Why Sensitive, Neurodivergent Introverts Make Great Aunties

So 👋 many 👋 waving 👋 hand 👋 emojis 👋.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and you’re reading The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship and community for people who choose to help raise other people’s kids – and the people who love us. You can read my archive here.

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Prologue: Changes Afoot at The Auntie Bulletin

Aunties, have I told you how much I love you?

I get these amazing messages all the time. Aunties comment or write to me directly to share their own experiences of Auntiehood and kinship. (Dudes, check out the comment thread on the white elephant post. Come for the unshoppable no links lesbian gift guide, stay for the cake in the shape of a frozen dead squirrel). Parents reach out with insights I never would have understood on my own (see, e.g., the letter from a parent in this week’s Kinship Snacks).

And I get a ton of messages from people who are beginning to imagine doing community, kinship, and family differently. Indeed, you’re not just imagining; you’re actually doing things differently. I’ve heard from people having newly connected conversations with the kids in their lives, talking seriously with parent friends about how they can pitch in, and broaching the idea of not giving gifts this holiday season to the resounding assent of their loved ones.

What’s going right? I’m bringing a few assets to the project, it’s true, but really I attribute enthusiasm for the Auntie Bulletin to a widespread longing to reimagine family, community, and kin. The individualist, isolationist nuclear family model isn’t serving us – in fact, the social expectation that we all must form nuclear families may be a key reason that parents are so overwhelmed and everyone else is so lonely. The social safety net in the United States, already frayed and full of holes, is about to be attacked with scissors by the incoming administration, and beyond the U.S. it’s often not much better. Under these conditions, if we want a better world – if we want healthier and more sustainable and more welcoming communities – then we need to build all this ourselves. Strong, intergenerational, interdependent networks of community, kinship, and care will be essential. There is no other way.

I love writing this newsletter so much – I love the community that’s arising so much, I love doing this work and trying to build toward this world so much – that I recently quit my teaching job and I’m now focusing on The Auntie Bulletin full time.

In order to make ends meet, I need to paywall some posts starting in January. Going forward, you’ll receive two weekly posts in your inbox.

• Early each week, expect a collection of tasty Kinship Snacks – an Auntie how-to, Auntie and parent insights from the mail bag, three recommended reads, and the Cute Kid Video of the Week. Kinship Snacks are going behind a paywall in January.

• At the end of each week, look for the Aunties’ Entree – a full-length essay like today’s (which hasn’t even started yet, if you can believe it). Entrees will always be free, forever and ever, amen.

Instead of a drinking game, why not play a snack-eating game every time you encounter the phrase “sensitive, neurodivergent introvert” in this post? You will get to eat so many snacks!

I’d like your input on how to make a paid subscription worth your $5/month or $50/year. Will you do me a solid and respond to my Guidance from the Aunties survey, just below? It’s twelve multiple choice questions (with a few opportunities to elaborate if you want) and two open-ended ones; the whole thing should take you less than 3 minutes to complete. Respond now and be automatically entered to win one of five complementary 12-month paid subscriptions to The Auntie Bulletin!

Now Let’s Talk About Sensitive, Neurodivergent Introverts 👋

I don’t know about you, but the idea that sensitive, neurodivergent, introverted adults would be great with kids strikes me as counterintuitive. Those of us with sensory sensitivities (hi! 👋) often have very specific needs around lighting, noise levels, smells, messes, and bodies careening around – yet kids love to flick the overhead lights on and off, they bellow unexpectedly and for protracted periods of time, they make huge messes, and they’re often oblivious to other people’s personal space. We neurodivergent folks with our autism (me maybe? 👋) or anxiety (me for sure! 👋) or ADHD¹ or all three (plus whatever else, neurodivergence contains multitudes) – we often need things to be just so – yet kids don’t know or care about our systems and routines. As introverts (yep, very much me! 👋), we tend to be drained by social interaction, and we need quiet downtime to recharge – yet kids often want nothing more than our total and unceasing attention.

In spite of all these apparent incompatibilities, however, I’m here to suggest that hanging with kids can be oddly relieving for adults with sensory sensitivities and neurodivergences who otherwise need a lot of time alone. This is because kids have almost no social expectations, which allows us to actually be ourselves with them. Given our often significant needs for quiet, predictability, and downtime, however, it may make sense for us to have a part-time, Auntie-type relationship with kids.

Today’s post ventures into somewhat tricky territory that I’ll be exploring a lot more in 2025: why people might choose Auntiehood – perhaps even (I’m going there) instead of parenthood. Honestly, I’m nervous. I am about to make the pitch that, if you’re a sensitive, neurodivergent, and/or an introvert and you’re on the fence about parenthood, deciding to become an Auntie instead is worthy of your sincere consideration. My worry is that I’ll come off as criticizing or not understanding sensitive, neurodivergent, introverted parents, which is the last thing I want. Honestly, I have a track record of hurting people’s feelings when I least intend to, because I am not always great at diplomacy (autism, maybe! 👋).

So let me just start with this caveat: whoever you are, whatever your personality or needs, if you’re a parent or primary caregiver, The Auntie Bulletin is behind you. An essential aim of this newsletter is to have parents’ backs. Henceforth, I will be regularly publishing reader feedback (with or without the author’s name) in the Kinship Snacks, and if you’d like to weigh in on something I’ve missed or misunderstood, I sure do welcome your thoughts.

Okay, then.

Kids and Sensitive, Neurodivergent Introverts Have a Lot in Common

Imagine you’re at a party. It’s that time of year right now, so let’s say it’s a holiday party. 10 adults, or 20, or 30. Kids scamper underfoot. The lighting is bright, the music is loud, the conversations are many, shifting, and surface-y. Forget about a cozy one-on-one chat with your friend who you haven’t seen in awhile; even if you do manage to sit down with them, others will sidle up soon enough and almost inevitably change the subject away from whatever you were talking about that you were actually interested in. Or their partner or kids or your partner or friend will need or want something, or you’ll have to pee and when you get back your friend will be talking to someone you don’t really know and you will find that, in the midst of a party, you’re not really feeling up for meeting new people.

Meanwhile, you have this really great book waiting at home. Can you go home now even though you only got here an hour ago? Will the host think you don’t like them? You have some friends at the party whom you haven’t seen in a long time and you haven’t even talked to them yet. Are you allowed to leave without talking to them? Are you allowed to leave without saying goodbye to anyone? If you go sit in the car until your partner is ready to go, will people notice and think you’re weird? Is there somewhere you can hide?

Pieter Janssens Elinga, Reading Woman, c. 1660

I am so fun at parties, can you tell? Even just writing about this terrible party is making me anxious. (It’s not this party’s fault; it’s every party. Down with parties).

If you go sit in the car people will think you’re weird; plus you’ll get cold because it’s December in this scenario. So here’s what you do: you go find the kids and you hang out with them until you can recover enough to go back and obligatorily talk to the grown-ups some more.

This is a thing I do all the time when I have to go to parties. This is a thing which, I suspect, many sensitive, neurodivergent introverts do at parties. Because for sensitive, neurodivergent introverts, despite kids’ frequent hollering and hurtling about, they’re often easier to hang out with than adults. Kids don’t make small talk, they are oblivious to social niceties, and they can’t really be offended. It’s such a relief. To use the language of neurodivergence, people like me can stop masking when we’re around kids – that is, we can stop trying to *act normal* or manage everyone else’s feelings, and instead we can just act like ourselves. It’s so straightforward. It’s so real. It’s so much easier. Even just writing about it, my body relaxes.

These illustrations are by Robin Preiss Glasser, in Ann Patchett’s very sweet picture book, The Verts. I’m with the kid hiding behind the couch.

With kids, we can talk or not talk, whichever we want. They don’t think it’s weird if we abruptly announce we’re tired of talking about a given topic (ahem, Minecraft) and we want to talk about something else now. Meanwhile, if a kid isn’t interested in what we’re talking about, they’ll change the subject or just straight-up ignore us. It’s easy to find common interests with kids – dinosaurs, Simone Biles, bee stings, baby pandas – insofar as we all both keep tossing out whatever comes to mind until we find a topic we mutually want to talk about. And then it’s off to the races.

Sensitive, neurodivergent introverts may not be good at parties, but we have many other fine qualities. These often include truly listening to the person we’re talking to; noticing people’s facial expressions and wondering – and inquiring – about their possible emotions; and being willing to run with imagined scenarios. All of these are great for interacting meaningfully, lovingly with kids.

For example, in just the past few days, I’ve had great, focused conversations with kids about each of the following topics: What if you had wings, would they attach to the sides of your body like a bat’s, or just come out from the shoulder blades? What if you had a car that could drive upside down on the roof of a tunnel – how would it get back down when the tunnel ends? Would it hop and flip over or would it need some kind of off-ramp? And would you keep doing ballet if they said your friend couldn’t be a ballerina because she wasn’t skinny enough? In each of these conversations, both the kid and I were totally intrigued. We talked about it for exactly as long as we wanted to and no longer. And we reinforced our already strong bonds through this continuing evidence of shared interests. Then we both wandered off without saying goodbye, which is one of my favorite ways to leave. The kids heard Legos or bedtime calling their names; I had a really good book.

Which Brings Us to Auntiehood

Hanging with kids is so great. They are funny. They are sweet. They are surprising. They keep getting bigger and stronger and smarter and kinder and wiser and more amazing with every passing day. And they will positively rescue you at parties without even realizing it. But those compatibility issues I mentioned at the top of this post will never not be an issue for many people like me. Sooner or later, I always need to go home and read a book.

Even if we understand and truly accept kids, and kids understand and truly accept us, it’s still the case that sensitive, neurodivergent, introverted adults tend to need things to be just so. Personally, I do a lot better when I can manage the noise and light and mess and people-hurtling-around levels in my space. I do a lot better when I get a lot of sleep, a lot of alone time, a lot of unscheduled time, and a lot of quiet work time (and here I am, joyfully quitting teaching to become a full time writer, hi! 👋). I spent many years trying to become the kind of person who doesn’t need all these things so much, but what’s turned out to work way better for me is just getting my needs met.

I don’t want to be “childless” or “childfree.” Indeed, as an Auntie, my life is childful – and that is an important part of getting my needs met as well. I see the kids in my life all the time, and truly they’re among my closest friends – just as beloved and just as much a part of my community as their parents. So when those parents ask me to help out, I’m happy to say yes whenever I can.

But Aunties, here’s the crux. I can have these deep, loving, intergenerational friendships – and I can show up for my parent friends when needed – because Auntiehood is a part-time gig. My sensitive, neurodivergent, introvert superpowers make me a great Auntie, but I also suspect they might make me a pretty distressed parent.

We Can’t Know

When it comes to having or not having kids, we can never know what the other path would’ve been like for us. In her beloved “Dear Sugar” advice column, Cheryl Strayed once wrote of the parenthood/non-parenthood path not taken as “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.”

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

There’s a ghost ship on which I didn’t have four miscarriages, and instead my partner and I had kids. I’m confident that in many ways it would have been wonderful, and I suspect that if I had kids I might feel, like Strayed, “rattled by the knowledge of how close I’d come to opting to live my life without [my child].” Honestly, that line grabs my heart and yanks on it a bit, even now.

And yet, being real with you? As a sensitive, neurodivergent introvert who spends quite a lot of time with a lot of children whom I adore completely? I am so, so relieved to be an Auntie and not a mom. I think I would really struggle as a parent because it would be so hard for me to get my needs met – for order and downtime and all the rest.

Now, there are many parents out there who are sensitive, neurodivergent, introverted, or some combination of these. Of these, I believe many are happy and thriving, but I also suspect that some such parents – perhaps, indeed, many of them – are not quite so happy, not quite so thriving. Sensitive, neurodivergent, introverted parents certainly don’t love their kids any less than other parents. But they may have a harder time getting their needs met, and it might be particularly helpful for them to have one or more like-minded Aunties on hand (👋).

It’s actually difficult for any parents to be happy and thriving under the conditions they’re expected to navigate in the U.S. these days. It’s harder and harder for quite a lot of us to get our needs met. Just being able to make ends meet is increasingly out of reach for many families; reliable full time childcare is unaffordable and hard to access, as is healthcare, as is housing; there’s practically no such thing as a part time job with benefits; and in most places infrastructures and systems that would encourage community-building are thin on the ground.

This is why society needs Aunties, badly. As Jessica Calarco puts it, other countries have social safety nets, but the United States just has women. Truly, many other countries’ social safety nets are fraying, too – if they ever existed. To the extent that our elected officials let us down – and they are letting us down quite badly in quite a lot of places these days – we need people who actually want to take on supporting roles for families. We might need quite a lot of such people, in fact. So if you’re a sensitive, neurodivergent introvert trying to figure out whether to have kids, the good news is, you’ve got options.

Coming Attractions

Was this the absolutely, positively, #1 best way to figure out if you want kids, poorly disguised as something else? No! That one’s really still coming up in January. As I said in the Kinship Snacks on Tuesday, I’m saving it for after the holiday season because I want to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. I’m hoping it will be a resource for a lot of people.

This Monday in your inbox, look for the final complementary Kinship Snacks before they go behind a paywall. The how-to will be about what to do if a kid gives you something they made for you… and you don’t know what it is. There’ll be a note from a parent who would really prefer not to hand her kid a big sharp knife (and what she does instead), as well as some super helpful insights from an Uncle who thankfully knows a lot more than I do about how to decide which charities and nonprofits to support.

The Auntie Bulletin will be on hiatus from December 24 through the end of the year – apart from maybe a quick email asking you to offer me your Guidance from the Aunties, complete survey, and be entered to win a complementary 12-month paid-level subscription to The Auntie Bulletin.

Meanwhile, what delights await us in the new year!

• The absolutely, positively, #1 best way to decide if you want kids (have I mentioned that one yet? probably not)

• An encouragement to move toward your people

• “We’re all in this together”: What does it mean, really?

• And in the Kinship Snacks, a bunch of great how-tos:

  • How to tell a really good story to kids

  • How to disrupt the patriarchy, one family at a time

  • How to prevent a toddler from toddling into the street

  • How to apologize to a child

  • How to lose at Uno (👋)

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Thanks for reading all the way to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to final hardship, shoot me a message in the Substack app or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions asked.

1. I don’t have ADHD, so this is the flavor of neurodivergence I am least equipped to speak to. I know and love many people with ADHD, kids and adults alike, but I don’t know what it’s like to be inside that experience. Of course, even for the traits that do describe me, I don’t necessarily know what other people’s experiences are like. In this post, I make some educated guesses based on my own experience and those of various loved ones who are similar to me in some ways – but I also welcome your dissent!