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.
