How to support mom-preneurs with autism?
I was hired to teach a workshop to a group of mom-preneurs and it was so obvious that at least 5 of the women had some form of autism. When I mentioned this to the head of the organization, she asked me what she could do to make sure she supported these individuals.
Most of the small business owners are women, moms and minority women.
How do I best support these “mom-preneurs” in a workplace or educational environment? And can I make money doing this?
The biggest problem women with autism have is we can only see logic and not emotion.
Everyone in the room you are talking about has autism because women without autism are at home taking care of their family. If a neurotypical woman has to earn money she recognizes she doesn’t have time or resources to take courses like the one you’re teaching. The women in the room want to do something more interesting than relationships because they don’t see the outcome of more time spent on the relationships. There is no way to measure that.
Women with autism have a high divorce rate because we don’t understand what it means to value a partner. We have a high suicide rate because we don’t understand we don’t have real friends until it’s too late, and our kids don’t like us because we don’t make them the highest priority.
The best thing you can do for a woman with autism is explain to them that the job of a parent is to make a child feel like they are the highest priority. Because only a parent can do that. And what would be more important than a child?
The problem is that no autistic woman will pay for that, so no one tells us that. Women with autism pay other women with autism to tell them how to have an interesting life. So, there’s an autism economy of autistic women telling other autistic women how to have an interesting/better/fulling/best/whatever life while all the kids fend for themselves.
Penelope
Damn, does that resonate with me
It sounds like you may be talking about some specific personality types with autism such as ENTJ, Penelope?
I am INFJ and quite sure I have autism. I swing between making my kids the highest priority and then doing some work on myself in the periods that I feel like they are not appreciating what I do for them. I also swing between wanting to earn more money, but then giving up chasing it seriously because my family is more important to me.
I rarely attend courses on anything because I prefer DIY. I don’t like paying people for stuff and then finding out I could have researched the topic myself and done it better. The best value for a course I ever got was a course about how to improve my marriage through better communication (husband attended too because things were at breaking point back then).
I’m part of an entrepreneurs group with a lot of moms. Almost everyone needs help delegating. For most of us, the prospect of hiring help is too open-ended and we’re too busy to design a process that could be outsourced.
And since the target is moms with Autism, your pitch could be “Unload those $20/hour jobs so you have more time to make your kids feel like they are your number one priority.”