Caitlin Verdier

Caitlin Verdier didn't arrive at this work through a textbook. She arrived through family battles, meetings with the school SEN department, wilderness programmes and therapeutic boarding schools in Wisconsin, Idaho and Utah — and through the very specific exhaustion of loving a child whose brain the world simply wasn't designed for.

It was her son's journey, from a bright-eyed, endlessly curious little boy to years of misdiagnoses and residential treatment, and the slow, hard work of finding their way back to each other, that transformed her from a bewildered parent into a dedicated professional. When he graduated college with a degree in computer science, she understood something she hadn't been able to see in the thick of it: the goal was never to fix him. It was to understand him.

In 2017, Caitlin founded ParentAble, initially as an alternative educational consultancy for children with complex needs. It has since grown into a comprehensive coaching practice spanning the full spectrum of neurodiversity — from giftedness and ADHD to autism, anxiety, OCD, and twice-exceptionality. She works with children and their parents, because one without the other is only half of the whole.

She is a Certified Neurodiversity Coach, accredited by IPHM, CMA, and CPD, with professional affiliations including The Child Mind Institute, NAMI, The Mindsight Institute, and The Arbinger Institute. Her approach is grounded in the Naturalistic Neurodevelopmental model, studied under Douglas Maughan, LCMHC, whose work draws on cutting-edge research from Emory University's Center for Translational Social Neuroscience. She has fifteen years of trainings and workshops in her toolkit.

She also lives with ADHD and pure OCD herself. When she sits with a family, she is not observing from a distance.

*Neurodiversity Decoded: The Complete Handbook to Raising Neurodiverse Children* — over 500 pages covering ADHD, autism, anxiety, OCD, and twice-exceptional children aged 5 to 21 — is the guide she desperately wished she'd had. It exists because that book didn't.

Caitlin works with families across the US and UK.