Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. Diane and Elaine here today, talking about a topic that's come up a bunch in the last couple of months that we're kind of thinking through. So, we're gonna think out loud with you guys a little bit. Is that cool?

Diane Dempster: I think that’s either really dangerous, or that’s really exciting. I can’t decide which it is. I think it’s exciting.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Okay, I think it’s exciting. So, we’ve been talking about this. We had this insight a couple of months ago, where we realized that the role of the parent—and the reason we put such a big emphasis on parent training, parent involvement, and parent coaching—is because the role of the parent is to create an accommodated environment at home for their kids. 

It’s very similar to what we ask teachers to do at school: to create an accommodated environment to support their executive function challenges, social and emotional challenges, or whatever else is needed.

And so, we thought it’d be really good to just talk about: What does that mean? Because, Diane, I remember when I started this, I didn’t even know what the word "accommodations" meant.

Diane Dempster: Well, let’s go backwards, because I’ve had such an “aha” moment around this. A lot of parents I’ve been talking to about this idea for a while, and I’m like, “Well, your kid has accommodations at school. They have a 504 Plan, they have an IEP, or maybe you’re in the midst of trying to get one.” And we can talk about that in a minute. But why wouldn’t your kid also need accommodations at home? Right? It’s sort of like—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So, yes! Let’s go back. What are accommodations? What does that even mean?

Diane Dempster: Well—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Because when I first came to this, I want to say, I want to distinguish between "accommodation" and "remediation," because that’s another term I didn’t know.

Diane Dempster: Yeah, no, that’s true. Well, so one way I think about accommodations is in the context of the “three-to-five challenge,” right? We know that kids with ADHD specifically—and also kids with other executive function challenges—are often three to five years behind their peers in terms of certain areas of executive function development.

So, if your child has a lagging skill, they need support in that area. They either need help to develop the skill if they’re ready, or they need scaffolding and accommodations to support them until the lagging skill is developed. Or maybe it’s kind of both, right? You’re helping them develop the skill and accommodating them until the skill is developed.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Okay. So that’s actually really great because that’s where remediation comes in.

Okay, so remediation—like, I have a kid with dyslexia. I still have that kid, and she still has dyslexia, right? And the first place we really focused was remediation. That meant helping her gain the skills she needed to navigate the challenges she was facing, right?

Diane Dempster: Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So that’s remediation. For dyslexia, it was helping her learn tricks and strategies to read—to visually process the information and comprehend it. In the executive function realm, that might mean, as you said, identifying lagging skills and helping them catch up on those skills, which they may not have learned earlier because they weren’t ready.

Diane Dempster: They weren’t ready to learn it, yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It’s about teaching them the skills they need—skills they may have missed or that they may now need additionally—to function with the brain they’ve got.

Diane Dempster: Right, but one of the challenges is that if parents only see the remediation part of it, they think, “Okay, wait, my kid has lagging skills. Let’s sit down tomorrow, I’ll teach them, and they’ll be done.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And that’s where accommodation comes in.

Diane Dempster: Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. Because sometimes they’re not ready for us to remediate that lagging skill—developmentally, they’re just not ready to handle it yet or to integrate it. I remember when my kid was being remediated for dyslexia, one of the professionals told us, since she was in second and third grade, “You may have to come back to this in high school, when she’s ready to learn some new skills as the work becomes different and harder. She’s not ready to learn that yet, but she’ll still need it at some point.”

Diane Dempster: So there are times when we can help our kids learn skills, and there are times when our kids aren’t ready to learn those skills—or it just takes time for them to learn. If you think about it, and going back to what you said a few minutes ago about “catching them up,” it makes sense.

I’m thinking about third grade and how much time is spent in that phase on things like capturing assignments, knowing what’s due, and starting to manage schoolwork. That’s when a lot of the educational process focuses on organizing learning—not just learning the subjects like science and math, but how to organize the learning itself.

Now, if your child isn’t ready in third to fifth grade to learn those skills because they don’t yet have the executive function capacity to grasp and apply them, by the time they’re in sixth, seventh, or eighth grade, they might finally be ready. At that point, you can sit down and say, “Okay, let’s go back and help them develop a planning system that works for them or an organizing system that works for them.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: That’s remediation.

Diane Dempster: That’s remediation.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: That’s catching them up.

Diane Dempster: Yep.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Okay.

Diane Dempster: In those instances, you can do remediation. But in many other instances, they’re not ready—and that’s where accommodation steps in. So, how would you define accommodation, Elaine?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I love this distinction. Once you get to this realm—and I’m just going to keep using my kid as an example because it’s helpful, right? Dyslexia is a little more concrete than some of these executive function issues.

So, my kid still had dyslexia in high school. To level the playing field and allow her to demonstrate what she knew and what she was capable of, she was given accommodations. For example, extra time on standardized tests or the ability to write her answers in the workbook instead of transferring them to a bubble sheet.

That’s an example of an accommodation because, no matter how much we remediated her skills, she was never going to not have the visual processing issue that made it difficult to move from the workbook to the bubble sheet without missing some bubbles.

Diane Dempster: Well, or an accommodation for someone with dysgraphia might be letting them record what they want to say instead of having to write it down.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Or using a computer instead of a—

Diane Dempster: Pencil.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: —having to write it out in a blue book.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Accommodations aren’t about giving someone an “unfair advantage.” They’re designed to level the playing field and allow the person to demonstrate their knowledge and learning within the timeframe available—often with extended time or other supports—so that their performance is commensurate with their capacity compared to neurotypical peers. The point of it is to make things fair.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right?

Diane Dempster: Well, and so we're not what we're not gonna talk about, because we're gonna point you to another podcast episode that we did on, I think, 504 an IEP’s. We had a guest expert that you interviewed, that we talked specifically about school accommodations, and that sort of stuff. So we can point you to that. But I want to take us back to the fact that, it's like, our kids need a cup, we know and we get struggling in school, they need accommodations, they need remediation, but I don't think a lot of us go, wow, my kids having a really hard time doing their chores on Saturday, or wow, my kids having a really hard time doing their homework, right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: They need an accommodation.

Diane Dempster: They need an accommodation, right? In fact, I think it’s often the opposite. I distinctly remember one of my kids—honestly, I don’t even remember if it was fifth grade, seventh grade, something like that—saying, “The school says you’re not supposed to help me with my homework.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right.

Diane Dempster: Stay out of my room, don’t do this. And I’m like, “Sweetie, you have an accommodation for help with your work at school. It makes perfect sense that you would have an accommodation that says you can have help with your homework.” I’m not going to do your homework for you, but I might help you make sure it’s organized. I might help you figure out what it is each day and have a way to do it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. I used to scribe for my daughter. She would come home from school, and I would hold the pen and paper while she told me what to write. For example, if she wanted to plan out her schoolwork or if she was trying to brainstorm ideas, I wanted to take the motor coordination challenge out of the process. 

She was still doing all the work—my job was just to write it down. That’s an accommodation so she could focus on what was most important for her to learn without being distracted by the parts that were so difficult they prevented her from engaging with the content.

Diane Dempster: Part of this is about the parent realizing and recognizing that your kid might need an accommodation to help them remember to clean the kitchen, put their food away after dinner, or whatever it is that feels so annoying to them, right?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right.

Diane Dempster: And then, when it comes to schoolwork and homework, it might involve sitting down during your 504 or IEP meeting at school and asking, “How does this translate to homework? How do we map these accommodations to homework?”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: Part of schoolwork happens at home. So, what accommodations should we be providing? How do we measure how they’re doing? All of that could be part of the conversation about the accommodations they have at school.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: This is really saying to me—this has been a big realization for me this year—that one of our hard jobs as parents is to create an accommodated environment. We’re training them, remediating them, and helping them learn to navigate their lives and manage their executive function.

If we set the bar so high that they feel like they can’t meet it, they’re going to stop trying. They won’t even want to put the effort in. But if we can—without lowering the bar—put scaffolding in place to help them feel successful in the home environment, just like we do at school, we can help them succeed. And success breeds success.

You look puzzled.

Diane Dempster: Yeah, no, I’m like—I think it’s because we’re recording this on a Friday, and maybe you said it a little fancy. But I think what you’re saying—and I agree with it 1,000,000%—is that we create a bubble around our kid so they can focus on what they’re ready to learn and not have to worry about all the things they’re not ready to learn yet.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.

Diane Dempster: In terms of skills. But you were talking about a parent’s job to create an accommodated environment. Well, maybe we’re advocating for an accommodated environment at school, and what we’re really saying is: let’s evaluate and figure out what the accommodated environment needs to be for this child at home.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And it can be structural stuff, like we're talking about related to schoolwork or chores. It can also be social emotional stuff. It can be I use an example in the webinar we did yesterday, our back to school webinar about not bringing up a difficult topic for my daughter, right? Before she had an interview. Right, that's a way of accommodating. Yes, I want to deal with the dishes in the sink. But I don't need to deal with it at a time when all it's gonna do is trigger her.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: You want to approach it at a time when it's gonna be a good support. So the accommodation is waiting to have that candidate conversation to later.

Diane Dempster: So let’s talk a little about what gets in the way of this. Because once you understand conceptually that it’s absolutely appropriate to create accommodations at home—like recognizing that your kid might not remember to put the food away after cooking, or might struggle to clean the kitchen on their own, or might not stick to the agreements you have about getting off technology—things start to click.

Even when kids agree to the expectations, they often have a hard time following through. So what makes it hard for us, as parents, to provide those accommodations at home?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: That’s a great question. Alright, this is what’s bubbling up for me: I think the answer to that is... a million things.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It’s expectations, exhaustion, and fatigue. It’s the frustration of feeling like we’re asking the same thing over and over again. It’s taking aim at everything instead of focusing on one thing at a time. That’s a big one, right? We exhaust ourselves—and them—by not taking aim. If we can focus on one thing and scaffold the rest for a while, it will relieve the stress for everyone.

There are all these factors, and then there’s another layer: we don’t think we should [approach things differently]. We feel like it’s our responsibility to ensure they’re ready to become an adult. I tell this story often because it’s so illustrative.

I was coaching a mom of a 12-year-old child. She also had a 24-year-old who had already launched and was out in the world. The 12-year-old had ADHD, and the mom was struggling because she had never dealt with these kinds of issues before. During our coaching, we realized she was freaking out about the potato chips on the floor while her child was watching television.

When we dug deeper, we realized she was panicking because she thought that by the time the child was 24, they wouldn’t be able to take care of their apartment. She was catastrophizing, projecting the issue forward twice into the future. As a result, she wasn’t measured in asking, “What does my child need to learn—and when?” There was this unrealistic expectation that the child needed to be able to do everything now.

Diane Dempster: People get stuck in that mindset a lot. I always use the analogy of stair steps. I’ll remind everyone that our kids are often three to five years behind their peers in development. As they grow older, the gap can feel bigger because it’s a percentage—about 30%. So, if you’ve got a 25-year-old, developmentally they might be more like a 19-year-old.

Instead of standing on the “25-year-old step” and saying, “You should be up here,” and trying to drag them up to act like other 25-year-olds, or 15-year-olds, or 8-year-olds, what we need to do is figure out what step they’re on. For example, if your 10-year-old is on step 5 when it comes to cleaning their room or hanging up their towel, you don’t focus on how to get them to do it completely independently without reminders.

Instead, ask, “What’s the next step?” Maybe the next step is helping them do it, or getting them to do it with a reminder—or even a few reminders.

If you’re asking someone to do something a million times and it’s not working, that’s a sign the accommodation you’re using isn’t effective. They’re having a hard time.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: There's not an accommodation.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. So, okay, what you talked about was the strategy of meeting them where they are.

Diane Dempster: Right.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: You also mentioned the three to five-year lag and developmental delay. And what came to mind as you were speaking earlier is, as parents, we're always focused on how we can get accommodations at school. But as your coaches, we want to ask you to think about how you can create accommodations at home. We want to encourage you to see the value in creating accommodations within your home environment for your child. This way, they can still feel supported and scaffolded, and continue to grow in a way that works for them.

Diane Dempster: Or even just sit with this question: What would it mean if I created a 504 plan for my child at home? What would that look like? How would I approach it?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, that’s the next step. But before you get to that, I challenge you to consider if this is even necessary in the first place. I believe that mindset changes outcomes. Mindset shifts perspectives. So, if we take on the mindset that we need to figure out the most helpful, effective, and empowering way to create accommodations for our child at home, we can then proceed to do the visioning exercise, Diane, that you mentioned—what could that look like? What might that include? And maybe even involve your child in the conversation?

Diane Dempster: Yeah, I think that’s key. If you're accommodating in one area, it gives you space to focus on remediation in other areas. We always talk about taking aim at something specific. There might be areas you accommodate because you want to focus on a particular skill. For example, if your child is ready to learn a new skill, you could focus on that skill for the next month or two—just on that one area. You'd help them work on it, building their independence until they reach a new level of autonomy. At the same time, you may be accommodating other areas to create space for that focus. Because life can feel overwhelming for both you and your child, and many of you are not dealing with just one challenge but several—maybe even 20 to 70 different things.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah. Okay. So, is there anything else we want to address about this? This might lead into another conversation about the difference between supporting and enabling, and I think we can have that conversation separately. For the purpose of this discussion, what I hear us saying is that it's really important to think in terms of constructive supports and scaffolds. How do we support in a way that empowers them to take ownership, cultivate new skills, and feel a sense of autonomy and independence? It’s about helping them feel good about themselves and building their self-esteem in the process.

Diane Dempster: Well, and this just came to me as a bonus, because a lot of us get exhausted with the constant reminders and the effort to get our kids to do something, right? It’s exhausting. And if we gave ourselves permission to say, "You know what? It’s okay if I hang up this towel," or "It’s okay if I say, 'Hey, let me clean up the kitchen with you.'" Or if I say, "Let’s sit down at the kitchen table together, and I’ll read a book while you work on your homework." It’s this idea of not sitting there struggling and fighting them to be in a place where they’re not. It might give you more energy to focus on yourself, your child, and what really matters.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And help them feel really good about themselves. Keep thinking about this because I have a young adult living in my house right now who’s working and applying to medical school and going through a really grueling process. One of the ways we’ve accommodated a lot has been around food. We’ve supported her by taking that one thing off her plate. We’re not feeding her every single meal, but if she wants dinner, dinner is available to her. And it’s not that she’s not capable of making her own dinner, but it takes one more thing off her plate and allows her to focus on what’s most important for her right now. It’s a powerful gift to be able to give.

Diane Dempster: So…

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It feels like a wrap.

Diane Dempster: Yeah, it does. So, to bottom-line it: Focus on accommodations at home. Understand it’s part of your role to create an accommodated environment, not just at school, but at home. Consider working with the school to figure out accommodations for homework, and most importantly, take care of yourself.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Their accommodations might be appropriate at home, and remember that remediation—teaching the skills—is different.

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: When creating an accommodated environment, we want to help them focus on one or two things at a time to build those skills, and not expect them to be working towards mastery in everything all the time, because that can become too exhausting.

Diane Dempster: Yeah, the combination of remediation, which is skill-building, and accommodation, which is providing support when skills are still lagging, is exactly what these kids need at all times.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah. And you started to say, "I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to lose it." And it's important to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself in the process, right?

Diane Dempster: Yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: The goal is to create an environment that supports them, but by doing so, also supports you and your capacity to support them. If you can let go of some of the extreme expectations and start setting more targeted ones, it will relieve stress for everyone.

Diane Dempster: So thanks for listening.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Have a great day. I’ll talk to you next time.