What You'll Learn
- What does the term neurodiversity mean?
- How does the neurodiversity movement, launched in the 1990s, help kids with autism, ADHD, or learning disorders?
- Neurodiversity also helps children cultivate self-esteem, viewing their differences not as impediments but simply as expressions of their uniqueness. As these attitudes are cultivated in children, they become better prepared to handle their neurodivergence in college, in the workplace and throughout their adult lives.Why are teenagers and young adults adopting neurodiversity as an identity?
Lately, neurodiversity has also become an identity sometimes adopted by teenagers who are struggling socially. The concept gives them a brain-based explanation for their difficulties: “I'm like this because my brain works this way.” And it can help them feel connected to others who identify as neurodivergent.
A central premise of the neurodiversity movement is that variations in neurological development and functioning across humans are a natural and valuable part of human variation and therefore not necessarily pathological (e.g., Jaarsma and Welin, 2012; Kapp, 2020)
Neurodiversity is a term that seems to be everywhere these days. And increasingly, kids and young adults are using it to describe themselves. But what does it mean to be neurodiverse, and where does the term come from?
In short, it means that there are many differences in the way people’s brains work. There’s no “correct” or “incorrect” way. Instead, there is a wide range of ways that people perceive and respond to the world, and these differences should be embraced.
The term neurodiversity was coined in the 1990s to fight stigma and promote acceptance of people with autism. But it also includes other conditions that involve neurological differences, such as ADHD and learning disorders like dyslexia and dyscalculia.
The growth of autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement has brought about new ethical, theoretical, and ideological debates within autism theory, research, and practice. The last two decades have brought about huge socio-political shifts within the world of autism theory, research, and practice. In the mid-1990s, the emergence of the internet provided a more accessible text-based means of communication and empowered a growing number of autistic people to connect and share ideas with one another (Dekker, 2020)1. Out of the early autistic social groups of the 1990s emerged autistic culture, the autistic self-advocacy movement, and the assertion that autism is a valid way of being. This environment also gave rise to the neurodiversity movement (Singer, 1998). Through the 2000s, the neurodiversity movement has been galvanized in a large part due to the voices, advocacy, and protest of the autistic community, facilitated through developments in online communication and networks (Kras, 2009) and is increasingly influencing academic, clinical, and lay understanding of autism and other forms of neurological difference
A central premise of the neurodiversity movement is that variations in neurological development and functioning across humans are a natural and valuable part of human variation and therefore not necessarily pathological (e.g., Jaarsma and Welin, 2012; Kapp, 2020). Neurodiversity as a social justice and civil rights movement intersects with the wider disability rights movement (Hughes, 2016). The most significant premise of both is that disability is not simply a defect in the individual, but arises from the interaction between a non-standard individual and an unaccommodating environment (the social model of disability; Oliver, 1990). Consistent with this stance, many neurodiversity proponents do view autism as a disability. From this theoretical underpinning, the neurodiversity movement makes several demands, including the recognition and acceptance of the value of cognitive variation as a form of biodiversity and hence its positive contribution to groups, communities and societies (the social-ecological perspective; Chapman, 2020) and equal rights leading to an end to discriminatory policies and practices (Runswick-Cole, 2014).
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