What Is Neurodiversity Literacy—and Why Do Our Schools Need It?

I kept coming back to the same question:

How can we ask children to include someone they don't understand?

Schools have made important progress when it comes to supporting neurodivergent students. We have IEPs and 504 Plans. We talk about accommodations, sensory supports, movement breaks, differentiated instruction, extra time, visual schedules and inclusive classrooms.

All of that matters.

But I started realizing there was a piece missing from the conversation.

We were working hard to make room for neurodivergent children in classrooms—but we weren't necessarily teaching the other children in those classrooms what neurodiversity actually means.

And kids notice differences.

Of course they do.

They notice who wears headphones during an assembly. They notice who gets to leave the classroom when everyone else stays. They notice the child who has an adult nearby, gets a different assignment, needs more breaks, doesn't always join the group, or becomes overwhelmed by something that doesn't seem overwhelming to anyone else.

When we don't give children age-appropriate language for understanding those differences, they fill in the blanks themselves.

That's where words like lazy, weird, dramatic, and unfair can start to creep in.

And that's the gap I want to help close.

I call it neurodiversity literacy.

So, what is neurodiversity literacy?

At its simplest, neurodiversity literacy means helping children understand that brains work differently—and those differences affect how people experience the world.

Some brains process sensory information differently.

Some need more movement.

Some have a harder time shifting from one thing to another.

Attention can work differently. Communication can look different. Learning can look different. Emotional regulation, executive functioning and social interaction can look different.

There are names for many of these differences—autism, ADHD, dyslexia and others.

But I don't think we need to start by handing elementary school students a vocabulary list of diagnoses.

We can start with something much more human:

Your experience isn't everyone's experience.

Something that feels easy for you might be incredibly difficult for someone else.

Something that doesn't bother you might feel overwhelming to another person's brain or body.

Someone may need a support you don't need.

Someone may communicate, learn, play or participate differently than you do.

And perhaps most importantly:

What you see on the outside doesn't always tell you what's happening on the inside.

That's neurodiversity literacy.

And our kids are absolutely capable of learning it.

Kids are already asking the questions

If you've spent much time around elementary-age children, you know they have a very finely tuned radar for fairness.

"Why does he get to do that?"

"Why does she get extra time?"

"Why does he get to leave?"

"How come she doesn't have to do the same thing?"

These aren't necessarily mean questions.

A lot of the time, they're reasonable questions from children trying to understand the world around them.

But too often, our response is essentially: Don't worry about it.

And I think we're missing an opportunity.

We don't need to disclose another child's diagnosis or private information to explain that fair doesn't always mean everyone gets exactly the same thing.

Glasses aren't unfair because everyone doesn't get a pair.

A wheelchair isn't an advantage.

And a sensory break, communication device, movement tool or additional support isn't a prize another child is missing out on.

They're tools.

Children can understand that people need different tools to access the same world.

But somebody has to teach them.

Access isn't the same thing as belonging

This is the distinction that became impossible for me to ignore.

We talk a lot about access in education—and rightly so.

Can a child access the curriculum? The classroom? The field trip? The playground? The school community?

Then we talk about inclusion.

Is that child physically present? Are they participating? Are they being given opportunities alongside their peers?

But I think there's another question we have to ask:

Does that child actually feel like they belong there?

Because a child can have a seat in a general education classroom and still feel profoundly different from everyone sitting around them.

A school can faithfully follow an IEP while classmates quietly wonder why that student gets "special treatment."

A child can technically be included in every activity and still know they're the kid everyone thinks is weird.

That's why I keep coming back to this:

Inclusion without understanding isn't belonging.

Accommodations can help create access.

Policies can create opportunities for inclusion.

But neither one automatically teaches children how to understand each other.

That's where neurodiversity literacy has a role to play.

What we see isn't always the whole story

This became especially important to me because behavior is so easy to judge from the outside.

We see a child refuse an assignment.

We see a child walk away.

We see a child cover their ears.

We see a child cry over something that seems small.

We see a child who can't sit still.

We see someone who doesn't answer when spoken to, struggles to join a group, needs the same direction repeated again, or suddenly can't seem to do something they did perfectly well yesterday.

And because we're human, our brains try to explain what we're seeing.

He doesn't want to.

She's not trying.

He's being difficult.

She's overreacting.

Sometimes behavior does need to be addressed.

But sometimes we're looking at the very end of a much bigger experience happening inside a child's brain and body.

Maybe the room has been getting louder and louder to them for the past twenty minutes.

Maybe they don't understand what they're supposed to do and don't know how to say that.

Maybe shifting away from what they were doing requires far more cognitive effort than anyone realizes.

Maybe their nervous system is overwhelmed.

Maybe they are trying incredibly hard—and what we're seeing is what happens when they can't keep doing it anymore.

We don't need children diagnosing their classmates.

We need to teach them something much simpler:

There may be more happening here than you can see.

So why aren't we teaching this?

This is the question that ultimately led me here.

Schools already teach children how to live in a community.

We teach kindness.

We teach empathy.

We teach conflict resolution, emotional awareness, cooperation and respect.

We teach children about different cultures, families, abilities and experiences.

So why wouldn't understanding different brains be part of that conversation too?

Not as a special lesson we pull out only after a neurodivergent child is struggling.

Not as a presentation about one particular student.

And not as something that asks a child to disclose their diagnosis so everyone else will treat them with compassion.

As basic literacy.

Brains are different.

Communication is different.

Needs are different.

Support can look different.

And different doesn't automatically mean wrong.

Imagine if children entered classrooms already understanding that.

Imagine if the first time they encountered a child wearing noise-reducing headphones wasn't also the first time anyone had explained sensory differences to them.

Imagine if they already understood that a classmate taking a break wasn't "getting out of work."

Imagine if needing help didn't immediately become something embarrassing.

Imagine how different school might feel for the child who is usually the one being explained.

This is why I created More Than What You See

This work didn't begin because I set out to create an initiative.

It began with my family.

I was trying to find a way to explain an experience that was incredibly real to us—and incredibly difficult for other people to see from the outside.

I wanted children to understand that sometimes the behavior they see is only the visible part of a much bigger story.

And as I worked on More Than What You See, something became increasingly clear:

This conversation was bigger than one child. And it was bigger than one diagnosis.

There are children in classrooms everywhere who are being interpreted before they're being understood.

Children whose sensory needs look like overreacting.

Whose executive-function struggles look like laziness.

Whose communication differences look like rudeness.

Whose anxiety looks like defiance.

Whose supports look like special treatment.

And I couldn't stop thinking about what might change if we gave children better language for understanding each other before those assumptions had a chance to take root.

That's how a children's book became something bigger.

That's how More Than What You See became a Neurodiversity Literacy Initiative.

We can teach children to look a little deeper

I don't expect a children's book to solve inclusion in schools.

This work is bigger than books.

Schools need appropriate services. Neurodivergent students need meaningful accommodations and access to education. Teachers need resources and support. Families need to be heard.

But I also believe culture matters.

And children help create the culture of their classrooms every single day.

We can give them tools for that.

We can teach them that fairness isn't always sameness.

We can teach them that support isn't something another child has to earn by looking like they're struggling enough.

We can teach them to respect boundaries while still being curious about differences.

We can teach them that brains don't all experience the same classroom in the same way.

And maybe we can replace a few:

"What's wrong with him?"

with:

"I wonder what's making this hard."

A few:

"That's not fair."

with:

"Maybe that's what she needs."

A few:

"He's weird."

with:

"His brain might work differently than mine."

Those may seem like small shifts.

I don't think they are.

Because the goal shouldn't simply be to create classrooms where neurodivergent children are allowed to be present.

The goal should be classrooms where they are understood enough to truly belong.

That's why I believe our schools need neurodiversity literacy.

And that's the conversation I hope More Than What You See can help start.

More Than What You See is a children's book series and Neurodiversity Literacy Initiative created by Carolina Andes to help children, families, and schools start conversations about access, inclusion, belonging—and all the things we can't always see from the outside.