Parenting at the edges: a neuro-affirming workshop for neurodivergent parents
For neurodivergent parents - often raising neurodivergent children - mainstream parenting advice can feel alien, exhausting, or impossible to live up to. In this gentle online workshop, we'll explore the unspoken parenting rules that exclude us, reconnect with our own values, and begin building more spacious, workable scripts for family life and community.
What you'll get from this workshop:
Feel less alone in the realities of neurodivergent parenting
Understand the hidden expectations that make parenting feel harder than it needs to
Leave with clearer language, more self-trust, and practical ways to respond in family, school, and community settings
"Thanks for organising this, it was very helpful. I feel less alone."
- Previous participant
About this workshop
Many neurodivergent parents carry the feeling that they are somehow "getting it wrong" - not because they are failing, but because the usual parenting scripts were never built with them in mind.
Across school expectations, family routines, social situations, holidays, and everyday demands, this mismatch can bring judgment, isolation, and self-doubt at exactly the moment support is most needed.
This workshop creates space to step outside those assumptions together. Through gentle experiential exercises, small-group conversation, and shared reflection, we'll:
Notice the rules and expectations shaping parenting life
Question the ones that do harm
Begin creating new narratives that better fit our families, our values, and our realities
This will be a neuro-affirming, inclusive space with different ways to participate - listening quietly, joining by chat, keeping your camera off, or speaking in smaller groups. You do not need to perform, explain yourself, or participate in any one "right" way.
You'll leave with:
Greater clarity about the situations that feel especially hard, and the hidden rules shaping them
A stronger sense of your own preferred responses as a parent, centered on you and your child rather than outside judgment
Simple ways to communicate your needs, boundaries, and parenting choices with family, schools, or professionals
Space to reflect on your own childhood experiences and the parenting path you want to create now
A sense of solidarity, validation, and connection with others living at similar edges
The option to stay connected with the community afterwards
How this workshop is different
This workshop is informed by narrative therapy principles, which means we do not treat people as the problem.
Instead of pathologising, fixing, or locating difficulty inside an individual, we look at how struggles are shaped by context, relationships, expectations, and systems - and we co-create more useful, humane possibilities from there.
That means this is not a workshop about becoming a "better behaved" parent by forcing yourself into mainstream norms. It is a space to think, reflect, and imagine parenting in ways that honour neurodiversity, complexity, agency, and shared humanity.
Format & Access
2-hour online Zoom workshop with closed captions provided
Cameras optional
No expectation to speak or share
Chat-only participation welcome
Use your own language and metaphors; there is no "correct" way to take part
Breaks built in, with flexibility for sensory and regulation needs
Stimming and movement welcomed
Who it's for:
Neurodivergent parents and caregivers (diagnosed, self-identified, or questioning), including parents of neurodivergent children who may be neurodivergent themselves or co-parenting with a neurodivergent person.
Who it's not for:
This is not a crisis service or replacement for individual therapy.
Facilitator:
Dr Fran Lassman, clinical psychologist specialising in narrative therapy with 15+ years experience working with young people, adults, and families across NHS and private settings. She co-founded "a time and space," a collective offering collaborative, neurodiversity-affirming narrative practice.
Limited spaces to keep the group intimate and supportive