Thoughts, updates & things worth knowing

Bringing up counselling can feel like a bigger conversation than it needs to be. Most children and young people take their cue from how calmly the subject is introduced, rather than the words themselves.

A simple, low-key framing tends to work best: describing it as "someone to talk to who isn't family or a teacher" rather than anything clinical. Avoid over-explaining or promising a particular outcome — young people often respond well to knowing it's their space, and that they're allowed to find it strange, boring, or unhelpful at first.

It's also worth saying plainly that they won't be in trouble for anything they say, and that you won't be asking for a play-by-play afterwards. That reassurance alone often lowers the pressure enough for a first session to go ahead.

Anxiety in neurodivergent children doesn't always look like worry on the surface — it can show up as meltdowns, shutdowns, rigid routines, or a sudden refusal to do something that was fine yesterday. Treating every instance as a behaviour to correct, rather than a sign of overload, often misses what's actually going on.

In sessions, that usually means slowing right down, not expecting eye contact or continuous verbal answers, and building in movement or an activity like Minecraft rather than sitting and talking. The goal is the same as it would be for any child — understanding what's underneath the anxiety — but the route there looks different.

If you're a parent of a neurodivergent child who's anxious, you're not doing anything wrong by finding it hard to work out what's going on underneath. That's exactly the sort of thing this kind of support can help untangle.