Sue Anderson never got in trouble at school. She drummed piano parts on her desk, got excited about everything, and kept almost all of it under wraps. “I was always extremely well behaved at school,” she tells Christopher Fern on Energy Economics for Parents, “but it took a lot of restraint.”
That restraint has a cost, and most parents are still paying some version of it. Sue Anderson, a professional writer for 20 years and the founder of Entrepreneurs Gone Wild, spent the conversation adding it up.
Outside was where the car lived
For 17 years of building her writing business, Sue only went outside to get the kids somewhere. She’d been told the rule of owning a business was to work until you drop, and with a family to feed, she followed it. She says now that it is not, in fact, the way.
A book got her outside, reluctantly. She expected bugs, heat, and boredom. What she found was that a few minutes a day calmed her down and made her creativity bloom. The minutes grew. She started sneaking out after lunch and felt like a fifth grader whose teacher had just announced class outdoors. Today she runs a group, newsletter, and podcast for entrepreneurs who do their best thinking outside—an idea she admits runs against everything they’ve been told.
The primary directive
Growing up, Sue absorbed one rule above the rest: be polite. Kindness never hurts, she says, but politeness turned into constraints that dimmed who she was. Holding in the excitement, the fidgeting, the urge to get amped up about an idea—all of it took effort she didn’t know she was spending.
She sees the same pattern in school. While homeschooling for a stretch, she read about how classrooms are built for an imaginary child who sits still, speaks only when spoken to, and focuses for long periods. Most kids aren’t that child. From age four or five, the ones who don’t fit start collecting the message that something is wrong with them, and they carry it for the next dozen years.
Christopher Fern knows that message firsthand. As a kid, he was pulled into a separate room for assessments while nobody figured out what was going on. He didn’t come away asking what was wrong with him. He knew he was different and that the way he was wasn’t accepted. “So inherently, I was wrong.”
What parents can stop spending on
Sue’s two grown kids struggled when they were small, and counselors in the ‘90s told her they were fine. They weren’t. Both have since come to understand themselves as neurodivergent, and Sue, with no diagnosis of her own, is newly curious about how her own brain works.
Looking back, she can name what she needed as a young parent: information, someone who believed her instead of jumping to “badly behaved,” and a co-parent on the same page about what they would and wouldn’t do before the hard moment arrived. Being married, she found, doesn’t mean two people share the same idea of parenting.
She can also name what she’d stop spending energy on. After a violent crime against a child in her neighborhood when her son was a newborn, she kept her kids close, and she sees now how much that fear steered their childhood. Parents who can be less afraid stop handing the fear down. The two things she’d want a neurodivergent kid to carry are simple. Be yourself. And know that mom and dad really have you.
About the host Christopher Fern hosts Energy Economics for Parents on the Neurodiversity Media Network. He’s an AuDHD author, inventor, and entrepreneur, and the founder of Energy Economics, a daily practice app that sorts what’s on your mind into must-do, worth-doing, and nice-to-have. He also created the ND Operating System and The Other Side of the Table, a video guide that explains neurodivergent shutdown to the partners, parents, and colleagues on the other side of it. On the show, every guest gets some version of his core question: what does it cost you?
About the guest Sue Anderson has been a professional writer for 20 years. She founded Entrepreneurs Gone Wild, a group, newsletter, and podcast built on the idea that entrepreneurs do their best thinking outdoors, where she interviews people who get their best ideas in nature. She is also a parent of two grown kids. Website: entrepreneursgonewild.com
