Friendship and Neurodivergent Children
[00:00:00] [music playing] Hello, and welcome to Children’s Friendships Matter. A podcast series about children’s friendships post-COVID 19. In this episode Dr Caron Carter talks to Doctor Luke Beardon, author of Reasonable Adjustments for Autistic Children, about children’s friendships and neurodivergent children, reflecting on what we might learn for both practice and future research directions.
Here they explore some of the challenges that affect children, practitioners, and teachers today – including what friendship means for neurodivergent children, what is diverging sociality, and how can we support neurodivergent children with friendship in educational settings.
[00:01:05] Welcome, Luke, to the podcast Children’s Friendships Matter.
Luke Beardon: [00:01:11] Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me Caron.
[00:01:16] I’m really glad you could make it, and I’ve been thinking about this podcast for a while. I just wondered if we could just start by you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and your role as an academic?
Luke Beardon: [00:01:29] So my name is Luke Beardon. It’s interesting that you refer to me as an academic. I never think of myself as an academic, despite having had an academic role for the last 22 years. So I think of myself still as a Grade 1 support worker, which is how I started off in the autism field, which is where I work. So I’ve kind of gone through most jobs that there are in the autism field around residential support, working as a volunteer in schools and so on and so forth. But yeah, for the last 22 years I’ve been a senior lecturer in autism at Sheffield Hallam University. I helped set up the autism centre, and obsessed/passionate about everything, pretty much, in relation to autism.
[00:02:10] That is really interesting. So could you tell us a little bit about your research?
Luke Beardon: [00:02:17] So in terms of formal research, my doctoral study was around the criminal justice system, and about when individuals who had broken the law, autistic individuals who had broken the law that is, I ought to be clear – whether there was a connection between the mens rea and actus rea. So was there a connection between the deed, if you like, itself and actually what led up to those actions. And I found some really interesting case studies of individuals who had clearly broken the last but actually the reason why they did so seemed to be very different to their non-autistic counterparts.
[00:02:52] So that is in terms of formal research. I do various other bits on other projects around things like suicidality, wellbeing, what it constitutes to actually be autistic, what people think about being autistic themselves. I am very interested in the sort of phenomenology, the lived experience of autistic individuals, and autistic wellbeing. I’m particularly obsessed with autistic wellbeing and what constitutes autistic wellbeing, what is meaningful to the autistic individual – which is why, part of the reason anyway, why I’m so excited to talk to you because I think that spills over in terms of things like friendships, what does friendship actually even mean to the autistic child, and how the lived experience of that individual is portrayed and understood; what does autistic authenticity mean to any given individual.
[00:03:37] And I am currently- One of my sort of pet obsessions is what I’ve labelled as autistic epistemology. Where does autism knowledge even come from, why is there so much misinformation in society, why does society actually believe that, and then subsequently what impact does that misinformation have on the autistic community. So this kind of spiralling effect of when we get things wrong, what that perpetuates, and how that affects the autistic individual themselves. So there is a whole range of things that I’m interested in.
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[00:04:15] Thank you, and we’re going to pick up on some of these points as we go along a little bit further and unpick those a little bit further. So I still want to keep on you for a little bit longer. You’ve recently written a book and could you tell us about that?
Luke Beardon: [00:04:29] So this is book number seven, I believe, and it’s entitled: Reasonable Adjustments for Autistic Children and I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a legal professional, I’m not in the arena of creating reasonable adjustments but this is almost like a list. It’s a bunch of chapters, nine chapters, demarking different components of society within children’s words. So things like education, for example, so schools – and just putting forward some ideas around what might be reasonable adjustments and maybe, to a certain degree, thinking outside the box, and then listing these reasonable adjustments with a narrative to go alongside them from an autism specific perspective as to why I think that they could make such an implicit different, and explicit difference, to the autistic child if we were to take them onboard.
[00:05:25] So even things that might seen incredibly simple, like how to believe the autistic voice. So many autistic children are essentially gaslit because they come out and say something and then the immediate reaction is ‘No, that’s not true’ or ‘You shouldn’t feel like that’, or ‘That’s ridiculous’, and actually the knock-on effect that as to the autistic adult is profound. So actually to me, I think that’s why something like actually at least considering that the autistic individual might have their own reality that might differ to everybody else’s should be and could be a reasonable adjustment in society.
[00:06:03] So kind of like that acknowledgement of how would you foresee somebody to respond then, when somebody says ‘I feel this’ or ‘This is what I think’? What do you think the response should be from the folks around them?
Luke Beardon: [00:06:18] I think it comes back to that concept of autistic epistemology, like why do we think what we think, and actually so many of what I refer to as the predominant neurotype have this base understanding that their own perceived experiences are the only ones. And actually within their own circle it’s relatively easy to recognise slight differences because most people do experience life in very similar ways. When it comes to autism, the whole point is that they’re individuals of a differing neurotype and for me anyway the concept of autism is all about processing and experiencing life in different ways. So by definition, you are actually processing things in a different way, including sociality, including the sensory environment, including your understanding of other people’s world view, and therefore your actual lived experience is qualitatively different to everybody else’s.
[00:07:19] Now if we don’t understand that, if society doesn’t understand that, then whatever the individual is stating of claiming or if they behave in a certain way, individuals are only going to process that through their own lens, and if that’s through a non-autistic lens then the risk is that they will get it wrong.
[00:07:40] So at the very outset it’s a case of accepting I don’t have an intuitive empathy for understanding your world view, and I think that as a stumbling block that is the very first one, and yet it’s a huge one and I refer to what I call cross-neurological theory of mind, or what Damian Milton refers to much better, in a much better way, as the double empathy problem. So often autistic people are accused, if you like, of lacking empathy or lacking an understanding of other people’s word views, but it goes both ways. Actually it goes the other way more, because autistic people have to learn other people’s world views to get on in life, whereas what I refer to as autistic courtesy quite a lot. Where is the courtesy afforded to those autistic children for other people to say actually no, my perception is different to yours. Let me join your world and try and figure things out from your perspective.
[00:08:32] But most people don’t even get to that point. Most people don’t even get to the point where there’s that acceptance that those world views might differ and until we get to that point we are always going to be at risk of disbelieving the autistic voice.
[00:08:46] Thank you, that is really, really helpful. I was actually thinking when you were talking then about saying about the autistic voice but I was also thinking about this huge spectrum, and there may be people who are on that spectrum that never have a formal diagnosis, or don’t want a formal diagnosis, but they might feel that they do process information in a different way, or they notice things that are slightly different. I was also thinking about children in particular there is these huge, long waiting lists now, or sometimes I think that there might be situations in schools where it’s not as apparent in terms of that children are processing things in a different way and that doesn’t get noted, or maybe a child doesn’t want that to be noted and I was just thinking that perhaps some of the things that you were talking about would be useful for everybody. You know, that this would benefit everybody if we had more of an acceptance and an understanding that people do think in different ways and do process things in different ways and I just wondered what you thought about that, that whole idea of we know that there’s a kind of a community, an autistic community, but there is also all these people that are sort of children, young people, adults, that they’re not identifying as in that community but they feel that their processing or their thoughts are slightly different.
Luke Beardon: [00:10:17] I think that you’re absolutely right. I think one of the things that I like to push on to anyone who will listen is that the more options there are available in any given situation the less risk there is of discrimination. And that works right across the board for almost everything that we do. So take for example communication. So we’re talking, which I one form of communication. If that was our only form of communication we would be restricted. So, all of a sudden, we’re not allowed to email or write or have a phone call and it’s all via podcast. So the more options there are available the less risk there is of discrimination.
[00:10:59] So if I’m an individual who, for example, doesn’t process verbal communication in the same way as somebody else I might be at a disadvantage if talking is the only form of communication. I did come up with a reasonable adjustment which I thought about annoyingly after I wrote the book, but this is a real-life example, exactly based on what you’re saying Caron.
[00:11:23] So one of the things that’s generally recognised within the autism field is that if we create platforms that suit the autistic child it’s going to increase the likelihood of it being beneficial to everybody, or more people, whereas the flipside is also the case. If we only suit the non-autistic child then actually it probably won’t suit other individuals. But that is almost a flippant notion that nobody really seems to buy in to and I think we should. I think we should absolutely flood education, the classroom, homelife, sociality, friendship, all of the above with a plethora or differing ways of doing things. You haven’t got the one size fits all approach. It is literally the other way around.
[00:12:04] And I was thinking what are some of the problems that some autistic children have in the classroom, just some, and I thought okay, well some children don’t process verbal communication very easily – they prefer the written form of communication. Some children really struggle to hear the teacher, because they’ve got sensory sensitivities which means that they’re picking up on all of the noise around them, so background chatter for example or the noise of the clock or people shuffling about means that I literally cannot hear what the teacher is saying, and some children of the ilk where they can’t bear being in the spotlight, so they are not going to put their hand up to ask a question.
So there is three, and I like things in sets of threes: so there is three things where they autistic child is being disadvantaged. Like literally being disadvantaged. I would say legally or unlawfully being disadvantaged, under the Equality Act, they are at a substantial disadvantage.
So we’re on Zoom at the moment, if we said all teaching is going to be via Zoom at the same time as the teacher teaching and anybody who wants to can have a laptop, have their tablet, have their phone, have their earphones – all of a sudden they are in total control of the volume of the teacher’s voice and it cuts out all the background noise, you can have captions up so you can read what the teacher is saying, and you can DM them when you’ve got a question. All of those three areas of disadvantage literally overnight at literally no cost. Now some people would say that would be really odd, that would be really weird. No. Everybody do it. it’s an option for everybody. And if 10% of the classroom do it then it becomes normalised.
[00:13:40] And I use the term ‘normalised’ deliberately. It becomes a perfectly acceptable everyday part of life. And I love that, because then the unusual becomes usual which then suits the wider neurodivergent population. And anybody then, whether identified or otherwise can use it. No problem at all.
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[00:14:06] Yeah, I really like that. And it’s probably an access and inclusion sort of scenario isn’t it really. I was thinking that sometimes – not always, but sometimes in schools there is this sort of, I don’t know whether it’s to do with the rule system, but it’s like everybody has to do this and if anybody else is doing something different then that will open the floodgates for pandemonium and chaos.
Luke Beardon: [00:14:37] Oh it’s exactly that. If you’re in school to do an inset day or something like that and you mentioned some of these things. like, for example, walking around the classroom. You’ve got an autistic child who has also got ADHD and I can absolutely demonstrate, if not prove to you, that their educational opportunities will increase if you allow them every fifteen minutes just to talk around the classroom. So, by definition, if you’re not allowing that you’re putting them at a substantial disadvantage.
[00:15:03] So the argument under The Equality Act, would it be reasonable to counter navigate that substantial disadvantage to ‘allow’, or I would argue ‘encourage’ a child to take a walk around the classroom? And I would argue that that is absolutely reasonable adjustment. So often the reaction within education is ‘Oh, but if you do that, first of all it will be really disruptive to the classroom’. No it’s not. Nobody cares. Literally nobody cares.
[00:15:27] The second argument that is often the case is ‘Well if we allow that child to do it, everyone will want to do it’ and I always come back and go ‘Interesting. If everybody does want to do it and it’s beneficial to all of those, why are you disallowing it for all of those other individuals as well? What you’re saying is that it’s good for everybody’ and then they get a bit cross with me.
[00:15:46] But it’s a fair point, and it’s not this strange revolution that if we allow everything to be different then the whole system breaks down. It’s not the case at all. There was a wonderful article written years and years and years ago by an autistic child and it’s called We Can Learn With Our Shoes Off. And it’s that principle that it’s okay to slip your shoes off when you’re learning because it actually helps and there is not going to be this breakdown of education because a child is not wearing their shoes in the classroom and that principle, I think, still hasn’t been taken onboard fully within education today. So all of those things that you said, that sort of fear of doing things differently, it is perhaps a fear of the unknown, a fear of breaking the traditional ways of doing things, but it’s a fear that shouldn’t be valid. I think it should be made invalid and actually experimenting- It goes back to exactly what I was saying. The more options there are available, the less discrimination is going to occur.
[00:16:48] I think sometimes there is this little thing as well of ‘If we let that child/those children do it then it won’t be fair to the others and they’ll think it’s unfair’ but surely it should be about developing that culture of ‘We all do different things, we all need different things’, and I think that if it’s within that culture that people understand that we have to – you know, we have all got something that we have to manage and we have to find strategies to manage it and this is what we’re all doing, you know.
Luke Beardon: [00:17:13] 100%, it’s that difference between equality and equity that people get confused about, and I know equality is used in different ways, but the equality versus equity argument states that equality is offering the same thing for all people and equity is offering the same outcome for all people, which means then what you make in terms of the offer might be different.
[00:17:43] And I think equity, well, I don’t think I know that equity is far more important than equality because if we do the same thing for everybody all the time then by definition it’s going to advantage some people more than others, which means by definition that some people will be disadvantaged. Which doesn’t seem fair.
[00:17:58] So actually doing things differently for people whose needs are different then leads to equity which in terms of equality leads to more equal outcomes, which is to be applauded.
[00:18:09] I sometimes give the example of handwriting. So if you’re an autistic child with sensory sensitivities and difficulties with proprioception and fine motor coordination, and I know plenty of children who come under this umbrella, some children also who are dyspraxia for example – so you find the sensation of holding a pencil painful to start off with. Secondly you find it takes you twice as long to write a sentence compared to somebody without those issues, and thirdly once you have even written that sentence it’s barely legible.
[00:18:47] So is that child, and it’s a rhetorical question, but is that child at a substantial disadvantage? The answer has got to be yes. They are taking twice as long as everybody else and actually the end product is nowhere near as good anyway, and they’re in pain at the same time. So is it okay to suggest teaching touch typing as opposed to teaching handwriting? And I would argue that in this day and age that touch typing is a far more useful skill than handwriting is anyway. And actually, I think that is a very, very stark example of equity over equality, as opposed to ‘Everybody has got to learn to write, and everybody has got to do it in that way’ and so on and so forth, and yet if you make those suggestions often in education people are shocked and say ‘Oh no, you can’t have one person working on a laptop and another expected to write’. It’s just different forms of communication.
[00:19:40] I’m just mindful of our timeframe but, yeah, we could have a whole conversation around that, isn’t it, because you kind of think that sometimes we have a lot of ways of working in schools that we don’t have in the workplace, so I mean hardly anybody seems to handwrite anything in the workplace nowadays, we are all on laptops, all on keyboards. So, again, it kind of doesn’t really make sense, does it.
Luke Beardon: [00:20:04] No, there is a guy in the autism field and he relates it to back in the day when cars were invented, people stopped teaching you how to ride horses, because it was no longer relevant, and I think we’re still teaching handwriting when actually it’s much less relevant in today’s modern age compared to, for example as you say, using laptops.
[00:20:26] It’s really useful. I know that we haven’t talked that much about friendship yet but I think that it’s almost useful to kind of have this conversation before we get to friendship, because I think that’s really important.
[00:20:37] So we have used the term autism, and I know you’ve used the term neurodivergent, so could you define neurodivergent for the listeners?
Luke Beardon: [00:20:46] Hah, right okay. So people get confused between the difference between neurodiversity and neurodivergence. So neurodiversity is everybody, in the same way that biodiversity is everything in terms of the natural world. So to state that one person is neurodiverse is grammatically incorrect, but a lot of people do it.
[00:21:04] So there is the concept of neurodiversity, which is the broadest, the totality of the ways in which brains work in the world. So the collective of individuals are neurodiverse, and most people will operate cognitively in a similar style. If you operate in a qualitatively different style, so say for example you have ADHD or you’re autistic or dyspraxic then you would be regarded, or you could be regarded, as being neurodivergent.
[00:21:36] And then there are lots of sub-labels of neurodivergency. So I’ve mentioned some already. Being autistic does not make you dyspraxic, for example, nor vice versa, but there will be some overlaps, but being autistic does make you neurodivergent. So all autistic people will be neurodivergent, but not all neurodivergent will be autistic.
[00:21:56] That’s great, thank you for clarifying that, I think that is really important.
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[00:22:01] The next question is slightly related to that and we’re getting towards our friendship conversation now. So I believe that you’ve got a view about diverging sociality. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
Luke Beardon: [00:22:17] So I think, and again my friend is autism, but I think actually they philosophies or concepts within the autism field are parallel, or could be taken in to account when it comes to broader neurodivergent populations, so I do think that it’s relevant. I suspect that autistic individuals and neurodivergent individuals develop in ways which mean that there is an increased chance of having a differing typology of sociality. By which I mean their understanding of the generic ways in which people socialise might be different. So that is when autistic individuals particularly when they first start engaging in social situations, say for example a pre-school or a primary, they find it confusing, whereas lots of other kids just seem to seamlessly gel together and understand what I refer to as those unwritten rules of social engagement. Nobody actually teaches them, but they are just there and it’s not a problem. Whereas with lots of autistic individuals it’s like ‘I don’t get. Why are they engaging like that, why are they talking like that? Why are they interacting like that?’. It’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that they are then often at a disadvantage.
So I think an understanding that social community of the non-autistic individuals, or non-neurodivergent individuals can be problematic but that doesn’t mean to say that neurodivergent individuals are non-social, and sometimes people are branded as ‘Oh, well if you’re autistic that means you don’t like friend or you don’t like people’ or whatever, which is an absolute nonsense. I think there is probably the same spectrum of sociability within the autism population as there is in the non-autism population. So there are non-autistic people who don’t have any friends and are not interested in people in the same was as there are autistic people who absolutely love going to parties, or whatever it might be, and everything in between. But actual sociality, in terms of what you get out of social relationships might differ in terms of how they present and the lived experience.
[00:24:21] So, for example, an autistic person might have fewer relationships compared to other people, and not understand, no, not understand, erm, it not be relevant to them, the concept of an acquaintance. So it’s like ‘Oh, I’ve got lots of acquaintances which I put in the bracket of I will perhaps have a coffee with them’ whereas the autistic person is ‘I either really want to engage with you, or I’m not bothered at all’, which I think is equally as valid and actually sometimes those autistic people, it’s like if you want to go for a coffee with them, surely you want to be married to them? It’s this sort of all or nothing. And I’m not saying all autistic people are like that by any way at all, not in a million years. What I’m saying is that is one example of sociality that might differ between the neurodivergent individual and the non-neurodivergent population.
[00:25:16] I’m not going to put words in your mouth but this is all seeming to be around ‘don’t make assumptions’, would you say?
Luke Beardon: 100%. Absolutely 100%. I got in to trouble – and I still to this day don’t know why. Something that I wrote got published in a bunch of newspapers and all I was writing was if somebody tells you that they’re autistic you don’t know anything about that person apart from the fact that they’re autistic. That is literally all of the knowledge that you have – and people wrote to me saying ‘You clearly don’t understand about autism’ but anyway, that’s another story. My point being is that you genuinely can have no prior assumed knowledge about somebody being autistic. Literally you cant. It’s like saying ‘I’m 53’, ‘Oh, well that must mean your knees are knackered’ or whatever, and it’s like you can’t make that assumption. All you know is I’m 53. That is all you know about me.
[00:26:17] Similarly when you absolutely rightly say you can’t make assumptions, I would go as far as to say, actually the opposite. Try and force yourself not to make assumptions because often people do hear that word and it goes back to autistic epistemology. People hear that word and go ‘Ah, that must mean X Y Z’. The sooner that we stop ourselves from doing that, the most we will increase the likelihood of going back to what I was saying earlier around autistic courtesy. ‘Great, your autistic, thank you so much for sharing. Right, that doesn’t mean anything to me because I don’t know who you are, let’s work it out together what that means to you and then I’ll take that onboard’.
[00:26:56] Yes, how nice would that be, if somebody said that to you. ‘Thanks for that, but I don’t know anything about you yet, let’s take some time to get to know you and what you’re interested in. How nice that would be.
Luke Beardon: [00:27:12] And actually the opposite tends to happen and, without wishing to get too dark about it, when the opposite happens when you’re essentially gaslit by people going ‘Oh, well that must mean X Y Z’ and the child or the adult is thinking ‘Well no, that isn’t me, but why are you telling me that that’s my reality, even though I’ve only just met you?’, those are the sorts of things that can lead to trauma later on in life. In terms of ‘Well, am I who I thought I was, or am I supposed to believe that person in a position of responsibility because they’re my teacher and they’re telling me ‘Oh no, you definitely can’t do that/mustn’t do that’, or if you’re autistic this means X Y Z, and that questioning of your own authenticity can really destroy a child. That genuinely can destroy the confidence of a child, their self-identity, their authenticity, their voice.
[00:28:05] I’ve known individual who have become unable to speak due to the fear of the fact that whenever they have been able to speak or they’ve said something they get shut down, or they are told that’s not true, or that’s ridiculous or that’s nonsense. So the individual is like ‘Okay, I will just withdraw then’ as a direct result of exactly what you’re saying, of people making assumptions that are erroneous.
[00:28:29] Yeah, that is something to reflect on, it really is. So talking about friendships, and I know that we’ve probably talked a little bit about this already but can you talk to us about your work and how it relates to children’s friendships? It might be that you’ve done some research and you’ve thought- I almost think that it’s one of those areas where you might not be researching children’s friendships, or even adult’s friendship but that comes up, or it just appears so could you tell us a little bit about that?
Luke Beardon: [00:28:58] Yeah, well I was going to say ‘interestingly’. I think it’s interesting and I will leave that up to you and your listeners, but what I found interesting in terms of doing the research on crime was how many of those individuals ended up in trouble as a direct result of being told ‘If you do this, I will be your friend’. And those individuals hitherto had not really understood necessarily how to make friendships but craved them, and it’s like all of a sudden here is a ready-made friend. All I need to do is go and sell these drugs that they’ve told me to sell and then they would say not only will I be your friend but our whole gang will be your friend.
[00:29:37] So all of a sudden you’ve gone from perhaps being quite lonely and not understanding this chaotic social work around you to having a whole bunch of very cool people all of a sudden being your friend. That is a real case example of somebody that I worked with who became the local dealer who craved friendship to the point that anybody who showed any kind of friendly tendency, he would do everything in his power to make them happy. So when the local dealers, who presumably were exploiting his vulnerability, say ‘Oh yeah, go and deal for us’ he was perfect. Until he then got arrested and the police were very friendly and so he tried to make friends with the police, and his way of making friends with the police was giving them a whole list of names and addresses of the people who were asking him to deal drugs.
[00:30:25] The worrying thing was he saw no reason then to not go back to the drug dealers as if nothing was wrong, because in his eyes he had done nothing wrong. So actually, the concept of friendship runs throughout probably almost all research, whether you know it or not. A lot of the work that I’ve been doing recently with adults around what does it mean to be autistic to you, people will refer to social relationships and/or friendships, as in ‘Oh, I made friends but they misunderstood what I was saying to them’, or I misunderstood what they were saying. And actually it goes back to that double empathy. It was a clash of neurotypes that caused the conflict, not the fact that somebody was autistic and they were then blamed for ‘Oh no, you misunderstood it’. No, it’s just a clash of communication.
[00:31:13] I think it’s fascinating. There was an autobiography that I read and I was absolutely blown away, and this is someone who is married. She always found relationships difficult, not because she didn’t want relationships but because there always seemed to be a clash and she learnt an amazing process with her husband when they were having an argument, she would say ‘Stop. We need to think about this. Are we having an argument because we’re disagreeing, or are you having an argument because I’m autistic and you’re not?’ and there is a difference between the two – and I just thought that was amazing.
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[00:31:44] So again, I’m going to ask you this question but now I don’t know whether this is the right question to be asking you, in light of the conversation that we’ve had. So the question was what do you think friendship means to neurodivergent children?
Luke Beardon: [00:32:00] I think it means exactly the same as it means to non-neurodivergent children, because there is that heterogeneity of the populations and there is always going to be some crossovers, but I think that there is often a qualitative difference in terms of the duration that individuals are willing to or want to engage. So that can be ‘Well I can cope with you, you’re being a really good friend, but only for five minutes a day’. And then you could have the opposite of ‘I really, really want to be friends for you for a year and now I’m not bothered, I’ve had my fill of you and then I’ll move on’. So both those examples are, I would argue, quite qualitatively different compared to non-neurodivergent sociality, but I think that they’re perfectly valid. I think that they should be perfectly valid, just because it’s unusual it doesn’t mean to say that it’s any less valid for that individual. So I think the ways in which friendship patterns play out are probably the differences, not the emotional connection you have with the individual and not the wish to engage with them, not the wish to help them out and all those sorts of things.
[00:33:06] That is the other thing that does come up very commonly in research is autistic people themselves will say I make a brilliant friend. Maybe not at the outset because I may not be the most gregarious or I might not be the one who is organising the party or whatever, but whenever you’re in crisis, whenever my friends are in crisis I’m the one that they turn to, over and over and over again, and I will do everything I can to problem solve on behalf of that individual.
[00:33:28] So sometimes in terms of friendship groups, neurodivergent individuals have an incredibly valid and important role to play that might not be the usual role that people might expect of a non-neurodivergent individual but, as I say, that isn’t across the board and so I wouldn’t be making claims right across the whole population, but I do think that there are potential differences.
[00:33:50] Yes, that is really interesting, isn’t it. And I was just thinking about that idea when you said about the timing and about how long you might want to socialise or might want to be with a friend, and I was thinking about young children and how often they have sleepovers and things like that and sometimes it will be like everybody meet up at two o’clock in the afternoon and then we will do an activity and then we will have tea and then we will have a sleepover and sometimes that idea of how do you manage that without offending a friend? I don’t want a sleepover, I will have had my fill after a couple of hours, and how you sort of manage that as a neurodivergent-
I mean that will be something that sometimes is a bit tricky for adults, about how you sort of navigate that and how you manage that, and even things like scouts and rainbows and beavers, they have sleepovers and they have things like this. And how would you manage that as the parents of a neurodivergent child. Do you make up an excuse, or all of that sort of thing about how you manage it is tricky, isn’t it.
Luke Beardon: [00:35:00] 100% and I was going to say I don’t want to go on about it, but I do. It comes back to that autistic courtesy of how much is afforded to you as the autistic child, as the autistic family, as the parent of the autistic child. It’s unbelievably rare to come across that courtesy. It’s so rare that somebody comes to you and says ‘This is an environment that you might want us to do things different’, and I’m not even going to say this is an environment that you might struggle in, because again that puts the onus and responsibility on you and you’re the one in the wrong, your child needs to whatever. So no, none of that. ‘This is the way that we normally do things, this is the way that most of the kids who we know that come over to our sleepover like doing things. I recognise you might have different needs, you might have different ways of doing things which is equally as valid. How can we incorporate those?’ and that is so unbelievably joyous to be exposed to that because it’s so rare. Once you have got that dialogue, everybody wins. Like literally everybody wins, because everybody then starts learning about the difference between being neurodivergent and non-neurodivergent and everybody begins to realise that once they’ve had the sleepover and, for example, the autistic child has slept in their own room or they’ve got their own space that they can go to and everybody else is quite happy to be all together for the whole night, and everybody wakes up in the morning and goes ‘That was fine. Just because things were done slightly differently – not a problem. Absolutely fine’. I’ve been to birthday parties where the birthday child themselves, who is autistic, is upstairs on their own. That is absolutely fine. They’re having a whale of a time upstairs on their own knowing that everybody else is gathered on their behalf, and everybody else is having a whale of a time. Then they come down, everybody sings happy birthday, and they go back upstairs. Job done.
And everybody, at a young age particularly, being exposed to different ways of doing things and realising that they work for everybody is a gorgeous way forward for the next generation, and everybody learns that little bit more about differing sociality. So I think that concept of autistic courtesy is really crucial.
[00:37:06] So just picking up on that a little bit, so say if I was a parent of a five year old and I might know that somebody in my child’s friendship group is autistic, but I might not, so I might just have- Again, not making any assumptions or whatever, so in theory we probably should be doing that all of the time regardless of whether we know somebody is autistic or not autistic. We should be thinking we are putting on this scenario, is that going to work for everybody and let’s have this conversation with everybody and what do you prefer, what suits you best? Do you know what I mean?
Luke Beardon: [00:37:43] I totally agree, and if more people did that and that became the norm, then you would be the odd one out if you didn’t. So say for example we’re saying ‘There’s going to be balloons a this party and we know that some people struggle with balloons because they’re unpredictable and they pop and that can be quite frightening, so if you’re one of those individuals, any of them, you can get your mum to anonymously let us know and we will make sure that we have balloons in a different room and there is always going to be room in the house where there are going to be no balloons at all’. Just as an example.
And if on the invitation that was to everybody you’re not singling any individual out, so it’s not a problem. And I think that you can do that as an employer, as an academic for your student, as a teacher for your kids, as a parent when you’re involving other kids. If it became literally the norm to say everybody’s different, everybody has got different needs, I recognise what some of those needs are but actually I might have missed some stuff out so if you’ve got specific needs I haven’t thought of, like you need to bring your own cutlery because you can’t bear the thought of eating off of somebody else’s knife and fork, bring your own cutlery, that is absolutely fine.
[00:38:49] Actually that is quite a big one. Sometimes autistic kids go to other people’s parties and can’t eat. We are basically denying them a basic human right, because we haven’t taken their eating in to account. Do you need to bring your own food, have you got sensory sensitivities around smells of foods. Do you need to eat in the corner on your own? Whatever it might be. And again just flooding the invitation or flooding the environments for all of these different ways of doing things – everybody is a winner.
[00:39:14] Yes, that sounds great. It reminds me of when you used to knock on the door of somebody’s house when you were younger and my nightmare was if they had a big, barking dog, you know, and you would knock on the door and then you would hear this dog and you’d think ‘Oh nooo, they have a dog and I’m going to have to go in there and it’s going to jump at me’ [#laughter]
Luke Beardon: [00:39:33] And I still have that problem. My problem is the opposite. If someone has got a dog I would much prefer to lie on the floor and sniff the dog than converse with them, so I have to fight against that a bit.
[00:39:45] Oh that’s brilliant. So we are coming to our final couple of questions now. I think we’ve talked a little bit about the sort of support, so I think what I’m really interested in is thinking about schools, mainly schools I think, but how do we support neurodivergent children with friendship, do you think? If I was like an early years practitioner or I was a teacher what should we be doing and how should we be supporting neurodivergent children with friendship?
Luke Beardon: [00:40:18] Well I think it’s a gorgeous question and I think, to a certain degree, you’ve answered it yourself in terms of no assumption of prior knowledge. So don’t make the assumption that the child wants to be forced in to friendship, or that we even have an understanding of what their concept of friendship is or what their needs or wants actually are. So the first port of call goes back to finding out what it is that they want while recognising that that might change tomorrow or next term, or next year. Or when they change from one class to another. Whatever that might be. So having an ongoing discussion about want are your needs at this current time, and then subsequently working out how can we meet those needs.
[00:40:54] It’s easier to say what not to do, to a certain degree, so I’m very against the concept of conformity for the sake of conformity, but unfortunately that’s very often the case. If you want friends you’ve got to behave like this. ‘You need to develop your social skills’, by which people actually mean you need to develop your predominant neurotype social skills. You might have wonderful autistic social skills, but all of a sudden the message that you’re getting is that’s not good enough, which means that you’re not good enough, yours a lesser human being and you’ve got to be more like everybody else. And that just causes trauma, or that increases risk of trauma – being told subliminally, constantly, on a day-to-day basis – your way of doing things is not good enough. So not making a child feel bad because they might not necessarily want loads of friends. Not making a child feel bad because they don’t want to go out in to the playground. I’ve heard that so many times, ‘You’ve got to go in to the playground’ and I might be terrified. So what you’re saying is I’ve got to go and be terrified, and that is the message that you’re giving me. ‘No, you’ve got to go and play with other kids otherwise how will you ever learn’, so I’ve got to a) go and be terrified, b) work out how to engage with these other individuals, and c) then being rejected because I don’t really understand the social rules of engagement, and I’ve got to do that, what, three times a day for the rest of my school life, because I’m not good enough. As opposed to someone going ‘Yeah, no, it’s perfectly okay to go to the library, that’s fine, if you would like a bit of company we know someone else who likes going to the library, they don’t like talking either. So you can sit next to each other and work on your computers and socialise without saying a single word’.
[00:42:28] I’ve got an autistic friend and every time I link up with them I contact them the night before saying ‘Just remember, we can spend the entire day together without saying a single word’ and that then leads them in to being able to engage with me for the whole day, otherwise the expectation of having to converse is too much and that would spoil everything.
[00:42:45] Oh that’s fantastic. Thank you. That is really, really helpful. I wanted to just ask you now in terms of just summing up if you would have any take home messages or questions or reflections you would like the listener to take away from the podcast in terms of this conversation that we’ve had?
Luke Beardon: [00:43:05] Well it would be remiss of me, and I’m amazed that I’ve got this far without saying it because normally I blurt it out within seconds of doing any kind of podcast or interview or conference. I’ve got what I refer to as the self—professed golden equation which is always autism + environment = outcome. And far too often the onus of responsibility is on the autistic individual to change, in order to subsequently change the outcome, and I vehemently disagree with that. I think actually we need to be changing the environment if we want to change the outcome. So if our outcome is centred around autistic wellbeing in a generic sense, which in my view it always should be, and obviously friendship is a component of that, if the outcome is good autistic wellbeing and currently it’s not, then we’ve got to look at the environment and what do we need to change about the environment in order to change the outcome, and very often by environment, we mean us. So what are we doing wrong in engaging with that individual that means that the outcome is not good autistic wellbeing.
[00:44:15] If you wanted to read more about it I’ve written about it in more detail, about what the environment actually entails around concept of self, other people’s sensory environments, social environment, emotional environment. All of those policies at schools, the law, all of those sorts of things. Absolutely the take away is being autistic, there is nothing wrong with being autistic, nothing fundamentally wrong with being autistic, however lots of autistic people are highly anxious and have low wellbeing and therefore if you accept autism + environment = outcome, we are getting it wrong.
[00:44:47] That is really great, and when you just said there about here is some stuff you’ve written about on the environment, I will attach this to the podcast, because I know there will be a lot of people who want to look at this, and I think that there is often a lot of people out there who want to help but they just don’t know what to do, or they don’t know what to say, or they’re worried about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, and I think what you’ve said today around not making assumptions, having that dialogue, what do you need at the moment, at this moment in time; all of that sort of thing I think is really going to help, so I really appreciate you talking to me about this today. Thank you.
Luke Beardon: [00:45:26] Even more thanks to you for giving me the space to talk. It’s been a real honour, thank you.
[00:45:30] Thanks for listening. For more information on Caron’s research and other podcasts in this series, please visit https://research.shu.ac.uk/friends This podcast was made possible and funded by Sheffield Hallam University. [music playing]
[end of recording]
Sacha Powell is the Chief Executive Officer of the Froebel Trust – a charity that works across the UK and internationally to promote and advance 
Professor Tina Bruce CBE is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Roehampton where she was Head of the Froebel Nursery Research School and then Director of the Centre for Early Childhood Studies. She studied at the Froebel Educational Institute (which has since become part of the University of Roehampton) at London University and at Manchester University where she trained to work with children with hearing impairments.
Dr Stella Louis is an internationally renowned freelance Early Years consultant, trainer, and author, who has worked with individual nursery settings, parents, nursery schools, local authorities, governments, and charities all over the world.