Ep 216: ADHD & Executive Function: What Matters More Than Grades (Part 1) — with Mike McLeod

In this episode of Your Child Is Normal, Dr. Jessica Hochman talks with Mike McLeod about ADHD, executive function, and why grades are not the best predictor of long-term success.

Mike explains why ADHD is less about “attention” and more about missing internal skills — including self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, and self-evaluation — and how those skills show up at home through homework battles, emotional conflict, and daily routines.

In Part 1, we cover:

• Why executive function predicts real-life success more than grades
• The “internal skills” behind ADHD behaviors
• Why home is often harder than school for kids with ADHD
• How homework can toxify the parent-child relationship — and what to do instead
• Why real-life experiences matter more than lectures and worksheets

About Mike McLeod:
Mike McLeod is the founder of Grow Now ADHD. He has ADHD himself and began his career as a speech and language pathologist, focused on improving children’s quality of life. He developed the Grow Now Internal Skills Model and provides executive functioning coaching and fully personalized parent training. Grow Now has expanded to multiple locations across the U.S. and also works with families virtually around the world. Mike also provides professional development training to schools and school districts, and he shares that his Executive Functioning Playbook books are scheduled for release in January (this month!).

Please refer to the GrowNow ADHD website for more information!  grownowadhd.com

Your Child is Normal is the trusted podcast for parents, pediatricians, and child health experts who want smart, nuanced conversations about raising healthy, resilient kids. Hosted by Dr. Jessica Hochman — a board-certified practicing pediatrician — the show combines evidence-based medicine, expert interviews, and real-world parenting advice to help listeners navigate everything from sleep struggles to mental health, nutrition, screen time, and more.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Hi everyone. I am Dr Jessica Hochman, and welcome back to your child as normal. I hope you've all had a really relaxing winter break with your families. Now, today's episode feels especially fitting for the your child is normal theme. There are many kids out there who struggle with school and homework, and for many families, parenting children with ADHD especially can feel exhausting and confusing. So I'm really excited to introduce to you Mike McLeod, founder of grow now ADHD. Mike has built a coaching model focused on the internal skills that drive executive function. And he also has two books that are being released this month, the executive functioning playbook for parents and teachers and a companion workbook. So in this episode, we zoom out and we talk about the real goal. And I'll give you a hint, it's not about your child getting straight A's. Mike explains why executive function is one of the strongest predictors of long term success, and why so many well intentioned families end up stuck in daily homework battles. I know this perspective will be helpful for a lot of families, so let's get into it. Mike McLeod, thank you so much for being here. I cannot tell you how excited I am to talk to you and shout from the rooftops about what you are doing and what you've created. Thank you so much. It is definitely a pleasure to be here, a privilege to be here. I was so happy to get a message from you to join big fan of your work and all the great stuff you're doing. So yeah, I'm really excited to chat. So I'm so curious. Just to start off, how did you become so motivated to do the work that you're doing with executive function and coaching? Sure, so I am someone who has ADHD myself and has dealt with all the issues that come along with ADHD my entire life. But overall, I started my career as a speech and language pathologist. I always knew I wanted to work directly with students on actually improving quality of life. The majority of my life. I wanted to be a teacher, but then I ended up working at this residential treatment facility in New York, which was a very large campus where kids lived full time on that campus, and there was also a school on the campus, so they were not living at home. They were living there. It was a residential facility, and I learned about speech pathology from working there, that it was more one to one, not academic based. It was all focused on improving quality of life. So from there, I went back and got my second bachelor's in speech pathology. Got my master's in speech and then I worked as a speech pathologist for an entire year, and it was a great experience. You know, most people think speech pathologists just do things like articulation and stuttering and sounds, but there's a whole language and social and quality of life aspect of Speech Pathology, which was awesome. And during my time as a speech pathologist, I ended up working with national nonprofit that worked with boys with chromosomal disorders and various issues. And it turned out the majority of those boys also had ADHD, and I learned very quickly that there's really nothing out there for these kids. There's there's no real treatment, no real hope for the families and all these parents are being sent to all these therapies and programs that aren't helping, like cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy and counseling and play therapy things that aren't real recommendations. So I took a lot of the work of Dr Russell Barkley, Dr George McCloskey, Dr Ned Hallowell, Sarah Ward and all the great pioneers of this field. And I developed the grown out internal skills model. We did a year long research study on it, and then everything really expanded from there. How long have you been doing it, since 2016 and have you found that there's a great need for what you're doing, a huge need, yeah, grown out has expanded quite quickly. So it literally started with me renting a room in a clinic with an occupational therapist and a physical therapist. I was there just literally using one room, and it was just me seeing kids literally from 8am to 8pm Monday through Friday, back to back to back to back, and then eventually it expanded to the point where I've needed to train other coaches and begin the grow now training program. It's hard to bring people on, and it started with one small room of just me, and now there's grow now, Philadelphia grow now. New York grow now. Los Angeles grow now North Carolina. So we have locations all across the country, and virtually we work with families all around the world. It's really amazing, really commendable, and you're doing such great work. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. And okay, so you'd mentioned that traditional CBT therapy, traditional therapies you found weren't really working. So what exactly are you doing with families that is making such an impact? Well, the number one thing we're doing is the most number one, most evidence based recommendation for ADHD and executive functioning, which is parent training. So most people still think that ADHD is this attention disorder that affects you at school, and executive functions are just time management and organization needed. For school, which is the smallest fraction of what ADHD and executive functions truly are. Executive functioning is the greatest predictor of success for human beings. Period a greater predictor of success than your your grades, your GPA, your homework, output, any of those things. If you have executive functioning skills, you can move out of your parents house, get a job, keep a job, make friends and keep friends, which, overall, we're not really seeing work too well for today's generation of youth. We're definitely seeing them struggle and failure to launch becoming a very popular term for this generation. So that's becoming a real big problem. So overall, it's really the home and with the parents, where you see the majority of ADHD symptoms, or a little bit over 50% of ADHD kids do pretty well at school, because they respond very well to the structure and the conditional relationships at school. Home is unstructured with unconditional relationships, and Home is where the parents are, and Home is where the screens are. And if there's two things the ADHD brain is constantly seeking out, it's conflict and screens. And who better to get conflict from than mom and dad, lots of conflict from there and also seeking out those screens. So the home and parent training, because you can't parent an ADHD kid the way you would a neurotypical kid. Parenting a child with ADHD requires its own separate playbook when you're talking about executive function. Just so everybody's clear. Can you explain what that is sure? So everyone thinks that executive functioning is just time management, organization, messy backpacks, messy folders. That is an incredibly small fraction of what ADHD is. ADHD is a set of four internal skills that create all of those external symptoms that everybody thinks about. So the first executive skill is self awareness, and being able to be aware of how the things you do and the things you say affect yourself and affect others. You're self aware. You realize, hey, I have an impact on my world around me. I send people messages. People send me messages. The things I do, the things I say, the choices I make, affect me and affect others. So it's a real social aspect there, and as well as understanding cause and effect, past and present. So self awareness is the first executive skill. The next is the big one, self regulation. And that's really what it is. It's not Attention Deficit Disorder, it is self regulation Deficit Disorder. It's not hyperactivity. It's an inability to regulate your body. It's not inattentiveness, it's an inability to regulate your mind. So the ability to regulate your emotions, your language, your body, your behavior in various environments towards various stimuli, that is a huge piece of it. So the ability to regulate oneself, if you have a child with ADHD, that's the number one thing you see is a dysregulation and an inability to regulate oneself, which is why they're constantly seeking screens and conflict for instant gratification. Number three is self motivation towards non preferred and non screen based tasks. Can they motivate themselves to do homework? Can they motivate themselves to brush their teeth? Can they motivate themselves to take a shower? Can they motivate themselves to go outside? Can they motivate themselves to join an after school activity or club and do things that don't offer instant gratification? Or do you, as the parent constantly have to dangle a carrot over their head to get them to do very basic tasks then self evaluation, which is the ability to learn from past experiences and apply it to the present, so you're not repeating the same mistakes over and over. So for decades, we thought executive functioning was just messy folders, messy backpacks. Get them in an executive functioning class. We'll color code everything, we'll organize everything. And all that was doing was keeping those kids prompt dependent on that class and on that teacher running that class, it wasn't teaching any actual skills, because, think about it, you're going to have a messy backpack unless you're first self aware that that's even a problem. Then you have to be regulated and motivated enough to be able to do that incredibly boring task of cleaning a backpack. Then you have to be able to self evaluate and think, hey, in two periods, I'm going to be in science class. She's going to ask me to take out my lab notebook. Everyone's going to do it right away and be ready. And I'm going to be the one person with dirty, crinkled papers for 15 minutes not finding my lab notebook. I'm not going to like the way that feels, so I better do something about it now. So for decades, we thought it was external, external symptoms, messy backpacks, messy folders, hyperactivity, inattentiveness. Now we know it's the missing internal skills that create those external symptoms, so I want to unpack some of what you just said there. The first being that grades are not a predictor of real life success, and I really want parents to hear this, because I. Talked to a lot of families where they share there's a lot of conflict at home over homework, over grades, and parents are frustrated. They're fighting with their kids because they don't want to sit down to do the homework, and it's stressful, because I think parents put a lot of weight on homework, and they'll get feedback from the teachers that there's missing assignments, that they're getting zeros. And so I think parents hearing that grades don't really predict success in the future will help take the weight off of it at home, which I think is really important to hear. Yeah. So I put up a post last week that basically gave two different scenarios, where you have child, a who comes home from school and, you know, relaxes in front of the TV for an hour, and then after a 1520 minute argument, they get their homework done, then they earn their screens, and they're on screens the rest of the evening until they go to sleep. And that child is getting A's and B's at school. Student B comes home from school and immediately goes outside and hangs out with a large group of peers, and they're riding bikes and they're playing in the woods, and they're going to the park and they're playing they're playing sports. He does his homework sometimes, and he gets B's, C's and D's at school out of student A and Student B, who really has these stronger executive functioning skills, who is going to be more prepared for life after high school when that IEP 504, is gone, and they now have that diploma, and It's sink or swim, because there's no greater period of life, no greater jump where executive functions are needed more than 12th grade, senior year to freshman year of college, America leads the world in first semester college dropouts. For a reason, because you can go 12 years of school where everything is just grades, grades, grades, then all of a sudden, you're a freshman at college, and who's there to say, Wake up, get to class on time, set office hours, check your school email, go to the library for three hours and leave your phone in the dorms. Don't Doom scroll all night long and get no sleep and just eat snacks all day long. So that's really the big problem there is we don't put enough focus on what really helps, we tend to think that kids gain skills and kids learn through lectures and worksheets and just sitting there and listening. Executive functioning skills are the most important set of skills for any human being to develop, and they are developed through relationships and experiences, meeting as many different people as possible and having as many different experiences as possible, and we have stolen those things from childhood by giving kids too many screens before their brains are ready for it, and they become addicted. And parents get so caught up in homework and grades because it makes them feel good as a parent, oh, my child's doing so well at school, my child's getting good grades when, hey, we live in this era of AI and in all of this nonsense, you know, school is pretty outdated with all of this stuff. You know, all of us adults, we're able to look back and realize on a daily basis how often we actually use the things we learned in high school. And it's pretty minimum. So things like the trades need a better appreciation. You know, going to college is not the only recipe for success, but really, give me the kid that does an activity, a sport, a club every single day after school. Give me the kid that's out and about around their neighborhood and can leave the house at 10 o'clock in the morning and know to get home in time for lunch, and know to check in with you and know how to get home without a GPS, give me that kid over the homework kid any day of the week. So I think this is a helpful reminder, because for parents listening, I think it's great to hear that we want to encourage our kids to do more activities out of the home, play a sport, get involved in something that's beyond homework. I mean, I can speak for myself as a mom of three kids who, yes, it would be great to do something like home school my kids, but the reality is, I can't, I go to work and I send my kids to traditional school, and I do think it's hard, because from what I'm understanding, the way that kids learn best is from doing the thing, from actually experiencing a real life activity. And when they're in school, you're right. A lot of hours a day are spent on a laptop. They're doing worksheets, they're listening to a lecture, and they're stressed about a test that's going to come up on the lectures that they've been listening to. And I think about myself when I was in school, those skills, I don't use them at all in my workplace, and it doesn't serve me with how productive I am at work. And so I guess what I'm is how to advise parents on what to do when they don't all have the option of homeschooling, and we do live in a society where schools are outdated. Well, number one, you have to relinquish control over this homework. Too many parents are allowing homework to fully toxify their relationship with their child, and homework is never worth it. There's a great book called The homework myth. I recommend more parents read that show that homework is not correlated to information retention. So stop going nuts about homework. Number one, find a peer in their class for them to go and do homework with at a different location, drop them off at the local. Library. Have them do homework there and then bring them home. Have them stay after school and do homework at school and then bring them home. You want them to do homework as far away from you as possible. Homework does not have to be done in the home. Does not have to be done with a parent sitting next to them, because you're going to end up sitting next to them every single day until 12th grade senior year. They're going to graduate, and it's going to be day one of college, and they're going to look back and they're going to say, Hey, I never did anything on my own. I needed my mom's help for everything. I never truly accomplished anything on my own, because my mom was always there to save me, prompt me, scaffold for me, and make everything as easy for me as possible. And that's exactly what we're seeing now. And parents are doing it with the best of intentions, but are you really doing it to help your child, or are you doing it to ease your own anxiety? So you need to look yourself in the mirror, get some parent training and learn how to step back. Your child can't step up unless you step back, so doing homework somewhere else, far away from you, so you don't micromanage, is absolutely crucial. And number two, I have made it my absolute career goal to end ed tech schools are an absolute mess, and introducing personal laptops for students is an absolute joke. You know, my daughter is four and a half years old. She's going to be in kindergarten soon, when she's in kindergarten, first grade, she's going to have her own iPad, and it's absolutely ridiculous, and I will be absolutely opting out of that iPad. Every parent has the legal right to fully opt out of it, but they also have to get over those mental hurdles of, is my kid going to get made fun of? Are they going to be ostracized? Are they going to feel left out? They have to get over those mental hurdles and realize it's not that big of a deal, and fully opt out of it. Spread more awareness around it, so more families do it. But Ed Tech has been an absolutely unmitigated disaster, to the point where parents are now afraid to even question it. Oh, computers are the are the way of the future. They need to practice. They need it. They need all these things when they can just have a computer lab they go to for one hour or two hours a day, like we had as kids. They don't need personal laptops with mostly unfettered access to YouTube and the internet. It's an absolute joke. So if you if you know they're misusing screens at school, you need to opt out of that immediately. So I'll tell you the problem that I faced. I am that parent that was ready to say no to all the screens, wait till eighth. And then the issue was my daughter, who's she likes school she wants to do well. In school, she's highly motivated academically. A few of her classes had homework that she could do on apps, and if she didn't have an iPhone in school, she had to wait to be home to finish her homework. And so the teachers would give them protected time in class to finish their work, but it had to be through a screen. And so it was a quandary, because I didn't want her to be at home doing the work. I'd much prefer her to get done at school. Yeah, and you have the right to opt out of that, like for schools to express this is the way we teach. This is the way we do it, that's nonsense. So they're going to continually say so the teacher is not individualizing it for each student. You know, yes, teachers are hard pressed, pressed for time. They're overworked, they're underpaid. I get it, but you, as the parent, you know, as a taxpayer, and that school is your taxpayer money, you have the right to step in and say, No, I'm not having my kid learn through an app period. I'm sorry if it adds more work to you and you have to do something special for my kid and everybody else. I am refusing this. I am raising my child tech free because I'm not turning a blind eye towards all this mountains of research of how dysregulated it is and how it delays executive functioning skills. I'm sorry if this adds more work to your plate, but I'm opting out of this completely. Well, the other piece of it is, and also why I think it's so important that you're sharing this perspective, is that my daughter was alone. She was the only kid in her eighth grade class that didn't have an iPhone. And when she told me that, I didn't believe her, to be honest, I said, There's no way. How can you be the only kid? And it was true. And I think, frankly, it's just easier to do the tech path because what's asked of us, so I think of more of us jump on board and get together, it will be easier, is my hope. Yeah, and parents need to realize their social responsibility. So your child may have strong executive functioning skills. They may be, you know, the Great, perfect dream kid, and they're ready for screens, but you giving your kid a screen then fuels the argument for Johnny down the road, who isn't ready for him to say, everybody else has it. Why can't I? You're the worst parents ever. I hate you. How dare you not do this. You're ruining my life. I get made fun of. I have no friends because of you. You're doing that. So you know, from the from the extra generation of Jonathan height, he interviewed kids and said, Hey, would you like to get rid of your iPhone? Would you like to get rid of your social media? Would you like to get rid of your screens? And every single kid said, No, but if you went to that then he went back to those kids and said, if nobody else had it, if all your friends got rid of it first, would you then get rid of it? And every single kid was like, oh, yeah, I would love. To do that. So even the kids realize, like, yeah, I would love to get rid of this, but I can't, because it's such a quote, unquote, social thing. And I use that term very lightly, because it's not social. Screens make kids less social. They're just marketed as social. It's it is a real mess, and we live in a society, and each of us are responsible for this youth mental health crisis. I was not really thinking about this at first, but schools by giving the kids laptops, my kids are coming home with laptops, and while I've never purchased personally a video game for my kids, I do notice that, especially my son, he's been playing these video games from his school laptop and and they tell me, Oh, they're not so advanced, they're not that great. They're just the free ones from school. But you brought to my awareness that this is really unhealthy for the brain to continue to play games while they're at home, and I should really be better about taking their laptops away. You mentioned, just let them do their homework for an hour and then put it away, out of sight, out of mind. Yeah, that's exactly what you have to do. You know, too many parents are just waving the white flag and and the number one, they're allowing their kids to take their school laptops into their bedroom behind closed doors, which is a horrible idea. There's never any tech behind closed doors, because that's when all the bad stuff happens. And yeah, sure, it's their school laptop for their school and their learning, but no, it's your laptop. The reason they go to that school is because you bought a house there, and you pay taxes there. So it's your laptop, not your kids. So they come home with it, give them a designated amount of time to get the work done, and then when that timer is up, you take that laptop away, whether they're done or not, if they chose to use that hour by playing games and being on YouTube. Too bad. Deal with the consequences tomorrow. This is your fault for misusing your time. And can you explain the different types of screen time and why some types are harder on an ADHD brain than others? Yeah, so anything that offers instant gratification, so number one you got to think about is touch screens. So obviously a phone, and the fact that we even call it a phone, is all part of big Tech's genius marketing plan that's like calling a cigarette a lollipop kind of thing. Like, like, it's the same kind of thing. Like, oh, it's just a phone. No, it's a super computer that's stronger than any laptop or computer we had as kids. So anything that's touchscreen, iPhone, iPad, video games, any video game that is directly connected to the internet, Fortnite Roblox, Minecraft. What a coincidence that when it comes to ADHD, it's always one of those three, or all three, Fortnite Roblox in Minecraft, the three games that were created with teams of psychologists to make them as addictive as possible, all the free to download games that require you to save a credit card on file to keep upgrading your account, so all of those things. So smartphone video games, Xbox, PlayStation, switch, Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, iPad, YouTube, watching videos of other people playing video games, exact same thing. And then something like TV, which is more passive, you just sit back and watch, is always going to be the lesser of all evils. There was no youth mental health crisis when TVs were the only screen in the house. So you can let your child watch TV, guilt free. Go ahead. Fine. Just remove YouTube from the Smart TV. Let them watch certain channels with commercials or low stem things. Totally fine. I'm a big fan of family movie night. I think that's fantastic. Just anything that's connected to the Internet is a big time problem. I meet so many parents who have children with ADHD, and on the weekends, a lot of kids will wake up extra early because parents, because what I find is parents will tell kids they'll limit the screens and the video games during the week, but they'll tell them it's permitted on the weekends, and their brain is so excited to play video games that they wake up earlier than typical, just so that they can play video games. And to me, it shows me how addicted their brain is to the video games. And it's scary. It's incredibly scary. So like over the past, you know, 10 years now, I've been working with families to decrease or eliminate tech. And when you first approach a parent in a parent training session and say, hey, it's going to be time to decrease or eliminate tech, the very first thing that happens is the parent gets ghost white with fear. So like you like that's the number one telltale sign that your child's addicted. If, if, right now the thought of hearing someone say to you, you need to decrease or eliminate screens. You have to cancel your child's phone plan. Get the Xbox PlayStation switch. Sell it back to GameStop. Get rid of the gaming computer. Remove YouTube from the Smart TV. If the very first emotion is fear, you most likely have a problem that you've been turning a blind eye towards and you've been trying to rationalize it in your head. It's okay. This is just what kids do now. It's okay. It's social. He's playing to kids, playing with kids, while he games. It's okay. Screens are the future. It's okay. I can't withhold it now, because if I do now, he'll over indulge when he's older, like with sugar and things like that. All of these nonsense cognitive distortions parents tell. Themselves to distract themselves from how serious it is. But if you're parenting with fear, if you're keeping something in your child's life that you know is hurting them, but the only reason you're keeping it in their life is because you're too scared, you most likely have a child with a very serious addiction, and you are absolutely right the fear based questions that you brought up, it's exactly what I hear at work all the time from parents. I hear every excuse I hear, he'll lose all his friends. They'll lose their friends. That's their social outlet. How can they see their friends? If they're not on video games, they'll get behind on technology. Technology is the future. If they don't participate, that all is all pure nonsense, and they have to know deep down that these things are false. And then they think they won't get into college either, which, by the way, the more and more I think about college, the less, honestly, I'm convinced that it's the end all be all. Yeah, the more and more I learn about college and when I think about what I want for my kids, for their future success. And the funny thing is that it's it's working parents that have a job, that are paying the bills, that have income, that are saying those things that these kids need practice with screens for the future, when chances are those kids right now are better at screens and technology than you are as a fully functioning parent and member of society, they're probably already, at 10 years old, better at screens than you are. So screens have always been that natural phenomenon where the younger generations are better than the older generations. They can still go to school and have a computer lab and learn how to do Word, Excel, PowerPoint, do research, learn how to spot fake news, do all of these different things. They can still learn that at school, Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft is not doing anything, but literally frying their brain and making them more dependent, dormant and depressed. It's a fact. It's an absolute fact. And I'm sure you've been hearing on the news, Roblox is getting sued because there have been predators online going after kids, giving them money, grooming the kids online. It's very scary. Not only is it not time well spent, but it's not even safe time. It's not safe at all. The Internet is a disgusting, dirty, wild place, and these parents would rather let their kids on Roblox than let them go play outside unsupervised. And the outside world is so safe right now, there's a much greater chance of something happening to them on the internet than there is in the outside world, because all the bad people have gone online now, and my entire algorithm is filled with Roblox being sued. Man arrested on Roblox, I see these things pop up, and to think the hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of parents that see that those posts come up, and an hour later they're saying, Oh, sure, go, go play your Roblox. It absolutely blows my mind. And can you just say that again? Because I really think that this point needs to be emphasized, that being outside is actually safer than being never been it's never been safer. So So number one, number one, we have all the screens that are keeping kids inside. Number two, we have something in America called the 24 hour news cycle, where you have to keep people tuned in. And you're not going to do that by talking about good Samaritans and people handing out turkeys and people raising money. It's going to be more about horrible people fear based marketing, which is exactly what screen based marketing is. So your child has a better chance of going outside and getting struck by lightning three times on the same day than something bad happening to them by some horrible person outside, and they have much greater chances of getting something bad happening to them on the Internet. The Internet is a is the Wild Wild West, a totally unregulated, lawless place, very scary place. Outside, there's people, there's cameras, there's nature, there's safety. The outside world is completely safe. We've just allowed our kids to we've stolen play and boredom from childhood, and ever since that happened, on came the Youth Mental Health Crisis. This wraps up part one of our conversation. Stay tuned for next week where Mike gets very specific about strategies that parents can start using right away. Thank you so much to Mike McLeod, and I'll see you next week for part two. Hi everyone, and welcome back to your child is normal. Today you're going to hear part two of my conversation with Mike McLeod, founder of grow now, ADHD now. Last week, we talked about why executive function skills matter so much, and how the way school and homework are structured can make things especially hard for kids with ADHD. So in today's episode, we shift into very practical, real life advice for parents. We talk about screens, which types are the most dysregulating. We also discuss parenting strategies to bring more ease into family life, and how to think about school accommodations in a way that prepares kids, not just for school, but for real life. Thank you again to Mike McLeod for joining your child as normal. He is incredibly thoughtful and gifted in the way that he works with families. I'll link his website and books in the show notes below, and you can also find him on Instagram. And lastly, if you're enjoying this podcast, I'd be so grateful if you could take a moment leave a five star review wherever. It is you listen to podcasts reviews help other families find the show, and it helps for the message that your child is normal.