Angela Kingdon will tell you, without a trace of embarrassment, that she keeps a kit of loop earplugs and lightly tinted sunglasses in her car so she is never caught off guard by the hum of fluorescent lights at the library. She keeps three scarves and a zip up sweatshirt with her at all times because her body cannot regulate its own temperature, and layering is the only thing that works. She calls these her systems, and building them is, for her, one of the great joys of being autistic.
Her son calls them something else entirely. Do not give me one more system.
That gap, between a parent who finds comfort in structure and a kid who feels crushed by it, is where this conversation lives. Angela runs the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, more than thirty shows hosted by autistic and AuDHD creators, built after her own burnout nearly took her out. She had spent years so good at masking, thanks to cognitive behavioral therapy, that she finally had the friends, the career, and the relationship she had always wanted. Then she lost the capacity to keep any of it running. Podcasts, interestingly, were what brought her back.
Out of that experience came what she calls the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture, one of which she names predictably comforting. It is the reason she wore the same sweater every day of tenth grade, in every color the store carried, and the reason Andy Warhol died with fifty pairs of the same green underwear. Eliminating a decision is not a limitation. It is relief. Why get up every morning and negotiate an outfit when you could just remove that problem from your day entirely?
But the deeper lesson in this episode is about what happens when a parent’s systems get handed down as if they are universal. Angela describes it plainly: when her son was a baby, she was his sun, and his whole world revolved around her. As he moved through adolescence, she needed to become his moon, there to light the way but no longer the center of gravity. She had labeled every bin in his room with a label maker. She had color coded his toys. And none of it worked, because he needed to see everything out, not tucked away. His floor had two piles of clothes that looked identical to her and meant something completely different to him. That was not chaos. That was his system. She just had not respected it as one.
The turning point came in an unexpected place: a heavily scheduled fiftieth birthday trip to the Amalfi Coast that Angela had planned down to the hour, because she believes you should get your money’s worth out of every vacation day. Her son wanted to do one thing a day, if that. So she let go of the plan once they reached the coast, and what followed was serendipity she could not have scheduled, conversations that only happen when nobody is rushing to the next activity, a kid who spontaneously decided he could speak Italian and simply started trying.
Angela’s advice for parents is not to abandon your own systems. It is to get curious about your kid’s, especially the ones that do not look like systems at all. Ask what would make this easier for you. Notice what they are already doing to cope, even if they would never call it that. And build in a rule that everything gets to change, because their needs will, and so will yours.
