated inside a school, a service landscape, and a culture, each of which either supports the child’s way of being or demands its correction.

The word doing the work in the title is neuro-normativity — the assumption, usually invisible to those who hold it, that the neurotypical way of attending, socialising, eating, sleeping and communicating is the standard, and that departures from it are problems in the person departing. The paper’s core move is to treat that assumption as something families are already, quietly, resisting — and to ask what they need in order to keep doing it.

The evidence base is modest and I’ll say so at the outset: 54 survey responses from Australian parents and carers, 21 complete, 83% European-ancestry, analysed through a lens the authors chose in advance. It is a seed paper, not a load-bearing one, and I’m writing it at that weight. But the frame it offers is worth having, and its best findings say in a family’s terms what this corpus keeps saying in structural ones — that the difficulty is not in the child, and that the people closest to the child usually know that first.

What parents already do, and why it keeps being read as dysfunction

Asked what actually helps, the parents described an elaborate, self-taught practice. Preparation before events — explaining what will happen, describing the setting, naming who will be there. Advance notice of any change of routine, visual schedules, gradual introduction of new environments. Messaging apps rather than spoken conversation for emotional check-ins, because the child talks more easily that way. Humour, used carefully — “only if the child understands the manner of humour used and does not see it as humiliating.” Watching for clenched fists mid-conversation and stopping before the escalation. And the most popular single strategy in the survey: letting the young person rest after a social event before asking anything about it, because they come home “exhausted,” “overwhelmed,” needing to “regulate.”

Twelve of twenty learned all this by trial and error or from allied health; eight from research and from neurodivergent family and friends. Almost none from a programme built for the purpose. And then there is the finding the paper builds its argument on, from a parent describing what works: “Structuring life to support his needs as much as possible even when it goes against social norms. E.g., eating dinner separately from everyone else.”

Within a neuro-normative frame, a family that eats apart is a family with a problem. Within the REBEL frame — and within this corpus — it is a family that has correctly identified the demand-structure of the shared table (sensory load, social performance, unpredictable timing, the pressure to eat particular things in a particular way) and adjusted the environment rather than the child. The authors say it directly: adjustments like this are legitimate, supportive adaptation, not a household deficit to be fixed. That is the whole argument, at kitchen-table scale. The parents did not need a framework to know it. They needed someone in authority to stop telling them they were wrong.

The boundary where a family’s adaptations meet an institution’s rules

Because that is where it breaks. The paper cites Katherine Benson’s UK finding that social workers, encountering autistic mothers of autistic children who could not manage full school attendance, tended to blame the mothers rather than examine whether the school met the child’s sensory and social needs — and encountered a “moralistic insistence” on what counted as normal: full attendance, a full social schedule, shared dinner routines, no screen time. The same adaptations the REBEL parents describe as protective are, at the institutional boundary, read as evidence of parental failure. Australian autistic mothers, in a study the paper also cites, described adversarial school relationships and their insights into their own children dismissed as invalid — a paper titled, in the mothers’ words, “I’m sick of being the problem.”

This is the double empathy problem at a scale the corpus hasn’t covered before: not between two people in conversation, but between a family and an institution. The family reads the child accurately and adjusts. The institution reads the adjustment through neurotypical norms and sees dysfunction. Responsibility for the misreading lands, as it always does, on the neurodivergent side — here on the parents, who are statistically likely to be neurodivergent themselves, given heritability estimates the paper puts at 75% for ADHD and 80% for autism.

The consequence the parents named most is a triple role nobody resourced: caregiver, advocate, and system-navigator, all at once. Asked what would make the biggest difference, the most frequent answer was simply “support,” followed by “the understanding of others.” They wanted a first port of call to find out what exists; funding navigation; someone else to do the heavy lifting sometimes; safe spaces for themselves; and — running under every answer without most of them naming it — time. Time to build the relationship with their child, time to find other families who would not judge how theirs works, time to recover. Advocacy across health and education systems that misread you at every turn is a job, and it was being done, unpaid, on top of everything else, by people the system was simultaneously blaming.

The village that is not there

The paper’s discussion asks the question the data forces: why are caregivers doing this alone? Where is the village? Its answer is structural — individualism and the productivity expectations of late capitalism, which leave families solely responsible for producing “normal” and “productive” citizens and finding their own resources when the child won’t be shaped that way. Whether or not one adopts the authors’ full anti-oppressive vocabulary, the observation underneath it stands: the parents in this survey were being asked to hold, alone, a load that a functioning community would have distributed.

Two smaller things are worth recording. The authors admit their survey never asked parents what joy they find in their children — a flaw they name themselves, prompted by the handful who volunteered it anyway: “he is perfect the way he is, I wouldn’t want to work on anything,” and, asked how the relationship might be strengthened, “it’s beautiful as it is.” And they disclose that AI was used to help develop the framework and generate its acronym — which is worth one plain sentence: this is what AI-assisted theory-building looks like, arriving in a peer-reviewed journal, and the disclosure is more transparent than most.

A lighter piece to close a heavier week, and its usefulness is proportionate. It doesn’t prove anything; it names something. The families in it were already resisting neuro-normativity — eating apart, preparing, waiting, watching for the fists — long before anyone offered them a framework for it, and what they lacked was not knowledge but permission and help. The generative reading is that the parents are the model: they had located the difficulty in the environment and adjusted it, and everything upstream of them was still trying to adjust the child. Build the village around what they already know, and the framework writes itself.

Citations

Goldingay, S., Omond, R., Ivelja, J., Ryan, J. & Hitch, D. (2026) — Resisting Neuro-Normativity: The REBEL Framework for Neurodivergent Young People and Their Families — Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work

Benson, K. J. (2023) — Perplexing presentations: Compulsory neuronormativity and cognitive marginalisation in social work practice with autistic mothers of autistic children — British Journal of Social Work

Rabba, A. S., Smith, J., Hall, G. et al. (2025) — ‘I’m sick of being the problem’: Autistic mothers’ experiences of interacting with schools for their autistic children — Autism

Chapman, R. (2023) — Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism — Pluto Press