The "Good" Kid: Compulsive Fawning, Rejection-Sensitivity, and Learning to Self-Advocate

In this session, speech pathologist and illustrator Em Hammond, known online as NeuroWild, joins host Mick Olds to talk about the child nobody worries about. Em is an AuDHD author and a parent of three neurodivergent kids, and most of what she shares here is her own story rather than a case study.

She describes growing up as the rule-following, people-pleasing, pleasure-to-have-in-class child, then arriving in adulthood with no self-advocacy skills and no way to ask whether an expectation was one she should meet. Em explains what rejection sensitivity feels like from the inside, using a year eight Japanese class and a prize she wanted too much to show how small a trigger can be and how long the aftermath lasts. She makes a case for retiring perfect as a compliment, and for teaching kids energy accounting instead: how much have I got, what will this cost me, and do I have to take this expectation at all. She then lays out the four things that have to be in place before a fawning kid can safely say no, and is candid that the hardest one is the adults getting ready to hear it. The session ends with her own daughter, whose self-advocacy currently sounds like yelling at her brothers, and Em's decision not to correct the volume.

Therapists, parents, and educators will come away with a way to spot the kids who never land on anyone's radar, language for inviting self-advocacy without demanding it, and a reason to let a first attempt be clumsy. Grounded in Em's clinical work and her own late identification as autistic and ADHD, this session is personal, funny in places, and gentle about how much of this is the adults' work.