Case studyFor parents who are neurodivergent too
Autistic and raising autistic children: how Michael Coles keeps his family's reports, patterns and plans in one place
Michael Coles is an autistic ADHDer in Australia, raising two neurodivergent children. He kept their reports on a hard drive and their patterns in his head. He now uploads reports, school emails and therapist observations to Understanding Zoe, keeps a profile for himself as well as for his children, and asks for a plan in the moment.
Written by Laetitia Andrac, co-founder of Understanding Zoe
Published 8 min read
Before: two children, two sets of triggers, and one brain holding all of it
Michael's weeks do not repeat.
“Week to week is still different for us, because you can't predict what it's actually going to look like in the first place.”
His two children experience the world differently from each other: different triggers, different anxieties, different sensitivities, different ways of interacting with their environment. His daughter had been having a difficult time at school. And Michael was working all of this out while managing his own autistic ADHD brain, which sometimes ran straight into his daughter's.
“Sometimes with my personality, or how I interact, especially with my daughter, sometimes our autistic traits clash, and I'm trying to work out how I can do this properly.”
The information existed. It just was not anywhere useful. Reports sat on a hard drive. Observations from teachers and therapists arrived by email. What actually happened on a hard day, and what helped, stayed in his head.
“All we did was have the information from reports. Now we can upload the reports and get a specific answer that I could actually really use.”
Michael is in the largest group of parents in our research, not an unusual one. In Understanding Zoe's 2025 study of 1,091 Australian parents, 63% of those raising a neurodivergent child also identify as neurodivergent themselves. They also carry more: neurodivergent parents of neurodivergent children average 37 hours a week on support and advocacy, against 25 hours for neurotypical parents of neurodivergent children (Understanding Zoe, Making the Invisible Visible, 2025, n=1,091).
The moment it changed: a theme park, and a brain going in too many directions
During the school holidays, Michael's daughter absconded at a theme park.
This is the part of the story that is rarely told out loud: the parent's own neurodivergence, in the middle of the emergency, doing exactly what it does. Monotropism, the tendency to attend deeply to one thing at a time, is a strength in most of Michael's life. In a theme park with a missing child and a lifeguard to find, it is not.
What changed was not that this stopped happening. It was that it stopped being lost. Michael now captures experiences like this one, so that the next time resembles a plan rather than a shutdown.
“Having those experiences and trying to learn from them and trying to capture those. So if there's a similar situation again, I know to plan for it... we could have a plan and work out what plan is actually going to work.”
What he actually does now
He uploads everything that used to be scattered.
Reports off the hard drive, emails, and the observations teachers and professionals share with him.
He captures what happens, as it happens.
The incidents, the morning and evening routines that work some days and not others, the things he had been carrying in his head and had never had a chance to write down.
He keeps a profile for himself.
Not only for his children. He uploads his own reports and describes how he interacts with the world.
He builds a document he can hand over.
Strengths, challenges and the accommodations that need to be in place, ready for the settings where they matter.
In his words
“Sharing how I interact with the world, and also uploading my reports, have helped as well, because with me being an autistic adult, I do have my own challenges.”
“I'm not the perfect parent. I'm pretty open to that... It's helpful with the app because it helps manage the frustration. I've got to take a step back and sometimes realise that what I'm doing may not be helping.”
“You can have moments where everything's going pretty well, but then one moment can bring everything down, and you need that app to be able to have that moment where the clinicians are not available, or the school is not available... It needs to be there at that particular time.”
“It's more supporting the way that the autistic brain actually works.”
“You can put a document together with the strengths, weaknesses, the challenges, and the accommodations that you need to put in. So it's helpful within certain settings, because having those accommodations and communicating those with them is really useful.”
“It's actually a very important tool. I think it will change how you interact with your children and interact with the world.”
What Michael told us that we have not fixed yet
Michael invited his children's therapists onto the app. Most did not take it up.
“I have invited them onto the app as well, but they haven't been able to accept. So having that integration will probably be important in the future.”
He is right, and it is a real limit. Clinician adoption is uneven: some therapists join immediately and others never do, and a family cannot make that happen on their own. It is on our roadmap and it is not solved.
Michael's household is not rare
The Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 290,900 Autistic Australians in 2022, 1.1% of the population and a 41.8% increase on 2018. Prevalence is 3.1% among people under 25 and 0.3% among people aged 25 and over (ABS, Autism in Australia, 2022).
The National Autism Strategy 2025 to 2031 notes that references to autism "are often in relation to children only and do not recognise the experience of autism across the life span".
That gap is the one Michael lives in: the parent who is also the adult the system rarely describes.
Questions parents and neurodivergent adults ask
I'm autistic myself and my child is autistic. How do other parents cope?
Michael describes doing two things at once: working out his children's triggers, and managing his own autistic ADHD brain while he does it. In our 2025 study of 1,091 Australian parents, 63% of those raising a neurodivergent child also identify as neurodivergent. It is the most common experience in our research, not an unusual one.
What happens when my autistic traits and my child's traits clash?
In Michael's words: "Sometimes with my personality, or how I interact, especially with my daughter, sometimes our autistic traits clash, and I'm trying to work out how I can do this properly." He uses Understanding Zoe to work through those moments rather than to prevent them from happening.
Can I use it for myself as an autistic adult, or is it only for parents?
Both. Michael keeps a profile for himself alongside his children's. He uploads his own reports and describes how he interacts with the world, which he says helps with his parenting and with how he and his wife work together. Adult support features were released in 2026.
Where do I keep my child's OT, speech and psychology reports?
Michael's were on a hard drive. He now uploads reports, school emails and the observations teachers and professionals send him into one place, so that asking a question about his child draws on his child's actual documents rather than general advice about children.
What goes into an accommodations document for school?
Michael builds one covering strengths, challenges and the accommodations that need to be in place, then shares it with the settings where it matters. He describes this as one of the more useful things he does with the app, because communicating accommodations is what actually changes what happens in the room.
I shut down in a crisis. Does that make me a bad parent?
No. Michael describes shutting down while looking for his daughter at a theme park, because monotropism means attending to one thing at a time and there were several. He now records what happened so the next time has a plan attached to it. Shutdown is how some autistic brains respond to overload, not a failure of care.
Listen: Michael's full conversation
Episode 3123 minutes
From overwhelm to clarity: A parent's journey with Understanding Zoe
Hosted by Laetitia Andrac on the Neurodivergent Pulse Podcast.
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About this case study
- Source
- Episode 31 of the Neurodivergent Pulse Podcast, recorded and published 05 May 2026, hosted by Laetitia Andrac
- Written by
- Laetitia Andrac, Understanding Zoe
- Published
- 25 August 2026
- Last reviewed
- 25 August 2026
- Next review
- February 2027
- Consent
- Michael agreed in writing to be named and quoted on this page.
- Quotes
- Lightly edited from the recording to remove spoken filler, and approved by Michael before publication.
A note on what this is. This is one person's account of his own experience. It is not a clinical claim, and it is not evidence that the app produces a particular outcome. Understanding Zoe does not hold verified efficacy data, and we will say so plainly until we do.
Find Michael
Michael hosts the Deep Dive Podcast at deepdiveau.net, where he talks with Australians about lived experience of neurodivergence, and he speaks on autistic burnout and inclusion.
References
- Understanding Zoe, Making the Invisible Visible: The Hidden Realities of Life for Neurodiverse Families, 2025. n=1,091 Australian parents. understandingzoe.com/white-paper
- Murray D, Lesser M and Lawson W, "Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism", Autism, 2005, 9(2), pages 139 to 156. The paper that introduced monotropism. Full text, free to read. monotropism.org/murray-lesser-lawson
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Autism in Australia, 2022, released 11 October 2024. 290,900 Autistic Australians, 1.1% of the population, a 41.8% increase on 2018. Prevalence is 3.1% among people under 25 and 0.3% among people aged 25 and over. abs.gov.au/articles/autism-australia-2022
- Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, National Autism Strategy 2025 to 2031, released 14 January 2025. health.gov.au/resources/publications/national-autism-strategy-2025-2031
