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let's get started. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining me today. I am going to be talking about why kids don't self-advocate.

So self-advocacy is an important skill for all people, but it's especially important for

nerd-a-vergent children and teens. Although it's never too late to develop

self-advocacy skills, I'm certainly working on it myself. It's important to help nerd divergent

kids develop this skill as early as possible because self-advocacy empowers them to express their needs, their feelings, preferences,

and concerns. Here's the thing, though. It's important that we don't throw this term

self-advocacy around without really thinking about what it means. There are foundations we have to consider

when we teach these skills. I often see parents and teachers talk about wanting children and teens

to self-advocate, but we don't often talk about what it actually means, what it looks like, how we teach it, and how we measure progress.

We can't address self-advocacy without recognizing why kids struggle with this skill.

So today I'm talking about three reasons why kids don't self-advocate. These reasons,

they don't come from me. These reasons come from hundreds of neurodivergent children that I've

worked with over the last 23 years.

Remember, they are our best teachers.

One of the reasons that they don't self-avocate is because they don't know how.

We often tell kids, self-avvocate, tell us what you want.

But again, what does that mean?

We need to really think about it as a skill set, not only a skill set, but how does the child learn these skills?

Remember, self-advocacy is not easy. A lot of us as adults don't do it,

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