Beautifully Complex
366 The Glass Child: The Neurotypical Sibling’s Experience
With Penny Williams

Penny Williams: [00:00:00] Welcome back, everyone. I am so glad to be joined by all of you caring adults in the lives of neurodivergent or complex kids. Today, we're not actually talking about those complex kids, though. Today, we're going to talk about the neurotypical sibling experience and something called the glass child, which I'll explain, where that terminology came from and what it means.
But I first want to chat a minute about why we are talking about the neurotypical sibling. We're talking about them because they don't get enough attention, which is exactly why we're having to have this discussion, right? And it's not that we make a choice as parents to give one child more attention, more time, more of what they need than the other.
It's that this [00:01:00] dynamic is created in the family, and even the neurotypical sibling kind of contributes to this, and we're going to talk about how that happens too. Not to blame them. It's not their fault at all. It's their biology. But we want to really understand the neurotypical sibling's experience, because it can be developmentally traumatic for that kid.
I want you to just sit with that idea for a moment. Your neurotypical child, who has a neurodivergent sibling, may very well be undergoing trauma from that experience and that family setup. So let's really get into it and unpack it. I want to start with an example from my own family. My neurotypical [00:02:00] child is my older child, my neurodivergent child is my younger child.
I just have the two. And I can still remember, even though they are now, as I'm recording this, 27 and 23 years old, I can still remember when my neurodivergent kid was probably seven years old and my neurotypical kid would have been around 10. We were in Target, went to Target a lot. I used to be a Target-aholic, doing better lately, but that's another story entirely. But we were in Target, it was just me and the two of them, and I'm sure I had dropped in to pick a few things up. They may have had some allowance and wanted to shop in the toy section. I don't remember specifically what was going on that trip before the meltdown happened, but I remember distinctly [00:03:00] that I was cutting through, I believe it was the lamp aisle in the middle of the store, and my neurodivergent kid was having a meltdown.
We were probably coming out of the toy section in the back and trying to leave, and for some reason it wasn't going well, and we had a meltdown, and I was trying to manage that child, right? I was trying to manage what was going on, not to melt down in public, which was going to happen anyway, and to get to the door. Let's get out of here, because this environment is no longer working for us. And it was a struggle. He was on the floor. He didn't want to move. I'm sure he was wanting to go back to the toy section. He had a hard time making a decision with his allowance, and so he would spend a lot of time [00:04:00] there, and then he would second-guess his choice, because he really couldn't decide. He wanted all of it. There were five things. He wanted all of them. He didn't have money for all of them, and this is the kind of thing that would happen at that age. And I remember glancing further down the aisle to see where my neurotypical kid was, and noticing that they were pacing. They were definitely activated, definitely having a hard time, and I was one person. So here I am, literally, physically, in between one kid having a hard time on my right, one kid having a hard time on my left, and having to make a choice in that moment of who was going to get my attention. And of course, the attention went to the kid on the floor screaming at the top of his lungs, [00:05:00] having a complete and utter meltdown, because he couldn't manage the situation and the environment. And so I'm trying to help that along, trying to get us moving, and I'm noticing that my neurotypical kid is also now in fight or flight. And I had to say, "I'm trying. I'm trying to do my best to rectify the situation so that we can go, so I'm trying to do something with your brother to help you also feel better." And that was really the best I could do in that moment. Do I feel regretful of that? Sure. Was there anything I could have done differently? No, probably not. I'm one person. I'm one human in that situation with two kids who both need help but need very different help.
And this is one tiny moment in time out of my [00:06:00] neurotypical kid's entire 27 years. Well, the first three she was an only child, so her last 24 years on this planet, this is the kind of thing that she experienced day in and day out. It was dysregulating to her nervous system. It was being encoded in her brain as trauma. Whether siblings look like they need help, or they're having a hard time like in this particular instance, or whether they seem like they're okay, they're quiet, they're compliant, they're not asking for your attention, they are still struggling, and that's the part that I think makes it even more common that they go unnoticed, that their needs go unnoticed.
Not those basic needs, right? You're feeding your kid, you love them, you're nurturing them, all of these things. It's not that. It's that they are learning to hide it from you. They are learning to take up less space, because there is less space for them very often. We need to be detectives when our neurotypical kids seem super okay in these situations, because they probably are not. Glass kids aren't transparent because nothing is happening to them. They're transparent because they have learned that what's happening inside of them doesn't get attention, [00:08:00] so they stop showing it. Their emotions don't get the response that they need, so they stop showing them. They start holding them in, shoving them down, stuffing them down, and not dealing with them, because they're children and they need help with that, and they're not always getting it.
The term glass children is generally credited to Alicia Meneses Maples, who introduced it in a TED Talk in San Antonio in 2010. The talk is called Recognizing Glass Children. She grew up with a brother with autism and another with a terminal illness, and she explains the name she attached to her experience this way. She says, "Parents are so consumed with the needs of the child with [00:09:00] disabilities," that neurodivergent kid, "that when they look at the other siblings, they look right through us as though we were made of glass."
Not because glass children are fragile. It's because they become invisible. They're sort of see-through in the family system. They're not invisible because they're unloved, as I said. They're invisible because your household's emotional bandwidth is already taken up. It's already spoken for. And our neurotypical kids can figure that out really early, often before they have any language or any skills to actually share that and express it to you. And the glass child's nervous system is adapting as well. They learn to self-regulate alone. They learn that [00:10:00] their dysregulation isn't going to get support. And it's often through suppressing those emotions, that dysregulation, those signals that their body is giving them of their needs, rather than processing the feelings, processing the nervous system signals.
And this is not resilience in a healthy sense. They may look resilient on the outside, but they are not actually resilient. It's actually a survival adaptation, and it can look like they are low maintenance, like they might even be high-achieving kids, and then at some point that ends. That is not sustainable for them. And so that survival mode starts to become more and more apparent, because their nervous system is screaming [00:11:00] louder and louder for the help that they need.
I have been encouraged for years and years now by my neurotypical kid to talk more and more about neurotypical siblings, because there was a lot of trauma there. There is a lot of nervous system repair, a lot of therapy that has been going into, and has been for years, trying to help that child's nervous system now feel safe, because it was coded that it wasn't safe. It was imprinted that their feelings, their needs, did not matter. Again, I want to make it very clear to you, I am in no way saying that is your intention, and I am in no way laying blame or shame. I have had to do some [00:12:00] of my own work on what has happened to my neurotypical kid, what my role in that was, and processing really that I couldn't have done any better. I was already doing my best. And I hope that you'll be able to do that work for yourself too.
There was a podcast episode on Esther Perel's podcast called Where Should We Begin? She's a therapist. It was sent to me by a very good friend who said, "This reminds me of your neurotypical kid." And I started listening to it. It's called To Make Room For My Brother, I Learned To Disappear. That's the episode name. The podcast is called Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel. And I started listening to it.
This particular person calls in or writes in with questions, and so this [00:13:00] question was chosen to record a conversation and an episode on. And this young woman has a brother who is probably level three autistic, not very verbal, having a lot of even maybe bigger needs in some ways than our experience with autism was.
And at first I thought, wow, this really doesn't apply. But then the therapist who hosts the podcast started really digging into what was behind what she was talking about, and so many things landed for me that it brought me to tears, because I finally felt like I truly, I'm getting goosebumps right now talking about it, I truly understood what my daughter's experience has been. And I needed that, and [00:14:00] she needed me to have it. And we've been having so many conversations about this, conversations about work with our therapist. I've really been trying to understand this for a long time. But something that was said in this episode just really unlocked it for me. And one quote that really stuck out to me, that I actually shared with my neurotypical kid as well, was, "The weather changed, but you haven't taken off the sweater."
And what she was talking about is this young woman, throughout her life as the sibling of an autistic brother, was making herself smaller. She was shrinking herself. She was talking about how she was trying to take up less space so that there would be room for her brother's needs. She talked about feeling guilt every time she did something or had a success [00:15:00] that he would not be able to have. Getting married was the catalyst for this conversation, for her to ask and seek this help, realizing that she wants to be truly happy and really enjoy the day, but she's thinking about mitigating her brother's behaviors during the ceremony and the party, and she's thinking about how she shouldn't be happy, because he doesn't get to have this experience in his life.
And that alone is just so powerful, that image of disappearing as a strategy, of making yourself smaller as a strategy. I remember a few years ago, my daughter came in from a therapy appointment and said, "We've been working on the fact that I'm allowed to take up space," and it just floored me. [00:16:00] Of course you're allowed to take up space. But through her childhood, it didn't feel like that, and that was what her body started learning, and that was the mode of operation it started using. So that quote about how the weather has changed but you haven't taken off the sweater, this young woman who was talking to this therapist in this podcast episode, she doesn't live in the home anymore. She is having her own experiences, and yet she is still using her brother as the compass, the barometer for everything. And Esther said to her, "The weather has changed. Things are different, but you haven't taken off the sweater yet." I am just having so many chills in this conversation. It's so [00:17:00] powerful.
And of course, my kids are older, and this woman is in her twenties as well, and so we're talking about the fact that the needs are different. In my home, we don't have meltdowns anymore. We haven't for a really long time. We don't have intense, explosive blowups. We don't have a lot of that stuff, and we haven't for years. And yet the neurotypical sibling's nervous system still expects it, still plans for it, still tries to create an out, still tries to control situations so it can't be a situation where that used to happen. For instance, it is still very hard for our neurotypical sibling to go to a restaurant as a family, even though we have not had a restaurant meltdown in a decade or more. [00:18:00] Still, the nervous system says, no, this isn't safe. We can't handle this. And we're working on pushing through and helping the nervous system realize that it is actually safe now. The weather has changed. You can take off the sweater.
I want you all to really sit with this. I really hope that you will pop over and listen to this podcast episode yourself. I will link it up in the show notes, so it's easy for you to find. But I'm telling you, you will have a profound experience from listening to it if you have more than one kid. And I hope that even educators will listen, because you have multiple kids in your care, and yet some of them need more attention than others, but those others still need attention. [00:19:00] And how do you find that balance? How do you help everyone feel safe in those environments?
Thinking about this as kind of self-protective shrinking, it doesn't undo itself just because the weather changed, just because we don't have the same intensity of storms we're having to learn to navigate. It doesn't automatically change what has been biologically encoded, imprinted on that brain and that nervous system. But our brains are wonderfully plastic. There's this concept of neuroplasticity in biology. So what has imprinted during development and changed the brain can still be changed. So it's not forever, and that's a really important, powerful aspect of this that I want you to also think about. Yes, your kid has had a hard time, and [00:20:00] it isn't fair, and it wasn't deserved, and they are having long-term impacts from it, but all of that can be changed. We can rectify that to a certain degree.
I want to give you some ideas of what this glass child thing might look like in your day-to-day life. It might be a sibling who never asks for anything and gets praised for, I'm going to use air quotes for those who are only listening, "being easy." They get praised for being easy when easy is actually just a coping strategy. It is a maladaptive biological coping strategy. It's not what we want. The sibling might become a junior caregiver. I referred to my own kid as a mother hen. She would go into that mother hen mode, and she would try to take care, and she would try to prevent anything from being uncomfortable and difficult. [00:21:00] They might try to manage the other child's moods before an adult, a parent, even clocks that something is starting to escalate or ramp up. They're trying to control it before the storm gets going. It might be a sibling who achieves really quietly, and they might downplay their own wins, because celebrating themselves feels like it's taking up space that isn't theirs. And I know we think it should be theirs, right? We should have equal space for our children. But as we've talked about here before, fair is not equal. Fair is everyone getting what they need, and sometimes there isn't enough of one parent to do that. There are ways you can help with that, and we're going to talk about that as well.
It could also be a sibling who seems fine in every conversation you have [00:22:00] about this with them. You may talk about this, and they may say, "Oh, it's fine, it's fine," because fine is the answer that ends that conversation the quickest. Fine is the answer that doesn't add to your plate. Fine is the answer that doesn't make you feel guilty. Fine is the answer that doesn't prolong the discomfort, because who wants to think about the fact that their sibling needs more from their parents than they do? It's difficult. It's hard. It's traumatic.
Let's now talk about what we can do about this, because this is the hopeful piece. This is the part where you can create some change for that neurotypical sibling. Number one, name it, but don't make it a project. "I notice that you go quiet when your brother is struggling. I want you to know that I see it, [00:23:00] and it's not your job to manage it." So we're noticing, but we're not trying to have a forty-five-minute conversation about all the strategies and all the things. We want them to know that we see it, and we want them to know that it's not their job to manage it. We're providing regulation through that acknowledgement. So we're not fixing it, but we are helping their nervous system feel safer.
Create scheduled, uninterrupted, undiluted attention for that neurotypical sibling. Something we did, her dad would do this with her, I would do this with her, we would at least once a month have an outing with her. Whatever she chose, all about her. The other parent, the one with the neurodivergent kid, could not call or text or interrupt [00:24:00] unless there was someone bleeding and on the way to the hospital, because so much of her life was interrupted by those needs, and she needed time where there could not be a disruption. She needed to know there were times she could count on, and your neurotypical sibling in your family needs that too. This has to be not earned time. This is scheduled no matter what that kid's behavior was. The neurotypical kid, no matter what grades they got that week, no matter what happened at all, they still got this time with you that was not contingent on the neurodivergent kid being okay first.
Five minutes of connection a day is also very powerful. It will do more [00:25:00] than those one single big once-a-month gestures. I feel like both are important, but absolutely they need the daily focused attention. Time in, special time with them, is crucial, but it can be short.
I want you to watch for over-functioning and kind of gently and softly interrupt that. So if your neurotypical child is stepping into that caregiving role, they're acting like a mother hen, it's really a signal to you that their nervous system has decided someone has to hold the challenge, and it shouldn't be them. They don't want it to happen, because they don't want to go through it, but it should not be them. They do not have any [00:26:00] responsibility for their neurodivergent sibling. That is the adult's job. That is always the adult's job. We need to make it very clear to those neurotypical kids that it is not their job to hold the challenge, to control or try to mitigate the behavior of their neurodivergent kid.
It really all comes back to connection and helping your neurotypical sibling feel seen, heard, and understood. I want you to really lean into noticing, validating their experience, letting them know that you know it's hard, you know it doesn't feel fair, and giving them that connection and that [00:27:00] uninterrupted time to really feel safe. You're not failing your other child by having a child with high needs. You're not failing that neurotypical sibling for having a neurodivergent kid. But that sibling relationship needs the same intentional regulation and connection that you're already learning to offer that neurodivergent child. We need to lean into those strategies we're using with our neurodivergent kids with our neurotypical kids as well.
So eventually, that sweater can come off through trauma and nervous system work, through connection, through helping them feel like they're seen, heard, and understood. All of that helps their nervous system finally believe [00:28:00] that the weather has changed. So if you're at that point where your kids or teens or young adults, where things aren't as difficult on a daily basis, help them recognize that they can take the sweater off.
I want to invite you to share this episode, to share the Esther Perel episode with anyone and everyone you think could benefit from this insight. It is so very powerful, and the more people who understand this experience our neurotypical kids are having, that our glass children are having, the more support they actually get, and that's what they need. They might feel like the easy kid, but I can tell you, being on the other end of it, where my kid is now an adult, being the easy kid has a lot of future [00:29:00] consequences. We don't want that for our kids. We want them to get what they need from us.
So subscribe, share the episode. If you'd like to watch instead of listen, you can do that on YouTube as well, and I will see everyone next time. Take good care.