I’m on week four of my new job and just about hanging in there, juggling parenting and working.

Thankfully having teenagers in the summer holidays is mostly about making sure there is lots and lots and lots of food and driving them places. Throw in a bit of laundry, cleaning, and some body-doubling for my daughter, and that’s it. It will be more challenging when they go back to school, as they will need a lot more scaffolding.

If you haven’t come across the term scaffolding in a neurodivergent sense, it’s simplifying tasks other people find very easy, to free up spoons for the essential or more difficult tasks.

When I went to see my son’s head of year to talk about reducing his timetable, I was given a long list of all the reasons why he was thriving at school and didn’t need any accommodations: He turned up to class on time, he had all of the things he needed to learn, he remembered all the ingredients for his food tech, he was always smartly dressed. These are all things that I put scaffolding in place for, to allow him the spoons to get through the day.

He still comes home exhausted.

For an average teenager, I would be encouraging them to weigh out and label their own food tech ingredients, make sure they have ironed shirts or that their laundry has been done. I would tell them to find and polish their own shoes or put together their own PE kit. This would be ‘preparing them for adulthood’. 

But the thing is, my son already knows how to do it all, but each tiny task takes spoons.

He also has his own scaffolding: multiple alarms to remind him to get up, shower, brush his teeth, and other things an allistic person might not even have to think about never mind be reminded to do. By the time he leaves for school, he’s used up so much of his capacity already, the least I can do is help. 

Unlike the scaffolding on a building, this scaffolding may never come down. He may end up with an understanding partner, or he may need a housekeeper, or like me he might rely on AI (Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT are my team.) These are accommodations for an autistic person in an allistic world. 

The same is true in my new job. I have a reputation for being very organised, which always makes me laugh as someone with ADHD. What people don’t realise, but I’ve become much more open in discussing, is that the organisation is essential for me to have any idea of what I’m supposed to be doing on an hourly or daily basis. 

I have links from spreadsheet to spreadsheet, I have bookmarks in sub-folders in folders. I have to-do lists and checklists and calendar reminders and even with all these things I still have to go through my notes every day to remember what I should be doing.

It is exhausting.

Like my son at the end of a school day, I have been crawling into bed early and sleeping late.

The analogy of the swan, calm on the surface and furiously paddling underneath, is a flippant image I use often. But imagine the swan is on an apparently slow-moving river with a very fast undertow: you would have no idea how exhausted the swan was just trying to stay in one place. Now imagine someone built a dam or a jetty to break the undertow. 

In case it helps, here are my favourite tech/AI scaffolding tips:

• Alexa shopping list
• Alexa devices in every room
• Calendar reminder to check Echo app shopping list
• Alexa timers and reminders (particularly cooking pasta!)
• Talking work problems through with ChatGPT
• Smart watch linked to phone so I hear calls
• Airpods to hear messages
• Tile to find my phone when watch tells me it’s ringing
• Alexa to find my keys to activate my tile

It’s so much easier for my husband, he just has Wife™. 😂

What scaffolding do you use?