Why You Should Write ND Affirming Goals

What does it mean for our goals to be neurodiversity affirming?

Neurodiveristy affirming goals should NOT aim to make a child appear less Autistic or make the child “fit in” aka look more neurotypical.

Neurodiveristy affirming goals should support the child’s language, wellbeing, and social interaction in authentic ways.

Why is this so important?

Depression rates are high in Autistic individuals and the average lifespan is decreased in Autistic individuals.

This isn’t an… I’ll get to this later… kind of problem.

And I think many SLPs know that. But there are just a lot of misconceptions out there about writing ND Affirming goals. 

So let’s bust some of those myths now: 

• They only focus on strengths and ignore the child’s challenges
• They won’t help kids in the “real world”
• You can’t target perspective taking 

I have written some non ND affirming goals. But when you know better, you do better right? 

So let’s talk about the truth behind neurodiversity affirming goals: 

• They’re easy to write
• They’re easy to target
• They feel good to kids, therapists, parents, and teachers (win for everyone)

And if you are sitting here thinking, “um no Jessie, they are not easy to write”, I’m here to help you!

Let’s talk about how to make our goals neurodiversity affirming:

Receptive Language Goals

It’s important to ask ourselves these questions when writing receptive language goals:

Does the child NEED this goal? 

Are we presuming competence? 

What assessment did we use that told me the child has difficulty with comprehension? 

Instead of writing following directions or compliance based goals, we can change our language to “child will demonstrate understanding of [insert various concepts]”. 

Expressive Language Goals

It’s important to ask ourselves these questions when writing expressive language goals: 

Would the child benefit from total communication?

Is the child a gestalt processor? 

How are they communicating their wants and needs at this point? 

Instead of focusing on requesting or only using verbal speech, we should be giving plenty of opportunities to use multimodal communication for a variety of pragmatic purposes. 

Social & Self Advocacy Goals

It’s important to ask ourselves these questions when writing social & self-advocacy goals: 

Does this goal aim to teach the student to imitate their peers?

Could this lead to masking and a sense of inauthenticity?

Does the goal lead to self-determination and agency? 

Instead of focusing on taking turns in a conversation about a non-preferred topic for 5 minutes, we should be modeling opportunities for the child to advocate for conversational topic changes. 

If you want to hear us go into more detail about goal writing, make sure to check out our recent live training: ND Affirming Goal Writing. 

And if you are a neurodiversity affirming therapist who has been scouring the internet trying to hunt and peck for resources that actually support your autistic clients, then your search is over. 

We’re so excited to be able to bring you all of the ND affirming trainings that you need, all in one place. 

Introducing the ND Affirming Therapy Academy - your one stop shop for all things ND affirming.

When you join the ND Affirming Therapy Academy, you get trainings, live calls with our Autistic mentor, and unlimited CEUs. All the CEUs you need for a year, in everything ND affirming.

Click here to learn more about the Neurodiversity Affirming Therapy Academy