Lived Experiences of Neurodivergent Children and Adolescents: What Helps and Hinders Well-Being in Everyday Life

Mental health research on neurodivergent children and adolescents often focuses on reducing neurodivergent traits in school, leisure, and family settings. This Research Topic shifts focus to how neurodivergent children and adolescents experience these everyday settings as helping or hindering their wellbeing and autonomy.Consistent with the scope of the Autism and Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders section, all contributions must provide detailed, in-depth evidence linking everyday contexts to mental health and wellbeing outcomes. Using a neurodivergence-affirmative framework and identity-first, strengths-based, non-stigmatizing language, this collection explores how everyday contexts can bring out neurodivergent children’s and adolescents’ unique strengths or negatively affect their development.We welcome research representing a broad range of neurodivergent lived experiences within the first two decades of life, with particular attention to groups currently underrepresented in neurodiversity research — for example, research with Tourette's children on what contexts help them connect with peers, or with autistic children on what contexts support healthy eating habits.We also welcome contributions developing methods that foreground the lived experiences of neurodivergent children and adolescents — for example, arts-based alternatives to interviews — provided they are grounded in empirical data collection with the populations concerned, rather than purely conceptual or theoretical proposals.Traditional psychiatric and clinical models often prioritize external behavioral observations — for instance, observable ticking behavior — over first-person accounts. This Research Topic does not seek to displace clinical or biomedical approaches as it complements them by focusing on how everyday contexts and interactions help or hinder wellbeing, in line with neurodiversity-affirmative approaches that consider lived experience alongside external behavior, and with the section’s commitment to identification, clinical care, and health services research that improves outcomes.Foregrounding specific sensory, material, or social elements of everyday life — for instance, the development of sleeping or eating habits in autistic children — can inform clinical care, health service design, and non-pharmacological intervention development, consistent with paradigms increasingly used in developmental psychology, psychiatric phenomenology, enactive psychiatry, and neurodiversity studies. There is a pressing clinical need to bridge these perspectives with empirical, clinical, and health service research: mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, social isolation, and eating disorders are better prevented and treated by centering neurodivergent experiences of everyday contexts.We invite empirical qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods submissions exploring the lived experiences of neurodivergent children and adolescents across everyday contexts. We are particularly interested in the impact of everyday environments on flow experiences (e.g., in leisure contexts) and on mental health outcomes, including anxiety and depression. All submissions should provide in-depth evidence connecting everyday context to a mental health, wellbeing, or clinical/health-service outcome; general wellbeing and autonomy contributions are welcome where this link is made explicit. We encourage submissions focused on autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), tic disorders (including Tourette’s syndrome), Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), and other neurodevelopmental conditions.Themes may include first-person perspectives on sensory environments and their clinical implications; the psychological impact of masking and cognitive fatigue; strengths-based clinical interventions; and participatory health services research. We welcome Brief Research Reports, Original Research, Systematic Reviews, Hypotheses and Theories, and Perspectives, including conceptual work on how lived-experience research can inform clinical practice, service design, or intervention development in neurodivergence-affirmative family, school, or leisure contexts.Purely descriptive or theoretical submissions without a clear health, wellbeing, or intervention-relevant contribution, or focused on adult-only populations without a direct connection to childhood or adolescent development, fall outside the scope of this topic. Topic editors: Jo Bervoets, Jeroen Dewinter, Hanne Jacobs, Jiedi Lei, Kate Cooper Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83830/lived-experiences-of-neurodivergent-children-and-adolescents-what-helps-and-hinders-well-being-in-everyday-life