Cracked Open
I've been watching The Forsyte Saga on Netflix — a story set in Victorian England where class, society, and a rigid way of being ruled everything. You dressed a certain way, married a certain way, lived a certain way. If you strayed, you were cast out. No negotiation. No second chances.
What strikes me, watching it, is how clearly you can see from the outside what the characters living inside it cannot always see: that the mold is just a mold. Someone's construct. A set of rules that were never handed down from any authority higher than the people who invented them. And yet the characters who embrace it most tightly are the ones who suffer most — brittle, controlled, cut off from anything real. The ones who crack it open, who dare to want something different, are the ones who find their way to something more authentic. It costs them. But they are more alive for it.
I recognize that story. I lived a version of it.
I related to both characters in this story, Soames and Irene.
The Mold I Didn't Know I Was Living Inside
I grew up in a cookie cutter environment. There was a way to dress, a way to behave, a set of clubs to join, a list of schools that mattered. Success had a shape, and you were expected to fit yourself into it. I didn't question it. I conformed — because that's what you did, and because for a long time, I didn't know there was another option.
When I had my own children, I carried that shape with me. I didn't mean to. I didn't even know I was doing it. But the expectations I had absorbed became the expectations I held, quietly and unconsciously, for the children I was raising.
And then one of them refused to fit.
He pushed every boundary I set. He questioned everything I assumed. What I didn't see at the time was that I was parenting from inside a set of inherited expectations that had nothing to do with who he actually was. I was measuring him against a shape that hadn't fit me either — I just hadn't recognized it yet. My other child moved through that shape more easily, and I mistook that ease for success. It wasn't until my son refused it entirely that I had to look at it honestly.
What I understand now, with the clarity that only hindsight provides, is that it wasn't his boundary-pushing alone that changed me. It was the work of embracing who he actually was — his strengths, his particular way of moving through the world, the things about him that didn't fit the shape I had inherited. In doing that work, I had to look honestly at the shape itself. And what I found was that it had never really fit me either. We both needed to break free. And we did, together, in our own ways.
What We're Actually Measuring When We Measure a Child
We impose a linear model of success on children almost without realizing it. There is a path: perform well, meet the milestones, arrive at the destination. Deviation reads as failure. But when we measure, what exactly are we measuring against?
For children who are neurodivergent (whose brain chemistry is developing on a different timeline, who are wired to learn and process the world differently) the linear model isn't just unfair. It is structurally impossible to meet. The message these children receive, repeatedly, is that they are behind. That they are less. When the truth is that they are on a different path. Not a deficient one. A different one.
The Better Question
The better question isn't how closely a child conforms to the expected path. It's whether they are developing their own critical thinking, leaning into their strengths, becoming more fully who they are. Every child is experiential, building their understanding of the world through what they feel, what they test, what they survive. Their perception of that experience is valid, even when it differs from ours.
Embracing Your Child for Who They Are — Not Who You Expected
The most successful people I have known are not the ones who followed the linear path most faithfully. They are the ones who learned to adapt, to be flexible, to find their footing on terrain that wasn't what they expected. The Forsyte characters who broke from the mold paid a social price. But they were the ones who got to live.
The parents who navigate this best are the ones who can hold the framework loosely enough to see their actual child. Not the child the linear model would produce. The one sitting in front of them, asking in whatever way they know how: do you see me? Do you love me?
Those are the questions that matter. I know. I lived them.
Jennifer Benson is a therapeutic educational consultant and MSW, and partner atCrossbridge Consulting. She and Rebekah Jordan work with families navigating complex educational and therapeutic placements for children, adolescents, and young adults.
