Energy Economics

About Energy Economics

Energy Economics for Parents is a show about the only budget that never balances—your own energy, and where it actually goes each day. Host Christopher Fern talks with parents, many of them raising neurodivergent kids, about what to spend their finite energy on, what to protect, and what to finally cut loose. members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/s/energy-economics?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Briar Harvey

Category

business · kids & family

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Jul 2026

Latest episode

23 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

9 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 Oct 2026

   If It’s Under a Seven, Let It Go: An ADHD Coach on Cognitive Load and the Neurodivergent Family

   Every household has someone who knows where the phone chargers went, which bill is due, and what homework is still sitting in a backpack. In Brooke Schnittman’s house, that person was her. An ADHD coach and coach trainer with 20 years in the field, Schnittman joined Christopher Fern on Energy Economics for Parents to talk about what that job cost her, and the simple system she now uses to decide what deserves her energy at all. The cost of being the one who knows everything Schnittman describes her home as one big neurodivergent family: a three-year-old, two stepsons, and ADHD, autism, anxiety, and OCD in the mix. She has ADHD and anxiety herself, and years of systems-building from her work as a special education teacher and administrator. That made her the default manager of everything. It didn’t hold. Schnittman told Fern her cognitive load got too heavy, and the result was stress, anxiety, and depression. Her conclusion was blunt: you can’t be everything to everyone. Now she steps back, takes mental breaks, exercises, and lets the other people in the house do their part—even when doing it herself would be faster. Her stepping back has roots in what she sees in clients. She cites the figure that kids with ADHD hear 20,000 more negative messages before age 10 than their peers, which leaves a lot of adults unable to name a single strength. Energy spent forcing yourself through tasks built on your weaknesses doesn’t come back. Her advice is to delegate those tasks, break them down, or get out of the situations that demand them. A one-to-ten scale for what gets your energy When Fern asked how she chooses what to let go of, Schnittman had a number for it. She rates each concern from one to ten. Lying, broken house rules, real damage in the house, and steady disregard for core values are tens, and those get handled. Anything under a seven goes in her journal. She writes it down, acknowledges that it’s frustrating, rips up the page, and moves on. She runs her business on the same logic. Her focus window is 10 to 4, she won’t book back-to-back meetings, and she keeps small tasks ready for low-energy days so she doesn’t have to push. Ideas that don’t fit the quarter’s goal go into a parking lot. Most she forgets. If one keeps surfacing every day for 30 days, it earns a real look. Talking with kids who don’t answer “how was your day” The second half of the conversation turns to connection. Schnittman defines masking as hiding your true colors out of fear of how others will see you, and her first tool for helping a child drop it is curiosity: ask questions, point out specific positives, spend one-on-one time, and try an end-of-day mood log. For autistic kids, she gets direct. “How was your day” can stall a conversation. “What made you happy today?” or “On a scale of one to ten, do you want to go out tonight?” gives a child something answerable. Fern brought in the double empathy problem, and Schnittman agreed that communication belongs to both people, so the work of being understood shouldn’t land entirely on the neurodivergent person. Her closing request applies to every parent listening. A label can help you understand someone, and the person in front of you is still their own person. Ask how they like to be spoken to. Don’t assume. Listen to the full episode: members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/p/energy-economics-ep-9 (http://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/p/energy-economics-ep-9) About the host Christopher Fern hosts Energy Economics for Parents on the Neurodiversity Media Network. He’s an AuDHD author, inventor, and entrepreneur, and the founder of Energy Economics (https://gooddecisions.tech/), a daily practice app that sorts what’s on your mind into must-do, worth-doing, and nice-to-have. He also created the ND Operating System and The Other Side of the Table (https://doubleempathy.com/), a video guide that explains neurodivergent shutdown to the partners, parents, and colleagues on the other side of it. On the show, every guest gets some version of his core question: what does it cost you? About the guest Brooke Schnittman is an ADHD coach and coach trainer and the founder of Coaching with Brooke, where she and her team work with ADHD students, adults, parents, and couples. She has spent 20 years in the ADHD field and previously worked as a special education teacher and administrator. She is the author of Activate Your ADHD Potential and hosts the podcast SuccessFULL With ADHD. Coaching with Brooke: coachingwithbrooke.com (https://www.coachingwithbrooke.com/) · Instagram: @coachingwithbrooke (https://www.instagram.com/coachingwithbrooke) · Activate Your ADHD Potential: coachingwithbrooke.com/activatebook (https://www.coachingwithbrooke.com/activatebook) · SuccessFULL With ADHD: coachingwithbrooke.com/successfull-with-adhd (https://www.coachingwithbrooke.com/successfull-with-adhd) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   16 Oct 2026

   Limiting Beliefs and the Fuel Gauge Parents Keep Ignoring

   Most parents can name the belief that trips them up. I’m not organized. I can’t focus. I was never a math person. Deciding how much of a short day to spend on it is where people stall. On this episode of Energy Economics for Parents, Christopher Fern talks with Alicia Cramer, a business mindset coach and hypnotherapist who has spent close to 20 years helping business owners shift the beliefs that keep them stuck. The conversation keeps returning to one practical problem: inner work costs energy, and parents don’t have much to spare. Where the old script comes from Alicia Cramer traces most limiting beliefs to conditioning that starts early. A kid daydreams through class, blanks on the quiz, and quietly decides something about who they are. A parent says you don’t pay attention often enough that it sticks. A professional delivers a verdict that sounds permanent. Each piece becomes evidence, and the evidence keeps confirming the story. That’s why telling someone to snap out of it fails. Cramer compares it to telling someone who has eaten emotionally for 20 years to just stop. Her first step with clients sounds backwards. Name the goal, then list every excuse for why you can’t have it. The excuses are the beliefs, and they have to come up before anything moves. In her experience, how heavy a belief feels depends on how intensely someone holds it, whatever their neurotype. The fuel gauge Christopher Fern pushed on the part most self-help skips. He describes a stretch when he’d call out of work because he knew he had personal work to do. Plenty of people get as overwhelmed by their inner to-do list as by the one on the fridge. How much should anyone take on? Cramer’s answer is to keep most of your attention on where you’re headed and treat the recurring snag as a warning light. You can ignore a low fuel gauge for a while. Then you run out. At home, running out looks like the blowup at the kids or a partner. The outburst drops the pressure just enough to get back to normal coping, the cause stays put, and the pressure starts building again from the same spot. The opposite trap is just as common. Fix one thing, feel the relief, and suddenly every part of life looks like a project. “You’ll never run out,” she says of the flaws a person can find in themselves. Her test for which belief deserves attention is simple: is it causing problems in your life right now? The body usually signals enough for now, the same way most people can feel which bite of food was the last one they needed. What parents bring into the room When the talk turns to kids, Cramer says most parents reach for something external first, and it tends to produce pushback. The work she asks parents to do is on their own state—their triggers, their fears, what they project onto a child. She asks them to hold a picture of their kid as capable and lovable, and come back to it after they slip. Her reasoning is that a child hears the state behind the words. “It’s okay, everybody makes mistakes” lands one way from a calm parent and another way from an anxious one. Asked what she’d most want her own kids to carry, she picks two things: knowing they’re capable, and accepting themselves, bad hair days included. Any parent who has loved their child unconditionally already knows the state she’s describing. The energy goes into getting back to it. Listen to the full episode: members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/p/energy-economics-ep-8 About the host Christopher Fern hosts Energy Economics for Parents on the Neurodiversity Media Network. He’s an AuDHD author, inventor, and entrepreneur, and the founder of Energy Economics (https://gooddecisions.tech/), a daily practice app that sorts what’s on your mind into must-do, worth-doing, and nice-to-have. He also created the ND Operating System and The Other Side of the Table (https://doubleempathy.com/), a video guide that explains neurodivergent shutdown to the partners, parents, and colleagues on the other side of it. On the show, every guest gets some version of his core question: what does it cost you? About the guest Alicia Cramer is a business mindset coach and hypnotherapist who works with business owners to shift limiting beliefs, work through past trauma, and line up their business and personal goals. She has been doing this work for close to 20 years, and her approach draws on a background in metaphysics alongside the psychological side. She is also a parent. Website: aliciacramer.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   25 Sept 2026

   The Red Pipe Wrench: Jennifer Masters on Good Enough Parenting

   For twenty years, the bathroom tap in Jennifer Masters’ childhood home was stripped, and the family turned the water on with a little red pipe wrench. Her father built houses and the family cottage, and he left it that way. Her mother, who needed everything perfect, couldn’t stand it. Masters told the story on Energy Economics for Parents when host Christopher Fern asked her a hard question: if trying to be perfect means failing, and not trying means you’re not good enough, what are you supposed to do? Love on condition Masters grew up in a house where love was withheld unless you were perfect. Perfect is impossible, so she was failing before she started, and she spent years as what she calls a chameleon. You want me green, I’ll be green. You want cartwheels, I’ll do cartwheels. Just love me. She sees the same pattern in the clients she works with now, and it shows up in their relationships. A comment in the present lands on something from thirty years ago, and the result is a slammed door instead of a conversation. It shows up in how people look, too. She’s coached models—striking women—who were deeply insecure, because the outside has very little to do with what’s going on inside. Christopher named the bind plainly: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. “Therein lies the problem,” she said. Good enough, and who it annoys Her answer came from her father. Soften the way you look at yourself, and lower the bar a little. He wore the same shirt three or four days running and didn’t care. He loved himself, read widely, and taught her to think for herself instead of believing what she was told. When Christopher asked whether living “good enough” would annoy people, she laughed. Her dad annoyed her mom often. Her version of his attitude is that you’re already acceptable, and the love is still there under a pile of old belief systems. Where the energy leaks The show is about where a finite supply goes, and Masters was specific about the leaks. There’s stewing and brewing, her name for replaying one upsetting encounter over and over until it costs you sleep. There’s the pre-trip list—laundry, sheets, clean house—and her question about whether any of it needs doing before you leave. Sort the real obligations from the distractions, she says, then say no to the rest. Comparison drains it too. She says it collapses your energy, and there’s nobody to measure against anyway, because you’re incomparable. For parents, her rule came from watching her daughter-in-law hand a baby the spoon at a few months old and let her make a mess. Masters used to panic about the laundry. Now she says to take your hands off the steering wheel. Control only where safety is a must. Everywhere else, let them get in the puddle, and when your kid does something you don’t like, correct lovingly without telling them they’re bad. Christopher asked her for the one lesson she’d leave her own children. She kept it short: no matter what, they’re loved. About the host Christopher Fern hosts Energy Economics for Parents on the Neurodiversity Media Network. He’s an AuDHD author, inventor, and entrepreneur, and the founder of Energy Economics (https://gooddecisions.tech/), a daily practice app that sorts what’s on your mind into must-do, worth-doing, and nice-to-have. He also created the ND Operating System and The Other Side of the Table (https://doubleempathy.com/), a video guide that explains neurodivergent shutdown to the partners, parents, and colleagues on the other side of it. On the show, every guest gets some version of his core question: what does it cost you? About the guest Jennifer Masters works with clients on transformation and self-realization, drawing on psychology, energy healing, the Akashic records, and channeling. Her work centers on helping people let go of limiting beliefs and old trauma. She’s a mother of three and a grandmother, and she counts herself and all three of her children among the neurodivergent people in her life. Find her at: jenniferelizabethmasters.com (https://jenniferelizabethmasters.com) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

4. 

   5 Sept 2026

   The Pain Nobody Sees: Sujai Johnston on What It Costs to Get Through a Day Autistic

   Sujai Johnston has spent about ten years working with families as a certified parenting coach, and she’s autistic. On Energy Economics for Parents, she gave host Christopher Fern an account of where an autistic person’s energy actually goes, and it starts somewhere most people never look: the body. The stress signal is physical When the brain decides something is a threat, it sends that message to the nervous system, and the nervous system answers in muscle. The stomach tightens. Then the chest. Then the shoulders. Johnston’s point is that this runs all day, from the time an autistic person gets up to the time they go to bed, and the people around them mostly can’t see any of it. Which is why she pushes back hard on the standard reading of a meltdown. Nobody melting down is emotionally weak. They’re in pain, and they’ve been in pain for hours. Her example is the sound of a bouncing ball, which for her is tangled up with PTSD and lands like impending doom. Trying harder to be fine with it makes it worse, because the brain reads the override as evidence you’re still not safe. She’s specific about which environments do the most damage. Institutional spaces—schools and hospitals in particular—are built with exactly the density of noise, light, and input that produces this, and they’re where a lot of autistic people are made to spend the most time. Ignoring the signal doesn’t make it cheaper Johnston walks through what overriding actually costs. The signal starts in the gut. Ignore it and it climbs to the lower back, then the chest. By the time it reaches your neck and face, your face is burning, your eyes are watering, your ears are red, and your voice is going in your throat. Sudden zero-to-sixty happens, she says, but it’s less common than this slow build. Most of the time the body has been asking for a change for a while. She thinks the overriding is trained into us, and she means the word. So the cheapest available fix is environmental. Change the lights, cut the competing noise, reduce the input, and she puts the difference at half the stress and half the pain. Where the trigger isn’t a real danger—that bouncing ball is probably kids playing basketball—you can tell your brain it’s safe, and the all-clear travels back down. With one exception she wants kept attached. If you’re still living somewhere that snappiness reliably turns into yelling, don’t tell your nervous system you’re safe there. It’s reporting accurately, and talking yourself out of it is just lying to yourself. The tools can become the mask The turn in the conversation is her own. She’s collected a lifetime of tools for managing sensory input, and at forty-eight, with all of them, sustained stress can still put her into a meltdown. She also noticed that some of the tools had started doing something else. Autistic people grab extremes to be socially acceptable, overcompensating for deficits they’ve been told they have, and past a certain point the coping strategy is another way of not being yourself. Her example: she rocks back and forth when a conversation gets deep. She was shamed for it badly enough that she stopped. She’s taking it back now, and it’s what she left listeners with. If you rock back and forth a little when you talk, own it and love it, because it’s part of you. Sujai Johnston’s work is at gentleparentsunite.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

5. 

   21 Aug 2026

   Co-Regulation Is a Physiological Capacity, and Parents Run Out of It with Jenny Hale

   Jenny Hale created the Hale Method after burnout in her thirties took the choice away from her. On Energy Economics for Parents, she gave host Christopher Fern an order of operations—what has to happen before anything else is available—and an account of why parents keep failing at step one. Nobody explained the pedals Start with her analogy. Imagine teaching driving the way we teach emotional skills. Nobody says what the wheel is for, what the pedals do, or where the mirrors are. The person gets put in the car, the car gets put in motion at speed, and they figure it out. It would be chaos, and it is. Neurotypical children absorb a lot of this by osmosis, picking up abstract rules from the adults around them. Neurodivergent kids, autistic kids in particular, often need the same material as explicit, sequenced instruction. So when a parent says “you need to calm down,” a neurotypical kid files away the feel of the thing and rebuilds it later. A neurodivergent kid asks how, gets no answer, and now carries the original upset plus the frustration of being asked to perform something nobody described. Hale learned this from her own daughter at eighteen months, sprawled on the floor after some Duplo blocks wouldn’t fit, announcing she was tired. It was nine in the morning after a full night’s sleep. She’d been handed “tired” as the label for a sensation that was actually frustration, and she was going to keep using it. Children need the vocabulary, the cues to look for, and a demonstration of the check adults are supposed to run on themselves: how much sleep did I get, have I eaten, what’s going on physiologically that’s making me feel this way. Physiology first, then emotions, then words Christopher Fern called co-regulation a scarce mental capacity. Hale corrected him mid-sentence. It’s physiological. When the autonomic nervous system flips into alert or fight-or-flight, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex is reduced, and the bandwidth for analytical thought goes with it. That correction sets the order she teaches. Physiological safety first, which means the nervous system back in the green zone before anything gets asked of anyone. Until that lands, managing emotions, taking another perspective, and considering someone else are all out of reach. Then emotional safety, where the person feels seen and validated in the experience even when the behavior was unacceptable. Then mental safety, where everyone understands the trigger and the unmet need. Each level reached settles the ones under it. The math on families is where this gets hard. Every parent is under-resourced. Neurodivergent parents more so, because moving through the world costs them more. And neurodivergent children need more co-regulation than average. All three push the same way. You can’t learn it during the meltdown Hale’s answer is repetition at low stakes. A kicker lines up against a goalkeeper with nobody interfering. If the only attempt you ever made came in the grand final, in extra time, with a hundred thousand people screaming, you’d miss. Thousands of reps with nobody watching builds the muscle memory that survives pressure. Regulation has to become subconscious the same way, because the moment you need it is the moment you can’t reach anything conscious. She has a case for it. A high school teacher came through her coach training with anxiety that showed up as irritability and one of the highest detention rates in his school. Six months later, with his own regulation in place, he was the most requested teacher there—enough students wanting his classes that the school hired someone to cover the overflow. He already taught in a competency-based system, so she handed him the emotional skills the same way: the behaviors that show you’ve mastered each step, in the order they build. As Jenny says, it does not have to be this way. Jenny Hale’s work is at jennyhale.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

6. 

   14 Aug 2026

   You Are Worthy Because You Exist—Ico Fish on Self-Love and Autistic Burnout

   Masking Runs 24/7 and Bills You for It Ico Fish calls themselves the autistic love mystic. In this episode of Energy Economics for Parents, they gave host Christopher Fern something more concrete than a title: an accounting of what masking actually takes out of a person, and what it takes to stop. Masking is the work of pretending to be neurotypical—holding eye contact you don’t want to hold, standing at the culturally approved distance, tracking the flow of a conversation that a neurotypical person tracks by reflex. Ico’s point is that none of it is free. It runs around the clock, it draws on the same reserve everything else draws on, and the person doing it usually doesn’t count it as work. Spoon theory, applied to masking Ico borrows spoon theory from the chronic illness community. A person has a set number of energetic spoons in a day. A shower takes some. Laundry takes some. Dishes take some. The count is finite and it doesn’t reset because the day got harder. For a neurodivergent person who has been masking a long time, masking is the item at the top of that ledger that never gets itemized. Which produces a result that catches people off guard: unmasking usually starts with exhaustion getting worse. Naming how depleted you are is its own expense before it is any kind of relief. Christopher Fern pushed on exactly this—a parent with no reserve left is being asked to spend more, on the promise of getting more back later. Ico’s answer is that the alternative doesn’t have a long-term version. Mask hard enough and long enough and the inauthenticity can build to a genuine mental crisis. The end of that road is a breakdown, arriving on a schedule nobody picks. Rebuilding the count from the floor Asked how to raise the ceiling rather than just sleeping under it, Ico started at the bottom. Neurodivergent people frequently run disconnected from the body and will go hours without eating or drinking without registering it. When did I last drink water. When did I last eat. Christopher connected it to the base of Maslow’s hierarchy—the questions that feel too small to matter are usually the ones that got skipped. Above that sits a body practice. Can I feel my feet. How many of my toes can I find. Ico traces a finger from the forehead down to the heart as a physical reminder of the direction of travel. And then the sensory inventory that adults often think they’re too old to ask for: tags cut out of shirts, socks folded a specific way. Ico’s framing is that saying what works out loud counts as advocacy, even when it makes no sense to anyone neurotypical. What this means for parents For a parent raising a neurodivergent child, Ico offered two things. Recognize the child as a sovereign individual—someone who will think, feel, and decide for themselves, with a real yes and a real no worth teaching them to find. And go one step further back and parent your own inner child, the one who didn’t get what they needed, without pretending it was fair. Both cost energy. Ico’s case is that they’re among the few expenditures that pay the reserve back rather than draining it. Ico is offering a free call at callwithico.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

7. 

   2 Aug 2026

   The Attachment Tax: What Boysen Hodgson Learned About Parenting Neurodivergent Kids

   Boysen Hodgson spent twenty years in men’s emotional development work before he became a father. When he and his wife Kendra took in two siblings through foster-to-adopt, they’d already done intensive parenting classes and a separate class on parenting kids with trauma. What none of it fully prepared them for was the daily, physical work of raising two neurodivergent kids in a world built for neither of them. On Energy Economics for Parents, he talked with Chris about what that work actually costs—and who ends up paying. The diagnosis is not the child For years, the labels that got attached to Boysen’s kids were “defiant” and “problem kid.” One child carried a diagnosis long before anyone named it, because behavior got attributed to trauma and PTSD before anyone looked at the kid brain and asked what was really happening. Boysen’s clearest line is a warning about the fix, not just the delay: during the years a kid is forming an identity, turning a diagnosis into the child is one of the most damaging things a family or a school can do. Understanding the pattern is useful. Letting it define the person is not. He frames the whole thing as one sentence with two endings—”I learn differently, so I do it this way,” or “I can’t because I.” One opens a door. The other locks it. Where the energy actually goes The show’s frame is energy, and Boysen names the tax directly. When he needs the den cleaned now, his way, that urgency belongs to him—and pushing it across the table lands on his kids as a wound. So in his house, “clean up the den” isn’t an order. It’s a bid for a conversation, a negotiation with if-thens and natural consequences instead of punishment. Bedtime ran over an hour for years, all of it nervous-system calming. And when his own tolerance for the songs on repeat and the repetitive patterns runs out, he taps his partner in and steps away on purpose, rather than amping up the stress in the room. He’s blunt that Kendra is better at the letting-go than he is, and that getting a partner who reminds you is part of the method, not a failure of it. The part that’s on the parent Public school was the hardest stretch of his kids’ lives—Boysen draws a direct line between it and the crisis interventions the family had to undertake, while being careful to separate good, under-resourced counselors from the “why can’t you fit the path” mindset that did the damage. But the sharpest turn in the conversation is inward. Every skill he’s trying to practice with his kids, he says, he has to practice with himself, because the self-judgment a parent won’t own gets projected onto the kids. He ties the cultural default of self-hatred to hustle and productivity pressure, and points at self-compassion as the replacement. He closes with an acronym from his friend Jim Catona—RESPECT: Remember Everyone Suffers Painful Experiences, Communicate Tenderly. It’s a decent summary of the whole hour. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

8. 

   24 Jul 2026

   What It Costs to Run on Anxiety—and What Jenna Larson Learned to Stop Paying

   Jenna Larson figured out she was neurodivergent the way a lot of women do: while researching how to help her kids. She’d read about ADHD, about dyslexia, about how these things show up in daily life, and the descriptions kept describing her. On Energy Economics for Parents, she tells Chris she’s never been formally diagnosed and doesn’t really need the paper. Everyone who knows her already nodded along years ago. What makes the conversation worth an hour is that Jenna doesn’t treat her wiring as a problem to be solved or a badge to wave. She treats it as an energy question. She’s a zero-to-100 person—her words—and that intensity is the fuel behind a career and a software company she and her partner have poured close to half a million dollars into. It’s also the reason a nurse saying “we found something” spikes her heart-rate monitor before anyone’s said whether it’s bad. Same engine, two very different bills. Where the energy actually goes The show’s frame is where a parent’s finite energy goes, and Jenna answers in specifics instead of theory. For a long time, a lot of hers went to the morning fight—getting one of her kids ready and out the door, shoes on, hurry up, every day a standoff. Then she and her husband tried something that felt like giving up and turned out to be the opposite. They stopped being his frontal lobe. As long as you’re in the car, they told him, we don’t care how you get ready. He started spending 30 minutes on backyard basketball first. He has never been late since. The pattern repeats across the episode. Jenna talks about a sock on the floor she looks at every day and can’t make herself pick up, an alarm clock she’s genuinely mad at even though she set it. That’s PDA—demand avoidance—and she’s clear that it eats real energy, most of it in conflicts that live entirely in her own head. Chris keeps pulling the thread back to one question: how much does that cost you? Letting go as the actual skill Jenna’s honest that self-awareness isn’t the finish line. She can explain her own patterns better than most therapists expect, and she still struggles with them daily. What’s changed isn’t that she fixed herself. It’s that she stopped spending energy pretending she could, and started building around the truth. A business partner who solves a crisis before he tells her, because he knows how she’ll react to the words “we need to talk.” A family that softens how they deliver a phone call, because a ringing phone once meant her mom’s cancer. She calls neurodivergence “not an excuse, an explanation”—and the explanation is what lets the people around her show up for her. For parents earlier in this, her advice is smaller and harder than any system. Mourn the version of your kid you pictured, so you can see the one in front of you. Let them fail sometimes, because you can’t remove all the friction and still raise someone with grit. And try—put yourself out there, because it’s already a no until you get the yes. Coming from someone who runs on anxiety and knows exactly what it costs her, that reads like a report from the field. Find Jenna Larson on Instagram @the.jenna.larson and on Facebook as Jenna Dubois Larson. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

9. 

   17 Jul 2026

   When Parenting Doesn't Feel Like a Struggle: Energy, Modeling, and Trusting a Kid's Inner Compass with Nicole Cruz

   Most parenting content aimed at families with neurodivergent kids starts from the same assumption: this is going to be hard. In the first episode of Energy Economics for Parents, Nicole Cruz opens with the opposite. Parenting her nine-year-old autistic son with ADHD hasn’t felt like the struggle she was told to expect—and she’s careful to say that’s her experience, not a verdict on anyone else’s. Where the ease actually comes from It isn’t luck, and it isn’t a lack of difficulty. It’s where Nicole chooses to spend her energy. Trained through Teach for America to build classrooms that work for every student—the shoveled-ramp idea, where the environment is set up so no one has to be separated out to get what they need—she carries the same principle into parenting and into her consulting work, where she helps business owners stay in their zone of genius and let systems handle the rest. The common thread is refusing to pour energy into fighting a person’s actual shape. Drop the assumption, then model the rest Two habits do most of the work. The first is dropping assumptions: when your mind decides a whole group of people must be careless or ignorant, that’s the cue to investigate, not conclude. Nicole asks herself why a person as intelligent and competent as she is would behave that way—and the question reliably opens a better conversation. The second is modeling. Kids absorb what you do long before they follow what you say, which is why “do as I say, not as I do” quietly teaches that words and actions don’t have to match. When she’s unsure what to do as a parent, she asks what she’d want her son to do, and then does that. Taking a child’s inner compass seriously Nicole has followed her son’s cues since he was a baby—”I need a hat. My baby doesn’t need a hat.” She treats his inner wisdom as serious data without handing over the decision, and the payoff is visible: four years running, he has planned a surprise Mother’s Day adventure, leading her across New York City to the Empire State Building. Her closing charge is the heart of the show: cut what drains you, build your life around your zone of genius, and drop the shame. The world wasn’t made for you—but you can make a life that fits. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe (https://members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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