If you work with children in foster care, you already know they arrive carrying so much. Neglect, loss, separation, the kind of upheaval most of us would struggle to cope with as adults. What we don’t always hold in mind is that a lot of these same children are neurodivergent too. Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, dyspraxic, or simply wired in a way that means the world reaches them differently. And when a child is carrying both of those things at once, something happens that genuinely upsets me. They get misunderstood, over and over, by the very people who are trying to help them.
I come at this from a few directions. I’m a former head teacher and SENCO, I coach and tutor, and my family fosters. But I also come at it as someone who spent most of her life being that misunderstood child. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 49 and autistic at 51. For all the years before that, I just thought I kept getting life wrong. I felt too much and not enough at the same time, and I never had the words to explain why everything seemed so much harder for me than it looked for everyone around me. I don’t tell you that for sympathy. I tell you because it’s exactly why I spot these children so quickly now, and why I care so much about them being understood while they’re still young enough for it to change the shape of their lives.
There’s a question I hear a lot in meetings. Is this trauma, or is it neurodivergence? I understand why we reach for it. But, honestly, it tends to send us hunting for one neat answer when the truth is messier, and kinder, than that. Most of the time, it’s both. So the question I’ve trained myself to ask instead is a softer one, and I think a far more useful one. What is this child trying to tell me, and what would help them feel safe enough to show me?
What foster carers get to see
My family were approved as foster carers in February 2024. We’ve cared for one young man with ADHD and trauma for the past year. We give respite to an AuDHD teenager in the holidays and on some weekends, and short breaks to a little boy with autism and complex needs, so his mum can have the rest she so deserves. Every child we foster is neurodivergent, and living alongside them has taught me things no training course ever could. In a classroom or a therapy session you catch one slice of a child’s day. As a carer, you see the whole of it. Bedtime. That fragile hour after school when everything they’ve held together all day comes tumbling out. The build-up to contact. The moment the sensory load tips over. And the quiet times too, when you finally meet the child underneath all the coping.
My own neurodivergence doesn’t hand me a magic key to any child. Every single one is different. What it does give me is a head start on noticing. The masking. The overwhelm. The executive functioning that can look, from the outside, like a child who just isn’t trying. The one who isn’t being difficult at all but is quietly going under. The one who seems absolutely fine, and is in fact holding it together at enormous cost, and who will pay for that later, at home.
Behaviour is communication
If there’s one thing I’d love every professional to carry with them, it’s this. Behaviour is communication. It really is. Almost nothing a child does is random, and, I promise you, very little of it is truly about you.
I won’t pretend that’s always easy to hold on to. Fostering a neurodivergent child will test you. When a child lies straight to your face, or takes something that isn’t theirs, or pushes you away at the exact moment you’re reaching for them, it is so human to feel hurt by it. I’ve felt it myself. The work, and it really is work, is to pause and remember that the behaviour is not the whole child. It’s almost always an attempt to manage anxiety, hold on to a little control, escape shame, or stay safe from feelings they can’t yet put into words.
This is where the PACE approach has helped me more than any behaviour chart I’ve ever used. Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy. It keeps you beside the child instead of squaring up against them. Curiosity turns “why are you doing this to me?” into “I wonder what’s going on underneath this?” Acceptance doesn’t mean letting unsafe or unkind behaviour slide. It means treating the child’s feelings as real, because they are. Add steady, predictable boundaries, and a genuine willingness to repair things when they go wrong, and slowly children learn there are gentler, safer ways to tell us what they need.
And here’s something we don’t say nearly often enough, especially to carers. You matter in this too. You have a Window of Tolerance, exactly like the child does. You cannot pour calm into a frightened child when your own tank is empty. Resting, forgiving yourself for the hard days, being as kind to yourself as you’re trying to be to them, none of that is a luxury or a weakness. It’s part of how you keep turning up. The shift I try to hold, especially on the difficult days, is away from “what’s wrong with this child?” and towards “what happened to them, how do their brain and body take in the world, and what would make all of this a little more manageable?”
Why safety in a relationship takes time
None of this works without relational safety, and with these children it takes longer to build than people expect. For a lot of care-experienced children, the adults in their lives have been frightening, or absent, or there one week and gone the next. So they test us. They push help away before it can be taken from them. They behave as though they need no one at all. Neurodivergent children may also show closeness in their own way: less eye contact, sitting beside you rather than facing you, needing to go quiet, finding it hard to name a feeling. Please read that as their style, not as them rejecting you.
Relational safety isn’t a soft, anything-goes kind of care. It’s predictable, warm, boundaried care. It’s doing what you said you’d do. It’s explaining the routine rather than just imposing it. It’s coming back and putting things right after a rupture. And it’s accepting that a child might need to watch you respond safely many, many times before any of it starts to feel like trust. For schools and clinicians, that’s also why talking properly with foster carers, social workers, virtual school heads and therapists isn’t an added extra. It’s the heart of the work.
Diane Frainer is a former head teacher and SENCO, now a coach, tutor and foster carer with a particular interest in neurodivergent children and young people. She co-hosts The Neurodivergent Nook, a podcast exploring ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and cognitive difference through lived, educational and therapeutic experience.
