Why Your Child Can’t Think Straight — And It’s Not Their Fault
A new lens on neurodivergence, modern childhood, and what’s really going on inside young minds.
If you’re a parent wondering why your child seems
anxious,
distracted,
sensitive, or “different”
You’re not alone.
And no, it’s not your parenting.
It’s not their personality.
And it’s not their genetics.
It’s their nervous system.
Trying to survive.
In an environment that no longer supports clear thinking.
For thousands of years.
Human minds evolved in a world of
movement,
rhythm,
apprenticeship,
and real-world feedback.
Children learned by doing.
Through play,
repair,
friction,
and story.
But today, the world has changed.
faster than biology can keep up.
Children now sit more than they move.
They scroll more than they speak.
They receive commands from devices, not attuned faces.
And we wonder.
Why focus collapses,
emotions surge,
and diagnoses multiply.
This is not a crisis of willpower.
It’s not a wave of mysterious disorders.
It’s a nervous system adaptation.
And our children are doing their best to cope.
In this post, I want to share a different way to think.
About your child’s attention,
mood, and behaviour.
One that moves beyond labels.
And toward the real levers of change.
The Dangerous Gift of Metacognition
It’s easy to assume that thinking is what humans do best.
But thinking is not our default state.
Reactivity is.
For most of human history.
Cognition was embodied.
We walked.
We hunted.
We copied elders.
We learned through rhythm, movement, failure, and repair.
There was no need to "reflect"
Life itself shaped the nervous system.
But then something strange happened.
A small subset of humans developed a recursive loop.
The ability to think about their own thoughts.
This is metacognition.
And it changed everything.
It gave rise to abstract language.
Philosophy,
Self-restraint,
Science,
The concept of future selves.
It allowed a few individuals.
Out of billions
to change the course of history.
Not through strength or number.
But through second-order thought.
It was a biological leap.
But it was also a liability.
Metacognition only works under the right conditions.
The body must feel safe.
The nervous system must be regulated.
The mind must be fed with diverse experiences.
Not trapped in threat or monotony.
But in the modern world, those conditions are vanishing.
The body is sedentary.
The diet is inflammatory.
Social bonds are weakened.
Algorithms hijack attention.
Movement, friction, and real feedback are removed.
The result?
A generation of nervous systems.
Running advanced software on unstable hardware.
And when the interostate is dysregulated.
When the body is inflamed.
Starved of movement.
Flooded with cortisol.
Metacognition turns inward and becomes distorted.
Reflection becomes rumination.
Insight becomes shame.
Awareness becomes overwhelming.
We are watching this happen at scale.
Metacognition, once our superpower,
is breaking down under pressure.
Not because it’s defective.
But because
it is too sensitive,
too advanced,
too fragile for the environment we’ve created.
And so the nervous system adapts.
Not with improved insight,
But with workarounds.
This is what we call neurodivergence.
There is no difference in genetic wiring.
But the nervous system’s best attempt to survive
In a world that no longer rewards coherence.
Only vigilance,
novelty,
and survival.
From Movement to Madness
For nearly all of human history,
Cognition was a byproduct of motion.
We moved to eat.
We moved to learn.
We moved to connect.
Every neural network developed
In tandem with a physical world
that provided friction,
feedback,
and rhythm.
But that world is gone.
In less than a century
Biologically speaking,
In a blink,
We have traded movement for stillness,
apprenticeship for isolation,
and physicality for screens.
We used to solve problems by moving through the world.
Now we solve problems by sitting still and staring at a glowing rectangle.
This shift has consequences.
The nervous system is not abstract.
It is situated.
In fascia,
Muscle,
Gut,
Breath,
And light.
It calibrates itself through micro-adjustments
In balance,
effort,
and social attention.
Remove those variables
And the system begins to drift.
Attention becomes unstable.
Emotional tone becomes dysregulated.
Thoughts become obsessive or fragmented.
We do not refer to this as “maladaptation.”
We call it
Autism,
ADHD,
Anxiety,
OCD,
Sensory processing disorder
And now, a growing umbrella
Neurodivergence.
But these are not fixed traits.
They are equilibria.
Stable states that the nervous system enters
When starved of the feedback it needs.
Take a modern child:
They sit more than they move.
They receive commands from digital interfaces, not attuned faces.
Their food spikes insulin. Their sleep is irregular.
Their social interactions are transactional or fragmented.
Their emotions are monitored but not modelled.
And then we ask.
Why is attention collapsing?
Why are sensory systems oversensitive?
Why are executive functions lagging?
The answer is not locked in their genes.
The answer is in the design of their world.
We’ve medicalised this shift.
Pathologised it.
But we rarely ask the more important question.
What is the nervous system trying to adapt to?
Because it is adapting.
Just not in a direction we understand.
The body is learning that stillness,
vigilance, and
novelty
are rewarded.
That deep focus,
boredom tolerance, and
Flexible thinking is a liability.
In this light,
The modern surge in neurodivergence is not a mystery.
It is a predictable outcome.
The cognitive phenotype is changing because the environment is driving it.
And the nervous system is obeying perfectly.
Language as a Cage
Wittgenstein warned us:
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Today, that limit is no longer just theoretical.
It’s neurological.
Because once a pattern of thought
or behaviour is named,
it becomes real in a new way.
It shapes perception,
guides attention, and
defines expectations.
Not just for others but for the self.
We call this diagnosis.
But in many cases.
It is closer to ontological suggestion.
An invitation to inhabit a role.
Take a child with a sensitive nervous system.
Perhaps under-slept,
screen-saturated,
or socially withdrawn.
He fidgets.
He daydreams.
He avoids eye contact.
He struggles to regulate big emotions.
A well-meaning adult applies a label.
He’s neurodivergent.
He’s autistic.
He has ADHD.
And now something profound has happened.
Not biologically.
But linguistically.
A framework has been installed:
The behaviours are now signs of disorder.
The child now belongs to a category.
The adults now have a script.
And worst of all.
The child now has a story.
That story is not neutral.
It is shaping cognition in real-time.
Wittgenstein’s genius
was in noticing that words don’t just describe reality
They create constraints within which meaning can occur.
In this context, diagnostic labels
Become cognitive traps:
They reduce curiosity.
They bias attention.
They suggest permanence.
They trigger scripts.
From teachers, parents, and peers.
And when the label is internalised.
Metacognition starts from the wrong place.
Not
What am I feeling?
But
This is how my brain works.
Not
What helps me focus?
But
I have ADHD, and I can’t focus.
The thought selector is now filtering reality
Through a linguistic prosthetic.
And like any prosthetic
The longer it's worn.
The more it replaces the original function.
None of this is to say that diagnostic language has no use.
But we must distinguish between.
Language that opens possibilities, and
Language that ossifies identity.
And today
In the name of inclusion and virtue.
We risk mistaking adaptive behaviour.
For fixed pathology.
And then naming it into permanence.
This is not science.
This is folk neurology.
Dressed up in institutional language.
And it is building cognitive cages.
Around children who are simply adapting.
As they must.
To the environments we have made.
Metacognition Under Siege
Metacognition allows for abstraction,
self-restraint,
moral reasoning,
and long-term planning.
It is, quite literally.
What makes us human?
But it is not guaranteed.
Metacognition is not a switch.
It’s a delicate capacity that depends on biological stability.
That stability
The balance
Between activation and rest,
Between gut, breath, and brain.
Is what I call the interostate.
At one interostate equilibrium.
The mind can explore, reflect, and revise.
But when it is under chronic stress.
Inflammatory, metabolic, and emotional.
That equilibrium shifts.
Metacognition shifts.
Not because the brain is broken.
Not because of deficit.
But because the brain
Is doing what it does best
Adapting
Surviving.
This is where the TGTS model comes in.
Thought Generation → Thought Selection
Governed by the Tone of the interostate.
When the interostate is regulated, thought generation is rich and varied.
The selector has options.
Reflection leads to insight.
When the interostate is inflamed or stressed, thought generation narrows.
The selector becomes reactive.
Reflection becomes rumination.
Different imbalances produce different cognitive patterns:
ASD
Thought generation becomes narrow and repetitive.
The selector loops on fixed content.
ADHD
Thought generation becomes noisy and rapid.
The selector struggles to stabilise attention.
Anxiety
The selector over-prioritises threat. It fixates.
OCD and trauma
Unresolvable loops hijack selection, often tied to somatic cues.
None of these patterns are random.
They are adaptive responses to environmental stress.
They are not “disorders” in the classical sense.
They are cognitive equilibria.
Stable but suboptimal
Strategies for thought management under pressure.
When we discuss the rise in neurodiversity.
We are not witnessing the unveiling of ancient traits.
We are witnessing new minds.
Shaped not by genes but by interostate distortion:
The gut-brain axis is inflamed by diet.
The social brain is malnourished by isolation.
The attention systems are rewired by overstimulation.
And most dangerously.
Metacognition.
Our highest function.
The function that sets us apart from other Apes.
It is now operating in uncharted territory.
It is no longer selecting from a full range of thought.
It is selecting from a biologically narrowed library.
Looped through a linguistic frame installed by culture.
This is not just a cognitive problem.
It is a civilizational one.
Because when metacognition is under siege.
The story a person tells themselves
becomes disconnected from their potential
and tethered to a label they were never meant to carry.
Reclaiming the Cognitive Future
The story we’ve been told is that neurodivergence is a matter of genetics.
That these minds have always existed,
and we’re just now getting better at identifying them.
That story is just comforting fiction.
The massive rise in neurodivergent profiles.
In children,
adolescents,
and now adults.
It is not a revelation of latent diversity.
But a biological adaptation to environmental collapse?
Not disorder.
Not destiny.
But response.
The body responds to inflammation.
The nervous system responds to isolation.
The cognitive system
The TGTS engine.
Reshapes itself
based on what kinds of thoughts are available
and selectable under pressure.
This is not random.
It’s not pathological.
It’s exactly what a plastic brain in a dynamic system is supposed to do.
So, where does that leave us?
It leaves us with responsibility.
Because the environment is shaping cognition.
And we are the designers of that environment.
Then, we are not just observers of these trends.
We are architects.
And here’s the tragic irony.
In our rush to name and include.
We may be cementing fragile cognitive states
into lifelong identities.
Turning temporary equilibria
into permanent realities
through the power of language and lowered expectations.
This is not liberation.
It is a quiet despair.
Society must choose a framework.
One that sees neurodivergent traits not as broken wiring.
But as signatures of survival.
In a world that no longer supports coherence.
One that recognises that cognition.
Especially, metacognition
is conditional
Is Emergent
Requires.
A stable interostate.
Physical movement.
Relational safety.
Nutritional integrity.
Time for boredom and flow.
And one that offers our children not just compassion.
but conditions that allow the full range of their potential to emerge.
Not despite the environment.
But because of it.
The future of cognition is not genetic.
It is epigenetic, ecological, and ethical.
Diagnoses, accommodations, or policy documents will not save it.
It will be shaped by what we feed the body
What we model in relationships,
What we expect from the mind
and how we speak about difference.
If we get that right, we won’t just see fewer diagnostic labels.
We’ll see a generation of minds
that can think clearly,
Choose wisely,
and reflect without breaking.
And perhaps
Just perhaps
Metacognition
Will become our superpower again.