Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish Compassion-based tools and practical strategies for parents and professionals navigating neurodivergence. Learn to regulate, advocate, and create systems—at home and at work—that foster belonging, confidence, and authentic thriving.
The Seesaw: How Much Support Is Enough
Published about 1 month ago • 9 min read
The Understory
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish
Summer 2026 | Issue 34
The Seesaw: How Much Support Is Enough
Individuation and neurodivergence, and how we tell the difference between helping and hovering
I was meeting a new friend's adult daughter for the first time last summer. She'd chosen not to go to college, and when my own daughter mentioned she was applying to schools, this young woman asked her, with real curiosity, why she'd chosen the ones she had. My daughter, feeling shy in the moment, gave a brief answer. Something like, well, I visited and they were nice.
And I stepped in, immediately, before I'd even decided to, and mentioned her love of animals, her hope of becoming a veterinarian, the whole fuller picture that I thought this young woman deserved to hear.
My daughter didn't ask for that. She hadn't finished speaking. And later that day, I sat with a real storm of self recrimination over it, over stepping on her toes in a moment that was hers to have, small as it was. I did some parts work with myself, brought a good amount of self compassion to the part of me that couldn't help but jump in, and then I gave my daughter a heartfelt apology.
I'm telling you this because I don't think it's a small story. I think it's the whole newsletter in miniature.
The tea conversation
Not long after that, I had herbal tea with a friend of mine who is also raising neurodivergent kids, both of us long since retired from coffee and now pretending that something the color of dishwater counts as a treat, and somewhere between our first and second cups, we both just started sighing, not dramatically, just this steady exhale that kept happening every few minutes as we talked about how much we do for our kids and whether we're doing too much.
Our four kids are at that particular hinge point, between eleventh grade and being college freshmen, (as well as two olders) one shoving off toward independent adult life without college, one becoming a freshman, and we found ourselves circling the same question from every angle: is this too much support, is this not enough, and underneath that question, we both noticed a sneakier one running the whole time, quieter, more insistent, telling us that if we didn't do this much, if we eased up now, we'd be failing at something essential, at secure attachment, at making sure our neurodivergent kids in particular knew they were safe and held.
We also noticed, and I'll be honest that neither of us loved noticing this, that our kids' dads did quite a bit less of this kind of managing, and that we sometimes judged them for it, quietly, in the way you judge someone for not carrying a weight you've decided is yours to carry. But something harder to sit with came up too, at least for me. I've noticed that my own daughter doesn't act more free around her dad so much as more careful; she hides a good number of her needs from him, needs she's decided he might see as too immature, and she doesn't feel safe asking him for help the way she does with me. Every so often she'll try something with a little more independence when he's around, but it's often a bit of fear driving that, not ease, and once he's not around she'll come find me and ask for the help she didn't feel safe asking him for. It's not that she's more herself with him. It's that she's more guarded, and the independence I'd noticed was sometimes just the shape fear takes when you don't feel safe enough to ask.
And still, I've come to feel real gratitude for those scared attempts, because that fumbling, frightened version of trying is often exactly how she grows what I think of as her felt capacity, the actual, embodied sense that she can do a hard thing, not just the idea of it. It doesn't have to be easy to count.
And then there was the part of the tea drinking where my friend and I just looked at each other, thinking about our kids about to launch into the world, and admitted that we were both crossing our fingers and toes, closing our eyes tight, wishing on a star that all of it would go well enough to let them stand on their own.
My older daughter at the outset of her third year at KSU
What's actually happening here
Psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler described individuation as a lifelong task, the work of building a separate self while staying securely attached to the people who raised you. It's not a switch that flips at eighteen. It's something that gets built, and when it gets disrupted, it tends to show up later as either helplessness or a kind of maladaptive, prickly independence that pushes connection away entirely.
There's a concept from education that maps onto this almost perfectly, scaffolding. The idea, originally about how much structure a teacher provides a learner, is that too much support breeds learned helplessness and quietly undermines a child's confidence in their own competence. Too little causes overload and shame. The actual skill isn't landing on the right amount of support once. It's continuously recalibrating, watching, adjusting, as the person in front of you changes.
For neurodivergent kids specifically, over support tends to look like a few particular things: doing the homework during a sensory meltdown instead of helping your child learn to name their own overwhelm; speaking for your child in social situations, the way I did with my daughter, instead of trusting them to build their own scripts, even imperfect ones; and removing every bit of unpredictability from a routine instead of helping your child build tolerance for it gradually, inside a structure that still holds.
I want to be honest about something here too. The research on overparenting in general, in neurotypical families, is well established: elevated anxiety, perfectionism, harder peer relationships. But the research specifically on over support in neurodivergent kids is thinner, more clinical and practitioner based than a stack of peer reviewed studies. I don't want to overstate the science to make a point. I want to tell you what's actually known, and let the rest be what it is, which is thoughtful observation rather than settled fact.
There's one more piece I keep coming back to, from Internal Family Systems. IFS doesn't require a correct way to participate, and it doesn't pathologize any part of a person, including the part of a parent that jumps in too fast, and including the part of a child that isn't ready yet to speak for themselves. Individuation, from this lens, is really about a young person's own parts learning to trust their own internal leadership. Our job isn't to do that leading for them forever. It's to become steadier ourselves, so they have something reliable to individuate against.
The seesaw
My friend and I kept coming back to the image of a seesaw, being there for our kids on one side, healthy boundaries and their own room to grow on the other, and neither of us could quite describe how to keep that thing level.
Here's what I've come to believe. It won't stay level. The sawing back and forth is going to feel imbalanced sometimes, even a little violent in how suddenly it swings, one week you're stepping back and it goes beautifully, the next week you're stepping in because something genuinely needed you, and you second guess both. That's not a sign you're doing it wrong. That's what the actual process of a young person individuating looks like from the parent's seat on the other end of the board.
What actually helps, I think, is less about achieving balance and more about building compassion for everyone standing near that seesaw. Compassion for yourself, for the part of you that jumps in too fast because it loves fiercely and is frightened, quietly, of what happens if you don't. Compassion for your child, who is learning this in real time and will get it wrong sometimes too. Compassion for your own parents, who were managing their own version of this seesaw with far less language for any of it than we have now. And compassion for the friends watching you go through this, who are almost certainly crossing their own fingers and toes about their own kids, sighing into their own cups of tea somewhere.
As the backpacks come out again
I'm writing this as the school year is about to turn over again, and I think this particular seesaw gets a hard shove right about now, every single year, regardless of what age your child is. It doesn't matter if you're sending a five-year-old off to kindergarten for the first real separation of their life, or a middle schooler into a building where you can no longer see who they're sitting with at lunch, or a teenager into a high school year with more autonomy and more ways to get hurt, or a young adult onto a college campus for the first time. Each of those has its own version of the same letting-go, and each one reactivates the same question we've been circling this whole newsletter: how much do I hold, and how much do I release, and how do I know I'm getting it right.
Here's what I keep returning to, for myself and for the parents I work with. Your child's nervous system takes real cues from yours in these transitions, so the most useful thing you can do before drop-off, before the first day, before the move-in, isn't necessarily one more conversation about lockers or roommates or bus schedules. It's finding your own rootedness first, a genuine, felt sense in your own body that you can survive this letting go, even the parts of it that scare you, so that what your child picks up from you is steadiness rather than your own held breath.
That rootedness isn't the absence of worry. It's closer to what we practice in self-compassion work, naming the fear honestly, letting the part of you that wants to hold on tighter be heard rather than shoved away, and then choosing, deliberately, to act from a calmer place anyway. It might look like a few minutes alone in the car after drop-off before you embody being that productive part of you. It might look like naming out loud to a partner or a friend that this particular transition is hitting you harder than you expected. It might look like noticing when the anxious, over-functioning part of you wants to send one more text, ask one more question, pack one more contingency, and gently asking that part what it's actually afraid will happen if it doesn't.
None of this guarantees your child's year unfolds smoothly. It can't. But a parent who has found some rootedness in their own capacity gives a developing nervous system something firm to individuate against, rather than something wobbly to either cling to or push hard away from. That, more than any particular strategy for the first day of school, is probably the most healthful thing you can offer them right now.
None of us gets this perfectly calibrated. I didn't, in that moment with my daughter and my new friend's daughter. What we get instead, if we're lucky, is the chance to notice, to repair, and to keep recalibrating, one small moment at a time.
If you're standing on your own version of this seesaw right now and want to think it through with someone, I'd love to be that person. You can grab a spot on my calendar below, no pressure, just a conversation.
I've got two more pieces brewing that I wanted to give you a peek at. One is about procrastination, and why it so often has less to do with discipline and more to do with a nervous system trying to protect you, with real overlap for parents managing their own follow-through alongside their kid's. The other is an honest look at what it actually takes to communicate well with teachers, administrators, doctors, and therapists when you're the parent in the room, since that's its own kind of seesaw entirely. I'll be sending these out one at a time over the coming weeks.
Let me know if there's a topic you'd like me to explore at any time!
"Whether you're just beginning to explore neurodivergence, feeling overwhelmed by the journey, or ready to build a sustainable path forward—you don't have to navigate this alone. Together, we'll turn today's challenges into catalysts for transformation."
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish Compassion-based tools and practical strategies for parents and professionals navigating neurodivergence. Learn to regulate, advocate, and create systems—at home and at work—that foster belonging, confidence, and authentic thriving.
