Peer-reviewed article

From 'Sensory' to 'Anxiety': Embodied States, Relational Care, and Ethical Transformation in Parental Care for U.S. Neurodivergent Childhood.

Davidson E · 3 Sept 2026

Abstract

This paper draws on an ethnography of care for social-emotional differences in middle-class North American childhood to explore the relation between care practices employed by parents of neurodivergent, or neuroatypical, children, and emergent ethics of care. Focusing on a single case of asymmetrical care, that between a mother and a neurodivergent child, I draw on video-recorded interviews as well other ethnographic material to highlight how practices of care emphasizing forms of bodily and emotional connection, and labors of attunement to embodied states and forms of expression, enable shifts in the caretaker's perception of, and affective orientation toward, embodied states. In doing so, I show how moments of partially shared feeling across bodies (interembodiment) and intercorporeal connections can engender the parent-caretaker's perception of enhanced intersubjective understanding, and authentic insight into the child's embodied experience, particularly with regard to anxious and excited states. As such, I describe the caretaker's perceptual shift from an individualizing evaluation of her child's "sensory issues" to a relational understanding of "anxiety" as a collaboratively engendered embodied emotional state that can be altered, felt, shared, and alleviated through non-verbal tactile communication. In turn, I argue that it can be seen as a "gift" of ethical self-transformation that has implications for the care of neurodivergent childhood. In doing so, I suggest that such insight engenders care for a neurodivergent "other" that may come closer to preserving the other's singularity. Moreover, I argue that such insight rejects a stereotyped understanding of embodied neurodivergent selfhood as bounded, brain-based, and impermeable.