My family and I were on vacation. Edisto Island: no hotels, beaches, calm, quiet. We rented a house seaside and could hear the waves. A lot of family: my wife’s parents, her two brothers, and two aunts. My son was 3 years old. He came out for breakfast. My father in law says to him in a singsong tone, “I made you a waffle.” To say my son’s response was disproportionate would be an understatement. He screamed, cried, ranted, fussed, threw things. He wanted a pop tart, not a waffle.

We didn’t understand, and only recently have learned that the intensity is common among twice exceptional children. I hadn’t exactly gotten used to the frequent screaming at that point in Edisto, I guess. Now I’m as used to it as I suppose I can get. Parenting is hard no matter what. Conflicts, guilt, self-imposed pressure to be good parents, technology. And we also have the specific issues we face with two children, one of them doubly diagnosed with neurodiversity. Instead of accepting things as they are, we want to make things better.

One of the pitfalls of trying to make things better is deficit thinking. We’re in a world that has me (at least partially) convinced that there’s some value to so-called normal. That value can make us as parents adopt stories about our children in which our precious babies are seen as being the problem rather than the world they live in creating the problem.

One of the strategies we are practicing to reduce deficit thinking is called reframing. We find a new way to talk about the issues and conflicts. We re-story our situation to be more neutral, less judgmental, or maybe even positive.

A classic reframing that I learned from having grandparents around is this: instead of calling kids stubborn little mules, grandparents in their wisdom say, “they sure know their mind.” Another example: my kids rarely respond to me when I call to them from another room. A deficit story is that they never pay attention and are rude. To reframe that, I can talk about their great ability to focus on what they’re doing.

I find this helpful. It takes me from anger to understanding, which helps me feel better about myself (maybe I’m not such a jerk, after all!). It’s fun for me to consider reframing as little logic puzzles. How can I turn this unpleasant situation around? Reframing helps me see that I am often holding my children to an unfair standard. I stop escalating conflict. I don’t necessarily eliminate unwanted behaviors, rather I find them less obnoxious. More than a few times in my parenting life, I have felt like a drill sergeant. DO THIS, DO THAT, DO IT NOW, WHAT’S TAKING YOU SO LONG, YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE SCREEN TIME! Bark bark bark. When I have the wherewithal to reframe those situations, I build, rather than erode, the connection between my children and me.

I love reframing. I also see a potential pitfall. Reframing, without careful attention, can be too incremental. Reframing can be a baby step towards connection when a giant leap is what’s needed. Reframing can potentially reinforce deficit thinking. It can help make a kinder, gentler world rather than stepping into a whole new one.  

For example, we are running late on the way to school. “Hey,” I tell myself, reframing, “They didn’t get very good sleep last night, so I know it’s not stubbornness, it’s tiredness, that’s slowing them down.” That’s great. I don’t get aggravated, I don’t yell. Reframing moves me away from deficit views of my kids being lazy and uncooperative. But trying to move away from something or fighting a tendency can reinforce it. Telling myself not to yell maintains yelling as a focus. Another problem is that I sometimes see a small gain—not yelling while getting out the door to school—as a big win. The problem is, I’m still holding the same goal. My self-imposed sense of obligation hasn’t changed when I reframe: I still think people should always show up on time for school and work. Work makes the world go round, as we all know [side eye].

I think it’s possible as a parent to move more dramatically away from a deficit view to a more radical acceptance of my children as beautiful, unique treasures. Reframing helps maintain a society that doesn’t necessarily have room for neurodiverse children. There’s not necessarily a revolution towards dignity with reframing. There’s no upending a power structure that pushes people to burnout. I think instead of reframing, I’m called to reorient.

Reorienting looks different from reframing. It’s more fundamental. As a phenomenologist, I often focus on the four existential grounds of human experience: time, body, others, and world. Reorienting towards any of these four existential grounds can be more dramatic than reframing.

I’ll use time as an example. Our cultural inheritance includes a set of assumptions about time as something we lose as it marches ever forward in a line of moments. We think about time most when we’re late. Time can put pressure on us to improve and get better. Progress is an idea that is well supported by a linear view of time. Each moment is unique, to be seized. Each day is to be better than the last.

One of the bad parenting behaviors I’ll blame on my linear view of time is age shaming. I expect more and more independence every few months. As a student of educational psychology, and as a parent who excitedly filled out the development forms the doctor sent me, I’m well aware of when developmental milestones are supposed to happen. And if my kids aren’t washing themselves, brushing their own teeth, and wiping their own asses, I’m irritated. I attempt to enforce so-called age appropriate behaviors despite the clear double standard that is revealed when I notice a world of adults “acting like children.”

Yet we have elements of time as cyclical in our culture that might be a bridge to helping me shed these often-cruel expectations and the irritation that goes along with them. Most obviously, we experience day and night. The sun will come up again tomorrow. Seasons are another example of a cycle of time within our culture. When you have a cyclical system of time, each moment is not unique. Each morning is a morning. Each winter is a winter. The similarities of mornings and winters open the possibility for consistency rather than improvement. One can shed the expectation that the future will be better than the past.

The cycles of time can extend beyond seasons, beyond day and night. They can include war and peace, wealth and poverty, growth and contraction. On the interpersonal level cycles of time can include harmony and conflict, assisting and impeding, screaming and whispering.

Seeing and accepting time as cyclical is one way to reorient to a situation. Ongoing progress cannot be a reasonable expectation when we know that regression is progress’s companion. It’s harder to be angry about getting to school on time if I see being late as a phase that will pass. It’s not that time becomes less valuable when I think of cyclical rather than linear time. All moments of time have the same value.

That’s reorientation. Getting out the door isn’t down time. It’s not a sacrifice zone of hurry and move on to the more important thing, school. My wife inspired this reorientation through revolutionary love. It happened in the morning. We were doing our usual rushing out the door to get kids to school on time. She stops the process and tells each of us she wants a good, real hug. It’s so refreshing because it’s the opposite of what we usually do: gestures of goodbye can get stale and lose their meaning through repetition. Society says this time getting out the door is not valuable, and she gave it the most value any moment can have: here we are, together, able to express and share our appreciation and love for each other in farewell.

Maybe this is just us stepping out of the rat race. Nothing new. But it is countercultural to step outside the expectation of time as a series of wins and losses with an overall trend towards improvement. I don’t know how I might change the world to be more open and accepting of my neurodiverse son or other kinds of diversity. But reorienting toward the way we use and appreciate time has been a part of a change in culture in our family, and I like to think that will have ripple effects. If not, at least I’m not barking like a drill sergeant so much any more.