Parents – providing emotional support since ages ago.

Last night, at 11.30pm my 15yo came into our room and loudly told me he needed my help. I was a bit grumpy, having felt like I had just fallen asleep and wondering what was so urgent that I needed to be woken up, and I mean fully woken up. My grumpy feeling continued when he told me he had a headache and needed me to fix it. I went (grumpily) downstairs with him and got him panadol, and then watched as it seemed to take ages for him to get both tablets down with multiple glasses of water. He was oblivious to my grumpiness, and eventually, we both went back upstairs. He went back to his room and I went to mine. Hubby asked me what was going on, “he needed some panadol” was my reply, and silent eye rolls passed between us. Last night I felt like I needed to step up a little more as a parent, as seemingly I hadn’t taught my child how to go and get panadol when he had a headache. How was he going to cope in the big wide world if he couldn’t do this simple task?

I got up this morning and decided to look at it from a different perspective. Here was a child who was advocating for himself, and needed some support. Not only support with which medication he could take for his headache but also how much to take and when. He also needed a little emotional support; young adults often need this when something is really bothering them. My son finds taking tablets really hard, and he needed someone to just be there whilst he did it. How many times have I said to him with regards to his Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Dyscalculia, that he needed to advocate for himself, or people won’t know what is really going on? I’ve also, multiple times, said to him that if something was bothering him to let others know to get himself the right support. So perhaps him coming to me last night was just this; learning how to seek the right support from the right person (or people) to help him get through something. Perhaps the lesson from this experience, is that I don’t need to step up as a parent, maybe I’m doing just fine, and so is my neurodiverse son.