Practitioner reviews of the frameworks that shape how we raise, treat, and talk about neurodivergent children.
Jodie reads the frameworks most often used with neurodivergent kids, teens, and families — through a trauma-informed, attachment-aware, and neuroaffirming lens. This draws on nearly thirty years in the sector and lived experience as a parent of two neurodivergent adult children. These aren't academic reviews. They're a practitioner's perspective, written for parents and colleagues who want to think more carefully about what's being recommended to them and why.
“Some of the most influential frameworks in our field were built on narrow samples, often with the children they were designed for nowhere in the room. I read them carefully, take what still holds, and try to say clearly where the evidence ends and the assumptions begin.”
Each review is written in plain language, grounded in the research, and honest about its limits. Reviews in progress are listed below — full write-ups will appear here as they're finished.
Still foundational to how most child-and-family services in Australia are designed — and built on WEIRD samples that map awkwardly onto neurodivergent children. What stays useful, what to set aside, and why atypical attachment behaviours are not disorganised attachment by default.
Read more →The boundaries-first parenting canon most parents of neurodivergent kids have been handed by a relative, a church, or a school. Why it reads demand avoidance, sensory overwhelm, and autistic shutdown as wilful defiance — and why “being firmer” escalates rather than settles.
Read more →Routinely recommended by OTs and funded through NDIS. What the evidence supports (sensory differences are real and matter), where it thins out (specific protocols claiming specific outcomes), and how to tell sensory-aware parenting from packaged certainty.
Read more →The most-funded, most-recommended autism intervention in Australia, and the one a growing autistic adult community is asking us to look again at. Consent, masking, long-term outcomes, and the gap between ABA as a funding category and ABA as delivered in any given clinic.
Read more →Further ahead — Circle of Security and the attachment-based parenting programs, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), and PDA recognition in Australian clinical practice.
Or a question about how one of these applies to your family or your practice? Jodie reads everything that comes through, and suggestions shape what goes up next.
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