As a mother, I know I will never see my children in the same way as the rest of the world. On some days, I will only see the recurring annoyances like socks scattered on the floor and toothpaste left clinging to the sides of the sink. On others — the best days — I will see a glimpse of how with their unique gifts, they are destined to make the world a better place.
With Asher, my oldest son, it’s been clear from day one that he was uniquely different. Not the bad kind of different, the beautiful kind of different. The kind of different that makes someone unforgettable.
At 18 months, he was memorizing the lines of his favorite books and songs and completing my sentences in a sweet, husky little baby voice that melted me.
By three, he’d started beatboxing his way through his day to release the pent-up energy flowing through his busy mind. By four, his PreK teachers were sharing daily stories of him bouncing around the room, finding a thrill in challenging their authority to show the rest of the class his new dance moves. When he entered Kindergarten, these musings and quirks turned into lengthy and often heartbreaking parent teacher conferences. My talented, smart and wily boy became a distraction in his now more structured learning environment.
Around the same time, I began working on the education team at Microsoft. I spent my days steeped in research on modern learning environments and the digital skills my kids would need to thrive in their future careers. At home, I saw a child who had all of the promise in the world based on this research, and it gave me hope. This was also the time when my husband and I realized our new and important responsibility to be his advocates and collaborate with his teachers on an action plan. We, after all, knew him better than anyone else and could help find a path forward that worked for everyone.
When the pandemic struck, our school district — only a few miles from patient zero in the U.S. — was the first to shut down. Suddenly, I was both his advocate and a part-time teacher myself, witnessing him squirming in his chair to try to pay attention amid seemingly endless screen time.
A few months into the pandemic, we booked time with a behavioral psychologist who spent time with him, testing both his cognitive abilities and his challenges. Two weeks later, we had a diagnosis that confirmed what we had always known deep down: our boy had a brilliant mind in the top 10 percent of kids his age. His mind was just so eager to learn that was simply trying to do too much at once. He had impulsive ADHD that made it difficult to focus and organize his thoughts. It was a relief to have the information we needed to reassure him that he was brilliant and capable, and to begin working on our action plan.
A year into the pandemic, Asher was halfway through the third grade and still 100% remote when I was presented an opportunity to work with a new team at the company I had met years ago and fallen in love with — Flipgrid. Their mission to empower every voice spoke to me more than ever as I struggled to help Asher find his voice again.
A week after I joined the team, my husband and I decided to create a Flipgrid group to gather birthday wishes from our friends and family across the country. With COVID cases still raging around the world, a physical party was not possible and the videos from friends and family would help him feel more connected to his extended community. It was also a test run for me to get familiar with how Flipgrid worked when shared outside of the classroom setting.
So we threw a virtual birthday party on Flipgrid, and it was eye opening.
After watching Asher’s spirit fade sitting in front a computer screen for months on end, I saw him light up again.
On Flipgrid, there were no limits on self-expression, and everyone embraced it. His grandparents wrote a rap and recited it with backwards caps and sunglasses, friends coordinated costumes and dance routines, and his friends who didn’t like being on camera turned the assignment into a puppet show.
It was fun. It was creative. It was empowering.
On Flipgrid, he could dance all he wanted. He could go back and rewatch the videos whenever he wanted to make him feel loved by and connected to the friends and family the pandemic had kept him from seeing for so long.
In that moment I realized the power of the team I had just joined, where the mission mattered not just to my family, but to anyone with learning differences and neurodiversity.
Today my sweet ten-year-old is thriving, both in the classroom and socially. He is learning to balance the moments of focus with the moments of expression and creativity. And with the help of a team of educators and counselors at the school, and tools like Flipgrid, he is once again unforgettably unique and destined to do great things in this world.
