The IEP Can Change the Environment. But Can It Question the System?

Neurodiversity-affirming practice has to ask more than how we help a child function inside the classroom we already built.

By Mandy Parida, September 9, 2026

Schools already know the environment matters.

We write movement breaks into IEPs. We offer visual schedules. We allow headphones. We give extra processing time. We change transitions. We reduce demands. We add adult support. We create quiet spaces and sensory options and all sorts of ways to help a child access the school day. So I am not particularly interested in making another argument that environment matters.

I am interested in what happens when we go one step further.

What if the environment isn’t merely something we adjust to help the child function? What if our definition of functioning is part of the environment too?

That is where things get more complicated. A school can make an enormous number of accommodations for a child while leaving the basic architecture of participation untouched.

The student gets a movement break so they can return to sitting. They get headphones so they can remain in the noisy room. They get extra transition time so they can eventually arrive where everyone else is expected to be. They get support learning how to enter group work, initiate assignments, tolerate changes, regulate emotions, ask for help appropriately and become more independent.

None of those supports are inherently bad. Many are important. But underneath them can remain an assumption so familiar that we barely notice it:

The system is the fixed point. The child is the variable.

We will alter the conditions enough to help the child participate more successfully in the thing we have already decided counts as successful participation. That is the part I want to examine because in my own life, functioning has never behaved that neatly.

I am a therapist and the parent of neurodivergent children, which means I spend an unreasonable amount of time observing nervous systems under very poor laboratory conditions.

In my family, functioning moves. One person remembers appointments. Another notices the emotional temperature of the room. Someone knows where the scissors are. Someone remembers the snacks. Someone starts singing a ridiculous parody song at exactly the moment everyone is about to lose their minds.

No single person consistently possesses every required life skill at exactly the right time, but collectively we are strangely functional.

I describe this in my book as a kind of community mind: executive functioning stitched together through collaboration, compensation, humor, movement, reminders, forgiveness and whoever currently knows where the keys are.

That way of seeing my own family changed the questions I ask about children.

I am no longer asking how we help the person to function better in the system, but, rather: What exactly is being required here, and under what conditions does this person function best?

That is a different question, on purpose.

Here is what I mean.

Imagine a seventh grader during independent writing. The class has been given twenty minutes to respond to a prompt. Most students begin working. One student puts their head down on the desk.

The teacher approaches and says,  “Time to get started.”

Nothing.

A few minutes later, another prompt from the teacher or classmate. “You need to be writing.”

The student gets irritated. Eventually they say they are not doing it.

Now we have a behavior. And because schools are full of caring adults who are trying very hard to help children succeed, people begin trying to solve it.

Maybe the student needs a visual timer or a behavior goal around task initiation. Maybe they need reinforcement for beginning work independently or need a break card or fewer prompts.

Any of those could be useful. But before I choose an intervention, I want to slow the whole thing down.

I want to ask: What does independent writing actually require?

The child has to understand the prompt, generate an idea, decide where to begin, hold the idea in working memory, translate it into language, sequence those thoughts, physically write or type them, monitor time, ignore competing sensory information, tolerate uncertainty about whether the answer is “good,” then continue despite frustration. And they are expected to do all of that independently, while knowing an adult is periodically checking whether they have started yet.

That is not one task. That is a small executive-functioning obstacle course disguised as a worksheet.

Once we can see that, the useful question stops being: Why won’t this student write?

And becomes: Where is the friction?

The friction might be task initiation, language operation, handwriting demands, sensory overload, ambiguity, social pressure, working memory, fear of getting it wrong, or the cumulative effect of several of those at once.

This is the point where I use a different kind of inquiry. I want to know: What is being asked of the child?

Not merely the assignment. The sensory, cognitive, social, relational and executive demands hidden inside it. This is involves what the person is actually doing not our interpretation of it.

What I’m talking about here is how we make sense of this apparent divergence from standardized participation in learning. Perhaps we start with conceptualization.  Instead of saying, “the child refuses to do the work,” we actually just document what we observe: “Student has their dead down on their desk. No writing for six minutes. They are not using words.”

That gives us more useful information than “refusing.”

Then I can ask, What might the child’s response be accomplishing? Is it reducing sensory input? Delaying a demand? Creating processing time? Protecting the person from anticipated failure? Maintaining autonomy? Communicating that something in the task is inaccessible?

We do not have to know with certainty. We are generating hypotheses, not diagnosing somebody from across the room.

Then I might ask: What is the environment contributing? Noise? Time pressure? A blank page? Too many verbal instructions? Public correction? Unclear expectations? A social interaction that already happened fifteen minutes earlier and is still occupying half the child’s nervous system?

And then I arrive at the question that matters most: What could we change before requiring the child to change?

That might mean talking through idea through before writing, offering several entry points instead of a blank page, starting with an image, working beside another person, breaking the assignment into stages, or changing the adult prompt from “You need to get started to “Are you stuck on starting, thinking, or doing?”

Now we are not simply accommodating a deficit. We are designing conditions for access.

Some of these supports may already appear on an IEP. The difference is not necessarily the support itself, but what we believe it is for. Are we using it to help the child fit the existing system more successfully, or are we changing the conditions because the system itself is creating unnecessary friction?

And only after that do I want to ask: Is there a skill this child would benefit from developing?

Because sometimes there is. Neurodiversity-affirming practice does not mean children never stretch, learn, tolerate frustration or develop new abilities. It means the goal of skill-building is greater agency, not simply greater conformity.

There is an important difference between support and normalization. Supporting requires making meaningful participation possible for this person. Normalization dismisses that and goes straight to helping the person participate in the way we expect.

The distinction can be subtle.

Take a movement break. A child might genuinely use movement to regulate their nervous system and regain access to attention. Wonderful. But a movement break can also quietly become five minutes of permitted neurodivergence in exchange for forty-five minutes of sitting still.

Same accommodation with a different purpose.

This is why I think we have to become clearer about the outcomes our interventions are trying to produce. Are we trying to create learning, access, communication, agency, and belonging? Or are we primarily concerned with compliance? Those are not interchangeable.

The same thing happens with independence. We treat independence as though it were the final stage of successful human development, while almost every adult institution on Earth is built around distributed functioning.

A successful executive can have an assistant. A medical team distributes cognition among people with different expertise. Workplaces use calendars, project-management software, agendas, reminders, shared documents and entire administrative departments because expecting one human brain to remember and coordinate everything would be absurd.

My father understood this in the early nineties when he carried a Franklin Planner around and literally called it his brain.

“Has anyone seen my brain?”

It was roughly the size of a small family Bible and he took it everywhere. Nobody considered this evidence that he had failed to develop independent executive functioning. We called him organized.

So when a child functions better with another person nearby, or needs visual information, external reminders, repeated scaffolding or collaborative initiation, I am less interested in how quickly we can remove that support.

I want to know what the support is doing.

Executive functioning does not always need to move inward. Sometimes visual information can hold memory. Technology can hold time. Routine can hold sequencing. Another person can hold initiation. Movement can support regulation. Interest can support attention. A group can create momentum.

The environment is not compensating for the person, it is part of how the person functions.

That idea became very clear to me after I became a parent. Before children, I had unconsciously engineered much of my life around my own nervous system. I could recover in silence. I could leave. I could follow a thought until it reached wherever it was trying to go.

Then I became responsible for other nervous systems. Noise I could not turn off. Touch I did not initiate. Questions arriving in the middle of thoughts. Schedules changing. Objects disappearing. Emotional needs entering the room with absolutely no regard for whatever task I had planned to complete.

From the outside, it could have looked as though I became less functional. But that interpretation only works if you pretend the conditions remained the same.

They didn’t.

The conditions changed, and so did the amount and kind of executive functioning required. A nervous system is always functioning somewhere, with someone and under particular sensory, cognitive, relational and emotional conditions.

Children are no different. This is why I am increasingly interested in the gap between accommodating a child inside a system and examining the system itself.

Sometimes the intervention is headphones, a visual schedule, tteaching a skill, movement or more processing time or another person sitting nearby. And sometimes the intervention is realizing that the thing we have been measuring as competence is actually the child’s ability to perform school in the particular form we designed it.

Those are not always the same thing.

I have written that neurodivergent families often make distributed functioning more visible because our skills can be remarkably uneven. One person may struggle profoundly with time while possessing extraordinary creativity, pattern recognition or emotional attunement. Another may remember where every object in the room is and be unable to tolerate the sensory environment where those objects are located. The system works when no one person is expected to carry every function perfectly all the time.

Executive Functioning is a Team Sport is not just the title of the book I’m writing. It is the framework I keep arriving at when I look closely at the systems we have built around one narrow idea of how a competent mind and body should function.

I think classrooms deserve the same curiosity. Better structure not less. Structure that knows what it is for.

Jazz musicians understand this better than most institutions do. Structure and improvisation are not opposites. Structure is what allows improvisation to happen safely. In my own family, someone introduces a theme, someone compensates rhythmically, somebody completely misses the cue entirely and recovers in the bridge. Everybody adjusts based on what the other nervous systems are doing.

From outside, that can look disorganized. From inside, it is communication.

I think schools can hold both too.

Children need predictability. Boundaries. Skilled adults. Access to learning. Opportunities to stretch beyond what is easy. Communities where everybody’s needs matter. None of those things requires us to pretend there is only one legitimate way to pay attention, communicate, regulate, organize, participate, or learn.

An IEP can change the environment around a child. I want us to keep doing that. But I also want us to notice when we are spending enormous amounts of expertise helping a child become more successful inside a system whose underlying assumptions we have never interrogated.

Sometimes what we understand as deficit begins to look very different when we stop asking only what is happening inside the person. Sometimes it looks like mismatch.

The most important intervention is not teaching the child how to tolerate the room. It is becoming curious enough to ask why we built the room that way in the first place.