Autonomous Relating

🧠Autonomy comes up again and again in discussion with neurodivergent adults and about neurodivergent Young People. Not to all, but to most of them personal autonomy is sacrosanct.

I often say that the only deficit description I can fathom applicable to being neurodivergent (ND) would be  'less able to be less human'. 

In his latest blog Alfie Kohn points to Piaget’s distinction between “autonomous” relationships between adults and children, and and “heteronomous” relationships. 

Autonomous being: collaborative, mutually respectful, promoting independence. 

Heteronomous being: where Young People are expected/commanded to respect and defer to the authority adults.

Kohn quotes a book by DeVries and Zan which observes that heteronomous relationships between adults and children 

     “can range on a continuum from hostile and punitive to sugar-coated control.”

And this is where many relationships with ND Young People and adults fail, collapse or explode.

Up until toddler point, in a healthy household babies are in control of their own metering out demands and exercising their autonomy in a supported and protected fashion. From that point in most households adults consider babes on the journey of 'old enough to know better'/ 'has to learn sometime'.

As ND brains develop on a different time scale and in a different fashion to their more neurotypical peers, moral assumptions are made about their differing traits, and ability & inclination to move away from their personal autonomy and towards a new contract of heteronomous relationship with the Bigger Humans in the world.

Outside of perhaps a longer lasting strong drive for autonomy, most of the 'behaviours' we are socialised into from toddler hood onwards are:

1) neuro(typical)normative socially constructed, so not as naturally comfortable and achievable for an ND tot.

The often used and suggested reward and consequences style of motivation for raising and educating moral human beings is typically brought more and more into play, further undermining independent moral and self-development and marking ever more deeply, neurological differences. 

Which even when sugar coated, ND children's neurology doesn't trust - as they are already frequently in a heightened/triggered state.

It allows and enables us to be fully human, whatever neurotype we are.

Alfie Kohn's blog post can be found here: