The Rational Affection of the "Wrapped" Mother

The candles on the alpaca cake - an absurdly delightful and delicious choice for a ten-year-old’s step into the double digits - were still warm when the first wave of advice began to lap at the edges of my network.

My daughter turned ten yesterday, a milestone that seems to signal a shift in the social contract of motherhood. It marks a transition from the physical, tactile labour of the early years into what I can only describe as the psychological surveillance of the second decade. In the sometimes chaotic, sensory-rich moments following the celebration, I found myself sitting with the well-meaning debris of others' comments. There were the subtle nudges toward independence, the suggestions of creating separate spaces, and the deeper and upfront assertions that she has me wrapped around her thumb.

For a neurodiverse parent, this kind of external feedback does not land as a gentle suggestion to be weighed, measured, and perhaps discarded. Instead, through the specific filter of my autistic and dyslexic brain, it arrives as a high-stakes mandate for immediate behavioural change.

My brain translates “you might want to encourage some space” into a flashing red siren: “You are failing, the relationship is a problem, and you must enact a sequence of corrective measures immediately and entirely alone.”

It is a heavy, singular interpretation. This is not necessarily what the people around me are saying - they are kind, talking to fill the space between friendship, compassion and my anxiety (oh dear) - but it is how my brain processes the data. It is an overwhelming directive that implies my current operating system is fundamentally flawed and that I must, without any scaffolding or support, rewire the entire architecture of our relationship by lunchtime.

As a feminist reader who frequently returns to Mary Wollstonecraft's foundational arguments, I find myself caught in a familiar tension between the rational and the perceived. I am a woman who values the life of the mind, yet I am constantly being told, or interpreting the world as telling me, that my maternal instincts and the way I co-regulate with my child are obstacles to her development. There is a specific bluntness in the phrase ‘wrapped around her thumb’, a trope that suggests a mother-daughter relationship is not a collaborative effort of growth, but a zero-sum power struggle. And then my brain misinterprets our closeness as my daughter’s tactical success and my own strategic failure. Wollstonecraft, in her landmark work, wrote in Chapter 2:

“the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart.”

She championed a vision of parenting rooted in reason and mutual respect, yet the modern, neurotypical interpretation of parenting advice seems to favour a performative distance that feels deeply antithetical to the neurodiverse experience.

For the neurodiverse parent, the immediate change my brain feels required to make is often a demand for masking. When I am told that she needs more independence, I hear an indictment of the co-regulation that has kept us both afloat in a world that feels too loud and too fast. My brain interprets the suggestion of separate time not as a healthy boundary, but as a forced severance of the safety net we have painstakingly woven over a decade. I feel a frantic internal voice shouting, “I can’t do this all at once, I can’t!” The overwhelm stems from the lack of a middle ground. There is no instruction manual for how to transition from the intense, shared sensory world of neurodiverse childhood into the stratified, independent world of neurotypical adolescence.

Sidenote: my daughter is also neurodiverse.

Instead, there is only the advice that lands as criticism—a word that feels too light for the heavy, sinking sensation of being told that my daughter’s agency is actually a form of manipulation.

Wollstonecraft was famously critical of the way women were socialised to use “siren-like” charms to navigate a world that denied them actual power. She argued in the Dedication, Frame 7, that:

“if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges.”

When people tell me my daughter knows how to play me, they are invoking this ancient fear of the manipulative female. They are suggesting that her requests for closeness or her need for my presence are not expressions of genuine need, but rather “illicit privileges” she is securing through cunning. This interpretation strips her of her rationality and strips me of my agency. It frames our connection as a series of traps and triumphs rather than a “rational fellowship.” It suggests that as she grows, she must become a “troublesome companion” to me in order to find herself, rather than seeing our bond as the very thing that gives her the “legitimate rights” to her own emotions and space.

The demand for separate space is particularly jarring because it ignores the reality of how we inhabit space together. For us, proximity is not about a lack of independence; it is a shared sanctuary. In the feminist tradition of reclaiming the domestic sphere, I see our relationship as a site of resistance against the idea that a child must be “broken” into independence. FUCK THAT.

Wollstonecraft argued in Chapter 11 that parental affection is generally blind, but I would argue that for the neurodiverse parent and child, affection is often hyper-visible and hyper-analytical. We are constantly monitoring, adjusting, and translating the world for our children. To be told to suddenly stop doing so, and to feel that the “stop” must be instantaneous, feels like being told to stop breathing for a few hours a day just to see if your lungs can handle the challenge. It is an impossible ask that I try to solve in my head until it short-circuits.

The more serious and sustained set of criticisms I face is often couched in the language of concern for my daughter’s future. There is a prevailing myth that if she does not learn to stand alone now, she will never stand at all. Yet, as a scholar, I know that independence is not the absence of support, but the confidence that support is available.

Wollstonecraft’s insistence on “independence of mind” was never about isolation; it was about the ability to think for oneself within a community of reason. This was something she championed for herself as a mother, with the support of her daughter’s father - a bold stance for her time. When others offer their perspective on our bond, the advice itself is often sound, even wise; however, my neurodiverse brain bypasses the “suggestion” phase entirely. It translates their words at a frantic, breakneck speed into a rigid set of instructions - a singular, urgent “must.” I find myself frantically trying to build a new scaffolding for my daughter by sunset, even though the advice was never meant as a demolition order. In reality, by providing her with a secure, highly-connected base, I am allowing her to develop the very independence those with advice are also advocating for. We are aiming for the same horizon, but the “immediate change” my brain interprets as a command would actually undermine the stability she needs to eventually step away. It would replace a slow-built bridge with a sudden, impossible chasm.

There is also the matter of the “mother-daughter” narrative that haunts every birthday milestone. We are told that this is the age where they begin to pull away, where the friction becomes the fire. For a neurodiverse duo, this friction is often externalized. We are not fighting each other; we are fighting the expectations of a world that finds our bond “too much.” The overwhelm I feel stems from the cognitive dissonance between the joy I find in our relationship and the shame I am told I should feel for its intensity. Wollstonecraft declared in Chapter 5:

“I say behaviour, for genuine meekness never reached the heart or mind, unless as the effect of reflection; and, that simple restraint produces a number of peccant humours in domestic life, many sensible men will allow, who find some of these gentle irritable creatures, very troublesome companions.”

I find a strange comfort in that. I refuse to be “meek” in the face of parenting advice that asks me to sacrifice my daughter’s peace for the sake of a social norm. If “simple restraint” and the performance of distance only lead to “troublesome companions” and “peccant humours,” then I choose the path of reflection and radical connection instead.

The well-meaning and good advice fails to account for the labour of the neurodiverse mother. It does not see the hours spent deconstructing a social interaction or the energy required to maintain a calm exterior when your own sensory system is overloaded. And it is to have all that invisible labour dismissed as weakness. It reduces a complex, multifaceted support system to a simple power dynamic. It is a refusal to see the “rational affection” that Wollstonecraft so highly prized. I am not being “played”; I am being a parent. I am not being “manipulated”; I am being a resource.

In my posts on Substack, I often grapple with the intersection of the personal, the literary, the professional and the political, and there is nothing more political than the way we are told to raise our daughters. The way my brain mandates an 'immediate change' functions as its own form of internal social policing - a frantic, high-speed reflex that seeks to normalise our neurodiverse family by forcing us into a more 'legible' shape before I’ve had a second to process the cost. It is an attempt (inc my own attempts) to make us “legible” to the outside world, even at the cost of our internal harmony. Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication” was as much about the right to be a rational person as it was about the right to be a citizen. I must find comfort in the very discomfort of resisting the script. By doing so, I am reclaiming my own parenting voice and asserting my right to be a rational, neurodiverse mother who understands her child’s world with depth, compassion and desire for her to be independent of me and happy.

As my daughter moves into her eleventh year, I am leaning into the overwhelm not as a sign of failure, but as a sign of the complexity of our lives. Sobbing on the trampoline from overwhelm is fine; it is a rational response to an irrational pressure to be something I am not. I am choosing to listen to the writerly voice that tells me our relationship is a narrative of resistance, not a cautionary tale of over-attachment. I am looking back at Wollstonecraft’s words from Chapter 2 - “strengthen the body and form the heart” - and realising that I have been doing exactly that. If she knows how to “play” me, it is only because I have taught her that her needs, even her non-verbal ones, will be heard. That is not a failure of parenting; it is a feminist victory.

The separate spaces will come, but they will come on our terms, in our time, and with the rational fellowship that we have spent a decade building. I will no longer treat parenting advice as a frantic call to action, but as a supportive data point and reflection of parenting in a world that is still learning how to accommodate minds like ours. The 10th birthday is not the beginning of the end of our closeness; it is the beginning of a new chapter where her independence is rooted in the safety I provide, not in the distance I am forced to create. I am the mother, she is the daughter, and if there is a thumb involved, it is one that is held in a hand, moving forward together, defying the scripts written by those who do not know the language of our love.

• Primary Text: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Specifically, look at Chapter 11: Duty to Parents, where she dissects the “blind obedience” versus “rational affection” dynamic you explored in this post.

• The Feminist Mother-Daughter Canon: Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Essential for understanding why society views closeness as a “power struggle” (the institution) rather than a shared reality (the experience).

• Neuro-Affirmative Perspectives: Dr Naomi Fisher’s work on “Low Demand” and ND Parenting. Dr Fisher often writes brilliantly about the immense pressure ND parents feel to “fix” sequences of behaviour and the fallout of trying to parent to a neurotypical standard.

• On Cognitive “Fast-Processing”: Monotropism.org. This is an excellent resource for understanding why a neurodiverse brain might focus singularly and intensely on a piece of “advice” as a high-speed instruction (the “monotropic flow” applied to social demands).

• Reframing Independence: Mona Delahooke, Beyond Behaviours. A great resource for validating that co-regulation is not a lack of independence, but the biological prerequisite for it - a direct counter-argument to the “wrapped around her thumb” trope.