Energy Economics

Briar Harvey

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Energy Economics for Parents is a show about the only budget that never balances—your own energy, and where it actually goes each day. Host Christopher Fern talks with parents, many of them raising neurodivergent kids, about what to spend their finite energy on, what to protect, and what to finally cut loose. members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com

Aug 21

Co-Regulation Is a Physiological Capacity, and Parents Run Out of It with Jenny Hale

Jenny Hale created the Hale Method after burnout in her thirties took the choice away from her. On Energy Economics for Parents, she gave host Christopher Fern an order of operations—what has to happen before anything else is available—and an account of why parents keep failing at step one. Nobody explained the pedals Start with her analogy. Imagine teaching driving the way we teach emotional skills. Nobody says what the wheel is for, what the pedals do, or where the mirrors are. The person gets put in the car, the car gets put in motion at speed, and they figure it out. It would be chaos, and it is. Neurotypical children absorb a lot of this by osmosis, picking up abstract rules from the adults around them. Neurodivergent kids, autistic kids in particular, often need the same material as explicit, sequenced instruction. So when a parent says “you need to calm down,” a neurotypical kid files away the feel of the thing and rebuilds it later. A neurodivergent kid asks how, gets no answer, and now carries the original upset plus the frustration of being asked to perform something nobody described. Hale learned this from her own daughter at eighteen months, sprawled on the floor after some Duplo blocks wouldn’t fit, announcing she was tired. It was nine in the morning after a full night’s sleep. She’d been handed “tired” as the label for a sensation that was actually frustration, and she was going to keep using it. Children need the vocabulary, the cues to look for, and a demonstration of the check adults are supposed to run on themselves: how much sleep did I get, have I eaten, what’s going on physiologically that’s making me feel this way. Physiology first, then emotions, then words Christopher Fern called co-regulation a scarce mental capacity. Hale corrected him mid-sentence. It’s physiological. When the autonomic nervous system flips into alert or fight-or-flight, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex is reduced, and the bandwidth for analytical thought goes with it. That correction sets the order she teaches. Physiological safety first, which means the nervous system back in the green zone before anything gets asked of anyone. Until that lands, managing emotions, taking another perspective, and considering someone else are all out of reach. Then emotional safety, where the person feels seen and validated in the experience even when the behavior was unacceptable. Then mental safety, where everyone understands the trigger and the unmet need. Each level reached settles the ones under it. The math on families is where this gets hard. Every parent is under-resourced. Neurodivergent parents more so, because moving through the world costs them more. And neurodivergent children need more co-regulation than average. All three push the same way. You can’t learn it during the meltdown Hale’s answer is repetition at low stakes. A kicker lines up against a goalkeeper with nobody interfering. If the only attempt you ever made came in the grand final, in extra time, with a hundred thousand people screaming, you’d miss. Thousands of reps with nobody watching builds the muscle memory that survives pressure. Regulation has to become subconscious the same way, because the moment you need it is the moment you can’t reach anything conscious. She has a case for it. A high school teacher came through her coach training with anxiety that showed up as irritability and one of the highest detention rates in his school. Six months later, with his own regulation in place, he was the most requested teacher there—enough students wanting his classes that the school hired someone to cover the overflow. He already taught in a competency-based system, so she handed him the emotional skills the same way: the behaviors that show you’ve mastered each step, in the order they build. As Jenny says, it does not have to be this way. Jenny Hale’s work is at jennyhale.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe
Aug 14

You Are Worthy Because You Exist—Ico Fish on Self-Love and Autistic Burnout

Masking Runs 24/7 and Bills You for It Ico Fish calls themselves the autistic love mystic. In this episode of Energy Economics for Parents, they gave host Christopher Fern something more concrete than a title: an accounting of what masking actually takes out of a person, and what it takes to stop. Masking is the work of pretending to be neurotypical—holding eye contact you don’t want to hold, standing at the culturally approved distance, tracking the flow of a conversation that a neurotypical person tracks by reflex. Ico’s point is that none of it is free. It runs around the clock, it draws on the same reserve everything else draws on, and the person doing it usually doesn’t count it as work. Spoon theory, applied to masking Ico borrows spoon theory from the chronic illness community. A person has a set number of energetic spoons in a day. A shower takes some. Laundry takes some. Dishes take some. The count is finite and it doesn’t reset because the day got harder. For a neurodivergent person who has been masking a long time, masking is the item at the top of that ledger that never gets itemized. Which produces a result that catches people off guard: unmasking usually starts with exhaustion getting worse. Naming how depleted you are is its own expense before it is any kind of relief. Christopher Fern pushed on exactly this—a parent with no reserve left is being asked to spend more, on the promise of getting more back later. Ico’s answer is that the alternative doesn’t have a long-term version. Mask hard enough and long enough and the inauthenticity can build to a genuine mental crisis. The end of that road is a breakdown, arriving on a schedule nobody picks. Rebuilding the count from the floor Asked how to raise the ceiling rather than just sleeping under it, Ico started at the bottom. Neurodivergent people frequently run disconnected from the body and will go hours without eating or drinking without registering it. When did I last drink water. When did I last eat. Christopher connected it to the base of Maslow’s hierarchy—the questions that feel too small to matter are usually the ones that got skipped. Above that sits a body practice. Can I feel my feet. How many of my toes can I find. Ico traces a finger from the forehead down to the heart as a physical reminder of the direction of travel. And then the sensory inventory that adults often think they’re too old to ask for: tags cut out of shirts, socks folded a specific way. Ico’s framing is that saying what works out loud counts as advocacy, even when it makes no sense to anyone neurotypical. What this means for parents For a parent raising a neurodivergent child, Ico offered two things. Recognize the child as a sovereign individual—someone who will think, feel, and decide for themselves, with a real yes and a real no worth teaching them to find. And go one step further back and parent your own inner child, the one who didn’t get what they needed, without pretending it was fair. Both cost energy. Ico’s case is that they’re among the few expenditures that pay the reserve back rather than draining it. Ico is offering a free call at callwithico.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe
Aug 2

The Attachment Tax: What Boysen Hodgson Learned About Parenting Neurodivergent Kids

Boysen Hodgson spent twenty years in men’s emotional development work before he became a father. When he and his wife Kendra took in two siblings through foster-to-adopt, they’d already done intensive parenting classes and a separate class on parenting kids with trauma. What none of it fully prepared them for was the daily, physical work of raising two neurodivergent kids in a world built for neither of them. On Energy Economics for Parents, he talked with Chris about what that work actually costs—and who ends up paying. The diagnosis is not the child For years, the labels that got attached to Boysen’s kids were “defiant” and “problem kid.” One child carried a diagnosis long before anyone named it, because behavior got attributed to trauma and PTSD before anyone looked at the kid brain and asked what was really happening. Boysen’s clearest line is a warning about the fix, not just the delay: during the years a kid is forming an identity, turning a diagnosis into the child is one of the most damaging things a family or a school can do. Understanding the pattern is useful. Letting it define the person is not. He frames the whole thing as one sentence with two endings—”I learn differently, so I do it this way,” or “I can’t because I.” One opens a door. The other locks it. Where the energy actually goes The show’s frame is energy, and Boysen names the tax directly. When he needs the den cleaned now, his way, that urgency belongs to him—and pushing it across the table lands on his kids as a wound. So in his house, “clean up the den” isn’t an order. It’s a bid for a conversation, a negotiation with if-thens and natural consequences instead of punishment. Bedtime ran over an hour for years, all of it nervous-system calming. And when his own tolerance for the songs on repeat and the repetitive patterns runs out, he taps his partner in and steps away on purpose, rather than amping up the stress in the room. He’s blunt that Kendra is better at the letting-go than he is, and that getting a partner who reminds you is part of the method, not a failure of it. The part that’s on the parent Public school was the hardest stretch of his kids’ lives—Boysen draws a direct line between it and the crisis interventions the family had to undertake, while being careful to separate good, under-resourced counselors from the “why can’t you fit the path” mindset that did the damage. But the sharpest turn in the conversation is inward. Every skill he’s trying to practice with his kids, he says, he has to practice with himself, because the self-judgment a parent won’t own gets projected onto the kids. He ties the cultural default of self-hatred to hustle and productivity pressure, and points at self-compassion as the replacement. He closes with an acronym from his friend Jim Catona—RESPECT: Remember Everyone Suffers Painful Experiences, Communicate Tenderly. It’s a decent summary of the whole hour. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe
Jul 24

What It Costs to Run on Anxiety—and What Jenna Larson Learned to Stop Paying

Jenna Larson figured out she was neurodivergent the way a lot of women do: while researching how to help her kids. She’d read about ADHD, about dyslexia, about how these things show up in daily life, and the descriptions kept describing her. On Energy Economics for Parents, she tells Chris she’s never been formally diagnosed and doesn’t really need the paper. Everyone who knows her already nodded along years ago. What makes the conversation worth an hour is that Jenna doesn’t treat her wiring as a problem to be solved or a badge to wave. She treats it as an energy question. She’s a zero-to-100 person—her words—and that intensity is the fuel behind a career and a software company she and her partner have poured close to half a million dollars into. It’s also the reason a nurse saying “we found something” spikes her heart-rate monitor before anyone’s said whether it’s bad. Same engine, two very different bills. Where the energy actually goes The show’s frame is where a parent’s finite energy goes, and Jenna answers in specifics instead of theory. For a long time, a lot of hers went to the morning fight—getting one of her kids ready and out the door, shoes on, hurry up, every day a standoff. Then she and her husband tried something that felt like giving up and turned out to be the opposite. They stopped being his frontal lobe. As long as you’re in the car, they told him, we don’t care how you get ready. He started spending 30 minutes on backyard basketball first. He has never been late since. The pattern repeats across the episode. Jenna talks about a sock on the floor she looks at every day and can’t make herself pick up, an alarm clock she’s genuinely mad at even though she set it. That’s PDA—demand avoidance—and she’s clear that it eats real energy, most of it in conflicts that live entirely in her own head. Chris keeps pulling the thread back to one question: how much does that cost you? Letting go as the actual skill Jenna’s honest that self-awareness isn’t the finish line. She can explain her own patterns better than most therapists expect, and she still struggles with them daily. What’s changed isn’t that she fixed herself. It’s that she stopped spending energy pretending she could, and started building around the truth. A business partner who solves a crisis before he tells her, because he knows how she’ll react to the words “we need to talk.” A family that softens how they deliver a phone call, because a ringing phone once meant her mom’s cancer. She calls neurodivergence “not an excuse, an explanation”—and the explanation is what lets the people around her show up for her. For parents earlier in this, her advice is smaller and harder than any system. Mourn the version of your kid you pictured, so you can see the one in front of you. Let them fail sometimes, because you can’t remove all the friction and still raise someone with grit. And try—put yourself out there, because it’s already a no until you get the yes. Coming from someone who runs on anxiety and knows exactly what it costs her, that reads like a report from the field. Find Jenna Larson on Instagram @the.jenna.larson and on Facebook as Jenna Dubois Larson. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe
Jul 17

When Parenting Doesn't Feel Like a Struggle: Energy, Modeling, and Trusting a Kid's Inner Compass with Nicole Cruz

Most parenting content aimed at families with neurodivergent kids starts from the same assumption: this is going to be hard. In the first episode of Energy Economics for Parents, Nicole Cruz opens with the opposite. Parenting her nine-year-old autistic son with ADHD hasn’t felt like the struggle she was told to expect—and she’s careful to say that’s her experience, not a verdict on anyone else’s. Where the ease actually comes from It isn’t luck, and it isn’t a lack of difficulty. It’s where Nicole chooses to spend her energy. Trained through Teach for America to build classrooms that work for every student—the shoveled-ramp idea, where the environment is set up so no one has to be separated out to get what they need—she carries the same principle into parenting and into her consulting work, where she helps business owners stay in their zone of genius and let systems handle the rest. The common thread is refusing to pour energy into fighting a person’s actual shape. Drop the assumption, then model the rest Two habits do most of the work. The first is dropping assumptions: when your mind decides a whole group of people must be careless or ignorant, that’s the cue to investigate, not conclude. Nicole asks herself why a person as intelligent and competent as she is would behave that way—and the question reliably opens a better conversation. The second is modeling. Kids absorb what you do long before they follow what you say, which is why “do as I say, not as I do” quietly teaches that words and actions don’t have to match. When she’s unsure what to do as a parent, she asks what she’d want her son to do, and then does that. Taking a child’s inner compass seriously Nicole has followed her son’s cues since he was a baby—”I need a hat. My baby doesn’t need a hat.” She treats his inner wisdom as serious data without handing over the decision, and the payoff is visible: four years running, he has planned a surprise Mother’s Day adventure, leading her across New York City to the Empire State Building. Her closing charge is the heart of the show: cut what drains you, build your life around your zone of genius, and drop the shame. The world wasn’t made for you—but you can make a life that fits. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com/subscribe

5 Episodes

Energy Economics for Parents is a show about the only budget that never balances—your own energy, and where it actually goes each day. Host Christopher Fern talks with parents, many of them raising neurodivergent kids, about what to spend their finite energy on, what to protect, and what to finally cut loose. members.neurodiversitymedianetwork.com

Creator

Briar Harvey
Years Active

2026
Episodes

5
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Briar Harvey
Show Website

Energy Economics