In Episode 133 of our podcast, Autism: A New Perspective, host Kat Lee sits down once again with RDI® consultant and research psychologist Dr. Tom Atkinson for a candid, compassionate discussion on parental well-being.
This episode is especially timely, as it builds on last month’s conversation with Dr. Rachelle Sheely on the role of parents as caregivers and how hard it can be to take care of yourself when so much of your energy is focused on helping your child thrive.
“Lonely. Overwhelmed. Inadequate.” Sound Familiar?
These are just a few of the words Kat hears from parents as they begin their RDI® journey. And Dr. Atkinson, a longtime RDI® parent himself, gets it. “I’ve felt all of those things,” he says. “But the good news is you don’t stay there forever.”
Tom speaks from personal and professional experience. He’s not only supported his own son’s growth through the RDI® model since 2005, but also spent his career studying the effects of stress and how to overcome it. In the episode, he reminds us that while some factors affecting happiness may be out of our control, a significant portion is influenced by our mindset and daily habits.
Simple Practices That Build Long-Term Resilience
Dr. Atkinson shares several science-backed strategies for improving emotional well-being, especially valuable for parents navigating the demands of raising a child with developmental challenges.
Here are a few highlights from the conversation:
1. Practice Gratitude
Even in the hardest seasons, looking for what’s working—or simply acknowledging small moments of connection—can reframe your experience. Tom shares how becoming an RDI® parent helped him prioritize relationships in a way he never had before.
2. Invest in Social Connection
Parents often feel isolated, but connection is essential. “Loneliness has been identified by the U.S. Surgeon General as a top health threat,” Tom notes. Reaching out, even to just one supportive person, can be a powerful lifeline.
3. Take Care of Your Body and Soul
Neglecting your own well-being isn’t noble—it’s unsustainable. As Tom says, “You’re not being selfish. You’re enabling yourself to be more helpful.” Whether it’s keeping a doctor’s appointment or finding quiet moments to rest, these are acts of service to you and your family.
4. Live in the Present
It’s easy to get stuck in “what ifs” or regrets. RDI® encourages mindful, in-the-moment engagement—noticing small wins and tuning in to your child’s current experience.
5. Set Small, Meaningful Goals
Progress doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real. Setting small goals, sharing them with others, and celebrating little victories (even learning to eat with a spoon!) reinforce a sense of agency and hope.
The Emotional Roller Coaster Is Real, But So Is Growth
One of the most poignant moments in the episode comes when Kat reflects on the emotional highs and lows that can feel so extreme on this parenting journey. “It almost feels unbearable,” she says.
Tom agrees, but reassures listeners that managing those highs and lows is possible. It starts with making space for your own emotional needs, not as an afterthought but as a priority. “You’re not indulging,” he emphasizes. “You’re investing in your own strength, so you can show up for your child in the way they deserve.”
Final Thoughts
At RDIconnect®, we believe growth is always possible—not just for the child, but for the whole family. And that growth starts with well-being. As Dr. Atkinson reminds us, it’s not about toxic positivity or ignoring the hard stuff. It’s about learning how to frame challenges, access support, and celebrate the small but powerful steps forward.
Full Transcript
Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child, and we always encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee, and in this week’s podcast, we visit with Dr. Tom Atkinson on well-being and parents. Let’s listen in.
So we are visiting about well-being for parents, how to stay healthy and positive, and I’m so excited. Dr. Tom Atkinson, Tom, you joined me a few years ago for a lovely visit about well-being and families, and we’re going to and also following up to the podcast from last month with Dr. Sheely on parents as caregivers and struggling to take care of themselves. So, what did you first—I love this slide.
It tells all about you, but I know there’s more. Tell us a little more about you. Kind of remind folks about who you are.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: I think that the long and short of it is that I feel like this is my community. I feel like I have multiple connections to the RDI group, and those are that I’ve been an RDI parent since I discovered RDI in 2005. My son is now 28.
He was about eight then, and I got excited enough that I became an RDI consultant in 2011, and I’ve been on the RDI advisory board member trying to share whatever I can that’s valuable with the leadership of the group. But my background is as a research psychologist, and in fact, I specialize in studying the effect of stress on people, so that topic ended up really having a lot of legs over time. We always have stress, and I’m a learning and development consultant.
I spend my career in business helping people learn leadership, customer service, teamwork, skills that involve kind of serving others in a business environment. So here I am.
Kat Lee: The fact that your focus in life is stress and how it affects people is just perfect for what we’re talking about today, and what Dr. Sheely and I talked about in our last podcast with parents really struggling to take care of themselves, think about themselves and what we’re talking about, their own well-being, and I wanted to show you, Tom, a few words that some of my parents, when I’m first getting to know them, have come and shared with me when it comes to raising a vulnerable child, their words.
Lonely, painful, inadequate. That’s a very big one, unfortunately. Unprepared, overwhelmed, afraid, and I know these words may, for those who haven’t had the experience, be a little, you know, sad, honestly, to hear, but lonely sometimes because friends that they have have not been able to hang around, their family may or may not be as available as they were, or maybe just feeling lonely in their experience, Tom, so that has variations.
I think as parents, you know, you and I are both parents and think anytime you think your child is hurting or may have a difficult life or may struggle to do things, it’s a painful experience. I think that’s natural for that to be painful. Inadequacy to feelings of inadequacy, I should say.
I don’t think there’s probably a stranger for any parent to honestly at some point or another, but when your child is vulnerable, you can be very feelings of inadequacy in that area. A lot of folks are unprepared, and that leads them to being overwhelmed and afraid. Would these words ring true to you?
And I know you’ve been through this experience as well, so I think that just adds to what we can hear from you.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Oh, yeah, sure. Those words ring true to me as a parent, and I know my family, my wife and I have shared those feelings over time, and people I’ve served as RDI parents, plus the people we serve, our children feel that often the same way, you know, and so those are familiar emotions. I’m always looking for the good news.
The good news is that they tend to be a period of time, but you’re not locked in those emotions for life, and there’s the other side of the coin that we can help move ourselves to.
Kat Lee: I love that, and that’s one of the reasons I love having you to visit with us because of your positivity, and as Dr. Shealy says, it’s not pie-in-the-sky positivity. It really is true that those feelings are not locked in, but let’s talk about some of the ways you talk about this. These are slides that I have seen you present, and what I do like about them is they are positive ways for parents to improve their well-being.
Let’s go through them together. What do you think we should start with here?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Well, what I’d just like to say by way of introduction is that these ideas came from a book called The How of Happiness, which is all about how to apply positive psychology to your life, and it turns out that, you know, we’re not stuck in a rut of always being unhappy and, you know, research has found that 50% of happiness tends to be genetically determined. Some people are naturally on the positive side, some people are naturally a bit cranky, and that doesn’t change a lot. They both can add value, by the way.
10% is due to, like, what happens to you. Like, I won the lottery, which is a great thing, or I lost my job, which is a horrible thing, but those events tend to have effects, and the effects tend to dissipate over time, but the other 40% has to do with how you frame things, like how you look at them, and what you do, and this is the author’s best advice on how you can frame your challenges and what you can do about them to move you toward the happiness side of the scale, or you might even call it the well-being side of the scale. So sure, we can start with, you know, gratitude and positive thinking and just move through them.
Kat Lee: Well, and I think that can be hard as a parent, because keeping positive thinking, you know how when something is negative, it feels big? Like, it can be a small thing, but it can feel huge, and how to overcome that in life with positive thinking. What do you think about that?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: I think it comes down to your framing, you know, you think, you know, how can you put a positive frame around, you know, having a child on the autism spectrum? But, you know, you can do that, and, you know, research has found that when it comes down to, like, stressful things that happen to people, they tracked people who won a lot of money in a lottery, and they compared them with people who were tragically injured in automobile accidents, and they all felt the results of that, but six months after the event, their happiness was about the same as it was. It was indistinguishable, one group from another. So it’s possible to move beyond, you know, events that happen to you through this kind of framing and doing.
So, having a positive attitude is one thing that helps. I tend to be kind of a silver lining type of person, and I have a friend who happens to be an attorney who said, you know, tell me, are you an optimist or a pessimist? I said, oh, I’m definitely an optimist.
And she said, you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? No, what’s that? Pessimist is an optimist who’s better informed about things.
So thank you for sharing that. It’s always good to be aware of the full situation, but, you know, I tend to focus on the positive side of the scale. But positive thinking can be married with gratitude, feeling something, what’s good about this situation.
And there are more specific things you can do by keeping journals and, you know, expressing gratitude to others that can really help. But you kind of, you know, get the idea. And I’ll just say with my own experience, if I were to say gratitude, my son’s condition on being on the spectrum and being an RDI consultant enabled me to focus more on relationships than I ever would have.
It was never top of mind for me. And it became very something I focused on moment by moment once I got involved in RDI.
Kat Lee: Well, now it’s down to investing in social connections.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Yes.
Kat Lee: And not moving away from those. And if some move away from you, then finding others to connect with. I just think parents need almost empowerment on that.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Yes, that’s true. And investing in social connections is huge. And by the way, our Surgeon General has identified loneliness and isolation as the number one threat that we have as a society.
Worse than smoking, drinking, drug use, and everything else. Those are bad enough. But isolation is even worse.
So that’s why it’s important for everybody, but particularly people on the spectrum, to be able to invest in relationship with each other, which is great about the RDI model, because that’s what it’s all about. That’s the focus of it. That’s the purpose of it, to enable your children and people you serve to create connections, and you create connections with them.
So I’m not telling you anything new there, but what you do in terms of investing in relationships has a huge payoff.
Kat Lee: So the next one beneath that, taking care of your body and soul. I think that is so important, but I have to say, I have so many sweet parents who have at times let that go. I don’t know how to say that.
I mean, they’ve talked to me about it openly, either physically, and I mean from a health perspective, and also from a nurturing their soul. What do you say to help them?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: I think parents oftentimes get, they have a lot on their hands, you know, just trying to take care of their child and everything. But also, I think they feel a bit guilty about indulging in themselves or worrying about themselves because, you know, if you want to take care of your children first, right? However, what do they tell you when you’re flying in a plane?
If there’s an emergency, put on your mask first and then help your child so that you can be your best, your most able person. And that’s true with our kids as well. We want to take care of ourselves so we can help them.
So you’re really not being selfish. You’re enabling yourself to be more helpful to those around you.
Kat Lee: I love what you said. I just feel that, like almost like, well, for me to keep these doctor’s appointments or do what I need to do here, I’m taking away from my child. But I think it’s so important for parents to realize you’re helping yourself and helping yourself helps your child, right?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: That’s right.
Kat Lee: Well, let’s move to living in the present because that is very hard to do.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Yeah, it is.
Kat Lee: And for some people more than others, I think you’ve identified that personalities play into this. I tend to think about, you know, project oriented. So it causes me to look in the future and kind of solve problems before they happen that can have a value.
So we always need to remember that, right? Just like being pessimistic can have a value, but it can cause you not to live today and enjoy today. How do you talk about that?
That’s a hard, that’s hard.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: It is hard, but it’s another one of these jewels that if you polish it, it can really be powerful. The present often gets pushed out of the way when we start worrying about, or even anticipating what’s going to happen in the future, or thinking about the past and what we could have done differently. It’s easy to spend time in one or the other of those dimensions.
But truly, we live in the present. And again, I come back to RDI. It’s about what’s happening in this moment and how can we get the most from it.
There’s also, by the way, a huge body of research on flow states that people, really a lot of it was kind of business oriented, but there’s research that shows if people get in a state of flow, they’re much more effective, productive, produce more value, and there are concrete things you can do to get in a state of flow. Like, you focus on yourself, focus on your breathing, you eliminate distractions, you block out of time, you know, straightforward things. If those of you who are interested, you can go, just Google the word flow, or on Amazon, you’ll find a book on flow, and that’ll give you more specific ideas.
But we all know what flow feels like. It’s those times when you’re not looking at your watch, time seems to, you know, not that it freezes, but you’re not stuck on deadlines or accomplishments, you’re just engaging in the activity ahead of you, in front of you.
Kat Lee: Well, I think that’s a beautiful transition from flowing to thinking about committing to goals, because both are what is needed. And I think committing to goals, one of the obstacles can be it feels like there’s so many fires to put out, so it’s hard to set any goal. And so figuring out, like, what is most important, what’s not important, because we can actually focus on the not important sometimes, or we can’t wait.
I think that can be hard, Tom.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Yeah, that’s true. But if you don’t set goals, of course, then you’re less likely to accomplish them, because it becomes more of a random event versus something that’s thoughtful. So some things about goal-setting is one is just make a plan.
It doesn’t have to be really elaborate, but think about what you wanted to accomplish, and what would it look like, and just kind of spell it out. You can do it in your mind, or you can do it on paper or electronically. The second thing about goal-setting is committing publicly.
And you don’t have to give a speech, but for people around you, you can say, let me tell you what I’m thinking about doing with my son. I want to reality test this with you, because I’m excited about it, and tell me what you think would work, or how it might do things differently. Just committing to something publicly makes you more likely to do it.
There’s research behind that, too, versus having it just be your private dream. And the third thing is celebrating success. So no matter how small the accomplishment is celebrating, it makes a big difference.
It just stops me in my tracks. I think about my son is in a day program that focuses on learning and having a job for everybody. And when I first started working with them, the whole organization stopped to celebrate somebody who learned to eat with a spoon, which was an accomplishment for her.
Just think about that and celebrating a very small success. And you can celebrate more realistic everyday successes, too. But just doing it makes a huge difference.
And it makes difference to those around you, too, because they can be thinking about their successes.
Kat Lee: Oh, I think that’s so important, celebrating. And I think that when our sweet parents are having trouble celebrating, it can be because they see all these other fires to put out. And I really think it’s important for them to be able to celebrate the great things that happen because they are great things, Tom.
Yeah, that’s right. They are great. And even the little things are big.
A friend of mine who’s a wonderful professional, we call them the little big things because it’s just huge. But I know that sometimes a lot of things cause those little things to not get celebrated. And I do, like you, I want to urge parents to celebrate them and to feel genuinely excited about it, because one thing leads to another, right?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Right, right. And sometimes that can happen accidentally. I was trying to teach my son how to ride a bicycle when he was young, and it was just not working, and he was getting frustrated, I was getting frustrated.
And I just gave up, and I went in the house and did something else for a little while. I looked out the window, and he started riding the bike outside the house by himself. He figured it out, so.
The unexpected. That’s right, so we celebrated that big time.
Kat Lee: Wow, that’s great.
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Sometimes you try too hard as a parent, you know.
Kat Lee: That is for sure. We’ve all done that. Speaking of stress, I’ll just jump right into that one, managing stress, hardship, and trauma.
I think this is so important. Again, it’s right next to, right there, take care of your body and soul, is managing your mind, and the stress that may be going on inside your brain. How do you talk, because you’ve been a lifetime studying stress.
How do you help parents with this? How do you help them think about it?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Yeah, well, here’s one, you know, we all encounter situations that just sort of get beyond us. And, you know, part of my training as a psychologist was in crisis intervention, you know, I’m working in a hospital, and somebody’s having trouble, and you focus on, has anybody hurt? Is everybody, are things physically under control?
Are people healthy? And then processing the psychological aspect of that. So this one really gets into when you might need to ask for help, deliberate help.
And also dealing with all the emotion that goes with that. On a personal level, again, there was a time in my life when my son was dangerous to have in our home, and I had to come up with a plan that I presented to the police department. I said, here, let me tell you about my son in case I need to call you.
And I did have to call them. And they did what they were supposed to do, and I helped my son get through it. But having a plan just in case, you know, is a good thing versus having it just be a nightmare in your head that, you know, maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t.
Sometimes just being proactive can really help. If you read the text, there’s psychological advice about how to help people overcome trauma, which is more than I can say in a quick call today. But the good news is that people do overcome trauma every day.
And you can, by anticipating it and not overreacting, you can help them get on the path to recovery faster. And including yourself, because, you know, we all experience trauma by being parents of kids going through difficult times. So it’s good to have a plan for it that hopefully you won’t have to do every day, but that is, you’re ready to do it.
And it gives you more confidence that, you know, when things happen, I can handle it.
Kat Lee: You know, my parents and I have talked to them over the years, and they’ll have a really challenging thing happen with their child. And I will start talking about all the positive that can come from that. And that can be hard, as with the day that you had, can be hard, but they’ll sometimes say, you’re so positive, is that real?
And I’m like, it is real. Because if we take this, and we learn from it, and we manage our experience, so in the future, that we know what to do, whatever it may be, we can turn this into a positive experience. And I really do believe that, which is a question that they’ll ask, like, are you just saying, I’m like, no, I know it’s true.
But I know it’s hard, Tom. I know that it’s hard for you. But I really do believe that we can take these times and turn them into not pie in the sky, but real positivity.
What do you think?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Oh, I think that’s definitely true. And positivity makes a big difference. And I did, in my academic career, I studied people who had gone through very stressful events, particularly like unemployment was the event that we were focusing on, which affects people on multiple levels.
But some people would just kind of be overloaded with stress. And other people would say, you know, this is a lesson that maybe I can take a step back from my career, think about what I’m good at, explore new opportunities, spend more time with people around me. And so it was like a mental focus.
Even so, even though they’re going through a hard time, they were trying to figure out a pathway forward that would be a stepping stone and really trying to kind of turn it from a curse to a blessing. This is something you look back on as a turning point in your life.
Kat Lee: I want to thank you so much for joining us. And I need to have you back sooner than later. So we can keep talking about this very important topic.
But thanks for sharing about your own family and your own life. I think that helps parents because all of a sudden on a journey, Tom, I think about it, and Dr. Sarah Whalen has been with us before to talk about this emotional roller coaster. So the highs and lows that can cause stress.
You can have this great thing happen, and then you can have this other thing happen. And it almost feels unbearable because the drop can be so profound as high as the highest high can be profound. And it seems like you found that sweet spot of trying to manage that.
How do you talk to our parents as we’re closing out on how to think about these things, from your experience, how to manage those highs and lows?
Dr. Tom Atkinson: Sure. Well, I would say it’s not being selfish to focus on yourself. But by focusing on yourself and your own strengths and opportunities, you’re being a better resource to those that you love and those that you’re trying to help.
So it’s definitely worth investing the time and not considering this sort of a luxury or something that you should feel guilty about. It’s all just kind of life affirming. It helps you as well as those who sort of get on a better path and to move ahead, you know, more, more positively.
Kat Lee: And thank you for joining us for Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child. And we always encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee.
See you next time.
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