What if your child isn’t resisting you—what if your brain just deleted the evidence that they weren’t?
I watched this video recently—Give Me 18 Minutes and You’ll Control Your Reality—and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiYC0yWdrcU
Quick recap: a chess Grandmaster gets beat by a complete beginner. Why?
Because the beginner didn’t know the rules.
Didn’t stick to the strategy.
Didn’t play inside the box the expert had spent decades mastering.
And that got me thinking about parenting.
Especially if you’re raising a teen/young adult with ADHD or autism, chances are you’ve inherited a set of parenting ”rules.”
How motivation “should” look.
What “appropriate” behavior is.
What communication “should” sound like.
You didn’t make those rules. You just absorbed them, like the rest of us did.
And your brain? It’s been filtering your experiences ever since—looking for evidence that confirms those rules, and quietly deleting what doesn’t.
That’s how we end up seeing disrespect, disobedience, or inappropriate (don’t get me started on that word) behavior where there might’ve been anxiety.
Defiance where there was actually fear.
Laziness where there was simply burnout.
This isn’t a parenting failure.
It’s a perception problem.
The video explains how our brains are constantly filtering reality—deleting what we’re not trained to expect, and filling in gaps with stuff that may not even be true.
Which means we might not be reacting to what our kid is doing—we might be reacting to what our brain thinks they’re doing.
Let that sink in.
If we expect our kid to roll their eyes, we’re gonna spot every blink that looks like one.
If we expect to have another meltdown at bedtime, we’re already tense before we even say goodnight.
And when we come in hot, our kids feel it—and react accordingly. Think co-regulation. We can help them become anxious just as we can help them calm down.
It’s a feedback loop built on faulty wiring.
But here’s the good news: the moment we notice the filter, we can disrupt it.
🌀 We can start asking, “Is this really disrespect… or frustration?”
🌀 We can slow down the story playing in our head long enough to wonder, “What else could be true?”
🌀 And we can shift the entire tone of a conversation just by choosing to see differently.
The Bottom Line: Most people never change—not because they can’t, but because they don’t realize they have the option to, and that an alternative could work better.
But you’re not most people.
You’re here.
You’re reading this.
And you’re already doing the brave work of looking past the script.
So if you watch the video, tell me what part hit you hardest.
And if you’ve ever had a moment where your kid broke the rules—and it worked—I want to hear about that too.
Let’s keep rewriting the rules together.
What’s one “rule” you’ve had to unlearn while raising your neurodivergent teen? Drop it in the comments—I guarantee someone else needs to hear they’re not the only one.