Energy Economics

Briar Harvey

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

Episodes

  1. 5d ago

    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

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

  2. 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

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

  3. 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

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

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Briar Harvey
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Briar Harvey
  • Show Website
    Energy Economics