HeyJaredDear Special Parent
A weekly letter to parents raising children with neurodevelopmental differences inside systems that rarely tell the whole truth.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 16, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 4, 2026
Latest issues
We Still Have to Decide (opens the original)
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Imagine you’re pregnant today and you have a fever right now. What are you supposed to do?Medical evidence matters in moments like this. Take the medication or don’t; start the hormone or wait; change what we eat or not; give our child the treatment or leave things be. But science often disagrees with itself, and evidence is rarely neatly and definitively resolved before the decision has to be made.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-JL-!,f
What “Too Much Sleep” Actually Tells You About the Brain (opens the original)
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A man retires, and for the first time in decades he doesn’t set an alarm. He starts sleeping eight, then nine, then ten hours each night, and he tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s finally getting the rest he spent his entire life craving. Meanwhile, his wife has started to notice him repeating himself more; he tells her the same story three times in three days and he asks, again, about plans they settled last week. He’s sleeping more, yet he’s remembering less. He reads the first as a reward,
Tonight at Midnight (opens the original)
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You’ve lain awake at 2 a.m. wondering whether the thing you keep noticing about your child is something or nothing. You’ve asked your pediatrician the same question three different ways and gotten the same reassurance. That’s why I built Natal.Because most parents don’t need someone to tell them their child is fine; they need someone to actually look closely and tell them what they see, in words they can use.Natal’s founding cohort closes tonight at midnight. This is your last day to join at the
What Are We Missing? (opens the original)
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If you’ve ever looked at your child and wondered, Is there something here I should be paying closer attention to? Natal was built for you.Maybe nothing is obviously wrong today. Your child sees a pediatrician; they’re growing; you ask questions when something concerns you. And still, you may have the sense that routine care leaves a lot unexplored.That’s because most healthcare is designed to answer the question: Is my child sick?Natal asks a different one: What can we lea
More Families Can Now Join Natal (opens the original)
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Over the past three weeks, many of you wrote to tell me you wanted to join Natal but lived in a state where membership wasn’t yet available.I’m excited to tell you that has changed.Natal is now available in 40 states and Washington, DC.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!O95a!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8d47124e-2beb-4e7b-b899-1f198a4cbcdc_1200x1100.png" targ
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