How to Support Sibling’s Wellbeing in Neurodiverse Families
When you're a parent, or carer, raising a neurodivergent child and their sibling(s) it's challenging to meet each child's unique needs.
There will be a constant juggle between your time, energy, and financial commitments. This can result in you feeling overwhelmed and not knowing how best to support them.
Your neurodivergent child might need specific sensory-friendly items and environments to help them regulate as well as structured routines. However, siblings might want to be more spontaneous about where and when they do activities.
At times siblings can feel like they are overlooked when their sibling requires more additional support, time and your energy.
I understand that it can be difficult to give each child equal amounts of undivided attention. However, taking small actions to help support siblings wellbeing while also raising your neurodivergent child can help your whole family.
Every neurodiverse family is unique. Therefore, there may be some parts of this blog that don't feel relevant to your family. I hope that you find some points useful and relevant to your family’s experience.
This blog post shares four ways that you can help support siblings' wellbeing in your family.
Expressing Emotions
It can be difficult for siblings to understand what is happening and what changes might happen when growing up in a neurodiverse family.
It can feel like they're carrying stress, worries, and anxieties from everyone in your family.
Sometimes siblings might not realise that they are carrying stress or worries.
Other times they will, but they might not know when or how to express their emotions to other family members.
Even if they seem fine, your neurotypical child may be carrying emotions you can’t always see.
When I was working with children in the charity sector, delivering social and emotional activities, I noticed that siblings in neurodiverse families often advocated for and worried about their brother/sister even at a young age.
This often meant that instead of having fun they would feel worried about what might happen next.
Over time this can have an impact on their mental health and wellbeing regularly moving them into fight or flight mode.
Supporting your child to notice and share their feelings and emotions can help them build their emotional literacy. This allows them to become more aware of their emotions and sharing with you helps lessen the amount of time they need to manage their emotions by themselves.
One way you can support them with this is with emotion cards. I have character themed emotion cards from my children's book series ‘The Mindfully Slow Down Series’, which can help with this.
Individual Time with Siblings
When neurodivergent parenting, you'll likely give a large amount of your time and energy to your neurodivergent child for instance attending meetings, appointments, filling in forms and other tasks relating to supporting their needs.
It is essential to keep advocating for and learning more about your child's needs to best support them.
However, not having endless time and energy can leave siblings feeling overlooked. This could bring up feelings of jealousy or frustration in them for not receiving as much of your time.
Creating time to prioritise one-to-one time with siblings can help support their wellbeing, increase their happiness and self-esteem.
This might feel challenging, especially if there are multiple siblings in your household. Yet, you don't need to spend large amounts of individual time with each sibling, if it isn't possible for your schedule.
Here are my five activity suggestions that can take as little as 10 minutes to help you connect with siblings:
1. Drawing
Simply drawing something that had happened during their day or earlier in the week.
2. Stories
Books that could relate to the characters or learn something new from the story. Seeking out books with diverse characters can help children and families see themselves and peers in books.
My children's picture books, ‘Slow Down Amaya’ and ‘Slow Down Sammy’ have Black and neurodivergent main characters. These stories explore emotions and managing emotions with interactive mindfulness activities.
3. Imaginative Play
Puppets, Lego, playdough, or any other random objects that they could use their imagination with while playing.
4. Mindfulness Activities
Noticing what was around them using their senses or tracing round pictures while mindfully breathing helped them to feel more present.
Consistency
You can choose how often to spend time with siblings individually depending on your family's schedule.
Once a week or every two weeks is a good place to start, siblings will remember when their one-to-one time is and have something to look forward to when spending allocated quality time together.
Family Bonding Time
Juggling your caring responsibilities for your neurodivergent child alongside their sibling's needs isn't easy.
Creating time to bond as a whole family can help siblings' feel connected to you and their neurodivergent sibling.
There will be times when you feel stressed managing sibling dynamics and big emotions will bubble up, and eventually come out.
By having regular quality family bonding time you can help reduce conflict between siblings by doing an activity that everyone feels comfortable doing.
Over time, your children will increase their ability to express their feelings and emotions and develop kindness and compassion towards each other, if they don't show much already!
Self-Care Activities
When growing up in a neurodiverse family, siblings may take on caring responsibilities, such as helping with daily tasks. This will vary for each family and other factors come into play, for instance cultural backgrounds and the size of your family.
Extra responsibilities can lead to additional stress and pressure on siblings to take on typical adult roles and responsibilities. This can lead to a loss of typical childhood experiences. This can particularly be the case for older siblings in families.
When siblings are required to balance their own interests, activities, school work alongside caring responsibilities it can leave little time for them to rest and do activities to look after themselves.
Additionally, there is a lot of mental energy that siblings carry in a neurodiverse family, such as worrying about the future. Which is why encouraging them to do activities that look after their wellbeing is vital.
An idea you could try is creating a set day, or amount of time every day, for them to do an activity that helps them relax and let go of any stress they're carrying.
5 simple activities that you can introduce them to are:
Creative activities, such as doodling
Short guided meditation
Yoga or gentle movement practices
Reading magazines or books
Baking a new or favorite recipe
These activities can help them take time to replenish their energy and connect to themselves as a way to calm their mind.
Supporting Siblings Wellbeing in Neurodiverse Families: Next Steps
I've created a 7-day online wellbeing course specifically for siblings in neurodiverse families.
If you're ready to create a more calm, supportive environment where your whole family can thrive together, register to ‘Supporting Siblings in Neurodiverse Families’ today by visiting here.