Different Minds in Different Worlds

What Global Cultures Can Teach Us About Supporting Neurodiverse Children

Ryk Groetchen, Executive Director of imeetswe
April 2026
Berkeley CA

I recently had the good fortune to reconnect with Vodzi Torgboh, a teacher from the Ewe tradition of coastal West Africa. He was sharing social music-and-dance with a group of Western music teachers, transmitting rhythm as the tradition does—not through notation or instruction, but body to body—meeting a Western cohort somewhere in the middle. In the course of this workshop, I ran into some of my own challenges as a person with differences—autism, ADHD, dyspraxia. I asked questions related to my challenges, and the teacher’s response unlocked something for me. He said, “It all will become regulated in the music.” This did not land for me as a dismissal or a truism: I felt this teacher’s understanding of different learning arcs within the tradition, and felt supported and seen. And something that had been forming in the back of my mind for years became suddenly legible.

I have worked with young children—many of them neurodivergent, many of them not yet diagnosed, many somewhere in the vast middle ground where difference is real but labeling hasn’t caught up—for over two decades. I have watched how they arrive in music and movement environments. I have watched which children struggle and which ones flourish and what seems to make the difference. And in dancing and drumming with my Ewe teacher, I found myself thinking: this is an intervention. The whole culture is an intervention. They just don’t call it that.

The Body as Classroom

In traditional Ewe child-rearing practice, infants are carried on the body of a caregiver—mother, grandmother, older sibling—for most of the first years of life, until they are reliably walking. This is not incidental. It is structural. The child’s nervous system is, for its most formative period, literally nested inside a regulated adult nervous system. Every breath, every heartbeat, every rhythmic shift of weight is information. Every emotion that moves through the caregiver’s body moves through the child’s body first.

Researchers call this co-regulation—the process by which an adult’s calm, organized nervous system lends its organization to a child’s nervous system that is still learning how to manage sensation, arousal, and emotional intensity. We know from developmental neuroscience that co-regulation is not a luxury. It is how regulation is learned. Children do not develop self-regulation in isolation; they borrow it from regulated adults until the capacity becomes their own.

For neurotypical children, this borrowing happens across ordinary daily contact. For children whose nervous systems are more sensitive, more reactive, slower to habituate, or less automatic in their processing—children we might later describe as autistic, sensory-seeking, sensory-avoiding, dyspraxic, or simply “a lot”—the amount of co-regulation needed is higher. The standard Western model of early childhood, with its cribs and strollers and bouncy seats and scheduled contact, may simply not provide enough co-regulation to nurture an independent nervous system.

The Ewe model provides it continuously. And then, as the child grows into toddlerhood and early childhood, the cultural environment offers something equally important: daily immersion in music, rhythm, and communal movement. Not music class. Not scheduled enrichment. Music as voluntary joyful collective cooperation—present at celebration, at work, at gathering, at play.

But there is a missing ingredient worth naming. The transition out of the carrying relationship is not a transition into an age-segregated classroom or a supervised play environment. It is a transition into a mixed-age world of children, nested inside the ongoing activity of adult life. Younger children witness older children. Older children witness adults. No one is performing for the child, and nothing is being formally taught. The child is simply present in an environment where the activities they will eventually grow into are happening continuously around them—drumming, singing, dancing, cooking, building—and where participation is available whenever the child reaches for it, without demand, without assessment, without a schedule that says now. The developmental psychologists call this observation learning or intent participation. In practice it looks like a child standing at the edge of the circle for six months before stepping in, and then stepping in as if they had always been there. Which, in a sense, they had.

The child’s motor system is constantly being invited to entrain, to synchronize, to coordinate with other bodies in space and time.

Let me share a personal anecdote. As a dyspraxic person, motor planning is a significant challenge for me. I will take far longer to internalize a patterned task than my neurotypical peers. A notable quality of my movement through the world is that of internalized rhythm. When I walk, I always have a rhythm snippet that guides my feet. Having this musical framework allows my varying muscle groups to work together to arrive at a step at the right moment. If I try to “clear the mind,” as is valued in some traditions, I will have difficulty—the coordination to arrive at a step has nothing to hold onto. Having an internalized rhythm literally assures that each step will land at the proper moment to support my body.

What I carry inside, the Ewe child finds outside—in the drum, in the circle, in the bodies moving around them every day. I have my internalized rhythms, but as a Western person I have relatively few opportunities to entrain with others: to feel my nervous system lock into a shared pulse, to be held by a rhythm that is bigger than the one I am generating alone. That experience—common, daily, ordinary in Ewe culture—is for most of us a rare gift, something we encounter at a concert or a dance or a particularly alive moment in community, and then return home without. The Ewe child is not borrowing from an internal resource. They are swimming in an external one, replenished constantly by the people around them.

This has implications for all children. It matters more for children whose motor coordination, sensory integration, or social timing presents differently from the norm. When the cultural practice provides daily, low-stakes, joyful repetition of rhythmic co-participation—not to fix anything, but simply because that is how the community lives—children who need more practice get more practice, embedded in belonging rather than remediation.

I find myself wondering: how many children in an Ewe village would meet the threshold for occupational therapy referral? Not none, certainly. But perhaps fewer—and perhaps the ones who do are met by a community that has already been doing the work.

What I was recognizing, working and playing with my teacher that afternoon, was something I’ve come to think of as a different model of intercognitive participation—the way a community structures the ongoing exchange between minds that work differently, such that difference is absorbed into shared practice rather than routed around it. In Ewe culture, the child who needs more time in the body of a caregiver gets more time in the body of a caregiver. The child who needs more repetitions of a rhythm before it settles gets more repetitions—not in a therapy room, but in the circle, in the ordinary event of community life. The community is not accommodating difference. It is, structurally, producing conditions under which a wider range of developmental profiles can participate and thrive.

This got me curious. If one culture could achieve this through its ecology of care and music, what were other cultures doing—and what had researchers and educators found when they looked? I started digging. What follows is some of what I found.

Beyond Assessment

A different kind of example comes from Finland, and it operates at the level of the institution rather than the family environment.

The Finnish education system is by now well-known in education reform circles, but its implications for neurodivergent learners are perhaps underappreciated. The key structural fact is this: there are no national standardized tests in Finland until the end of upper secondary school, around age eighteen. Children are not ranked against each other. Schools are not ranked against each other. The single nationwide exam that exists—taken at seventeen or eighteen—is optional, and used only for university entrance. Before that, assessment is entirely in the hands of teachers, who know their students as people.

This has a specific and powerful effect on children who develop along non-standard timelines. In a system organized around standardized benchmarks—reading by a certain age, numeracy by another, social competency demonstrated in particular ways by particular grades—a child who arrives at those benchmarks on a different schedule, or who arrives at them by a different route, is legible primarily as a child who is behind. The gap is measured, documented, named. Parents are called in. Interventions are prescribed. The child begins to understand themselves through the lens of what they cannot yet do.

In a system without those universal benchmarks, the same child is simply a child with a particular learning profile. Support is available—Finland has a tiered system of general, intensified, and special support—but the support is fluid, destigmatized, and delivered inside the mainstream classroom rather than by removing the child from it. Special educators work alongside general educators in the same room. The child receiving extra support is not marked by a different room, a different hallway, a different schedule. Difference is normal because difference is visible everywhere.

Most importantly: the Finnish philosophy holds explicitly that different children grow at different rates along different arcs, and that this is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be accommodated. The goal, as one policy document puts it, is not for all students to do the same thing at the same time, but for each student to grow meaningfully on their own terms.

For a child who is autistic, or dyspraxic, or whose language development is asynchronous, or who needs three times as long to feel comfortable in a new social environment—this is not a small thing. The absence of ranking removes the mechanism by which developmental difference becomes social shame. And shame, as anyone who has watched a child withdraw from a learning environment they once loved can tell you, is the most efficient killer of growth there is.

In The Wider World

These two examples—the Ewe and the Finnish—represent something larger when set alongside other cultural traditions. Across the world, communities have developed very different ways of understanding and responding to children whose minds work differently. What those ways share, in the best cases, is not any specific technique but a fundamental orientation: difference is not a failure of the child. It is information about the child.

Among the Māori people of Aotearoa New Zealand, autism is named takiwātanga—a word that means “in their own time and in their own space.” This is not a clinical euphemism. It reflects a genuine philosophical position: the autistic child is a taonga, a treasure, whose particular sensitivity and relationship to the world carries its own mana, its own dignity and weight. The child is not understood through the lens of what they lack. They are understood through the lens of what they carry.

The Nehiyaw people, Plains Cree of what is now Canada, have developed their own language for the same children. Their terms translate as “given a unique quiet spiritual intelligence,” “given a different way of thinking in one’s own spiritual intelligence,” “given the gift of moving a different way.” The grammatical structure is worth sitting with: these are constructions of receiving, of being given something. The child has been entrusted with something, not afflicted with something.

Among the Navajo, the traditional wellness philosophy of Hózhó—harmony, beauty, right relationship—extends to include every person in the community as serving a unique function. Navajo society historically did not have a category of disability in the separating, segregating sense. The collective structure of the community helped develop social capacity across the lifespan, and the community’s values did not place work productivity or social conformity at the center of worth—so children who struggled with those things were not thereby diminished.

In Japan, a remarkable grassroots movement emerged in the early 2000s from a small fishing town in Hokkaido. Bethel House, a peer-support community for people with psychiatric and developmental differences, developed a practice called tōjisha-kenkyū—roughly, “self-supported research” or “the science of the self.” Rather than placing the clinician as the expert on the person’s inner life, tōjisha-kenkyū places the person themselves as the researcher of their own experience, in collaboration with peers who share similar challenges. The finding is not a cure or a correction. The finding is a clearer, more compassionate understanding of one’s own mind—shared with others who can use it too. This practice has since moved from a village church to a laboratory at the University of Tokyo, where autistic researchers are generating knowledge about autism from the inside out.

One Field Through Three Lenses

Looking across these cases—the Ewe, the Finnish, the Māori, the Nehiyaw, the Navajo, tōjisha-kenkyū—patterns emerge. The cultures and systems that do best by children with cognitive, sensory, emotional, and behavioral differences tend to work at one or more of three distinct levels.

The first level is ecological. The environment itself provides, at the scale of daily community life, the sensory input, co-regulation, and rhythmic social engagement that differently-wired children need in greater quantity. No one has to prescribe it. It is simply how people live. The Ewe model of continuous carrying and communal music-making is the clearest example. Hunter-gatherer communities offer another angle on the same principle: in an economic life organized around tracking, pattern-recognition, and sustained sensory attention, the traits we label as symptoms in a classroom—hyperfocus, heightened sensory sensitivity, resistance to arbitrary routine—are not accommodated or reframed. They are simply functional. The environment and the nervous system are a match. What this clarifies is that “symptom” is never a property of the child alone. It is always a description of a child in a particular environment.

The second level is institutional. The formal structures that organize children’s time—schools, assessments, credentialing systems—are designed around an understanding that development varies, timelines differ, and no single benchmark captures the arc of a child’s unfolding. The Finnish model is the best-documented example, but the Māori version in Aotearoa points in the same direction.

The third level is ontological. The culture provides, at the level of meaning-making and language, a framework in which difference is not deficit. The child grows up hearing themselves described not as broken or behind but as carrying something, as moving in their own time, as given a particular kind of intelligence. This is not denial of difficulty. It is a different structure of dignity—one that makes it possible to struggle without shame, to be helped without humiliation.

The Western clinical model for neurodevelopmental difference tends to operate downstream of all three levels. It encounters the child after the ecological environment has failed to provide enough scaffolding, after the institutional environment has already produced a record of deficits, and after the ontological environment has already shaped the child’s self-understanding around what they cannot do. Then it tries, one child at a time, to repair what the system produced. This is not the fault of caregivers, educators, or practitioners, who are often doing extraordinary work. It is a tripartite structural problem.

What This Means for Us

None of this means we can simply import Ewe village life into a Bay Area music class, or legislate the Finnish model into American schools this semester. Culture is not a technique. It does not transplant whole.

But what it means is this: when we ask what our children with different minds need, the answer is not only more diagnosis, more intervention, more specialized service—though those things have their place. The answer is also: more ecological richness in the early years, more continuous bodies in contact, more rhythm in the shared environment, more daily communal practice that exercises coordination and timing in the context of belonging rather than assessment.

It means: longer time horizons with fewer rankings, more patience with the developmental arc, less urgency to measure and document what a child cannot yet do before we have fully seen what they are becoming.

It means: different language about difference, language that makes room for the child’s particular kind of mind as something that carries weight and value, not only as something to be managed.

None of these things require a diagnosis to provide. They are good for all children. They are especially good for children who experience sensory, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral differences.

I’m not sure if the Ewe have a word for sensory processing disorder. They have drums, and dance, and carrying cloths, and grandmothers who know which child needs to be held close a little longer. A teacher in the Ewe tradition carries the message: “It all will become regulated in the music.” Perhaps that is where we start.

A Note to the Top-Down Reader

If you have made it this far and find yourself faintly unsatisfied—waiting for the argument to arrive at a cleaner conclusion, or wondering why we began in a West African music-and-dance workshop rather than with a literature review—that response is worth sitting with for a moment. It is not a failure of attention. It is, most likely, the experience of having followed a bottom-up argument when your training has prepared you for a top-down one. Western institutional culture—including educational culture, medical culture, and the culture of professional development—typically delivers conclusions first and evidence in support of them second. The framework precedes the particulars. You are asked to receive, evaluate, and apply.

The autistic mind tends to work in the opposite direction. It builds coherence from the ground up, from specific observations toward pattern, and it is constitutionally skeptical of received frameworks—not out of contrarianism, but because those frameworks were never self-evident. Every assumption has to be earned from particulars before it can be trusted. This is a different architecture of knowing, not a lesser one. And it is, I would argue, one reason that people with this cognitive style are often the first to notice when the emperor has no clothes—when a structure that everyone else takes as given turns out to rest on assumptions that were never examined. It is also, not coincidentally, one reason they are so often dismissed, pathologized, or socially penalized for saying so.

Which brings me to a word about the scientific method, the authority of which underwrites much of what Western institutions treat as settled. The method itself, at its inception, is an instrument of genuine humility: observe carefully, hold your hypotheses loosely, remain open to disconfirmation. The trouble is that the institutions built on scientific consensus tend to do what institutions always do—they calcify. The consensus becomes the received category, and the received category begins to be seen as an expression of nature, rather than a point of arrival made through myriad choices that could just as easily have been made differently. In the field of child development, the population serving as the model of “normal” development was, for most of the 20th century, a remarkably narrow slice of humanity. The deviations from that norm were then described in the neutral language of clinical observation. The bias did not disappear. It was buried in a rational narrative, which made it harder to see and harder to question.

This essay has asked you to do something slightly uncomfortable: to follow a line of reasoning that began in a personal encounter and arrived at a framework by accumulation rather than by declaration. If that felt unfamiliar, you have experienced, briefly and at low cost, something like what it is to move through a world organized by someone else’s cognitive architecture. That experience is not the point of the essay. But it is not beside the point either. What we are reaching toward—in Ewe villages, in Finnish classrooms, in Māori wānanga, in a fishing town in Hokkaido—is something that might be called intercognitive participation: a way of structuring shared life in which different kinds of minds are not merely tolerated but genuinely accepted as given, and necessary. That project begins with the willingness to notice that what seems self-evident may simply be familiar, and that what is familiar is not necessarily the same as what is right.

---

Bibliography

Armstrong, Thomas. Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs Succeed in School and Life. ASCD, 2012.
https://www.institute4learning.com/books/neurodiversity-in-the-classroom-strength-based-strategies-to-help-students-with-special-needs-succeed-in-school-and-life/

Ayaya, Satsuki. “Tōjisha-Kenkyū on Autism in Japan: Against Epistemic Injustices and Tokenism.” Journal of Social Issues 81, no. 4 (2025): e70026.
https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josi.70026

Bagatell, Nancy. “From Cure to Community: Transforming Notions of Autism.” Ethos 38, no. 1 (2010): 33–55.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40603399

Bevan-Brown, Jill. “Providing a Culturally Responsive Environment for Gifted Māori Students.” Australasian Journal of Gifted Education, 2013.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ854964.pdf

Bruno, Grant, et al. “Global Indigenous Perspectives on Autism and Autism Research: Colonialism, Cultural Insights and Ways Forward.” Autism 29, no. 2 (2025): 275–283.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13623613251318399

Connors, Joan L., and Ann M. Donnellan. “Citizenship and Culture: The Role of Disabled People in Navajo Society.” Disability & Society 8, no. 3 (1993): 265–280.
https://nec.navajo-nsn.gov/Portals/0/NN%20Research/Psychosocial/1993_%20Citizenship%20and%20culture-%20the%20role%20of%20disabled%20people%20in%20Navajo%20society.pdf

Cowessess First Nation. Nehiyaw Understanding of Autism: Community Report. Cowessess First Nation, 2021. (Not peer-reviewed)
https://childrensautism.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Autism_Through_Indigenous_Lens.pdf

Draper, Patricia. “!Kung Women: Contrasts in Sexual Egalitarianism in Foraging and Sedentary Contexts.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiter. Monthly Review Press, 1975.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/anthropologyfacpub/45/

Harada, Nanami, Elizabeth Pellicano, Shinichiro Kumagaya, Satsuki Ayaya, Kosuke Asada, and Atsushi Senju. “‘I Don’t Think They Understand the Reality of Autism’: The Lived Experiences of Autistic Adults in Japan.” Autism (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613251355303

Hartmann, Thom. ADHD and the Edison Gene: A Drug-Free Approach to Managing the Unique Qualities of Your Child. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
https://books.google.com/books/about/ADHD_and_the_Edison_Gene.html

Kapp, Steven K. “Navajo and Autism: The Beauty of Harmony.” Disability & Society 26, no. 5 (2011): 583–595.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233216285_Navajo_and_autism_The_beauty_of_harmony

Kumagaya, Shinichiro. “Tojisha-Kenkyu of Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Advanced Robotics 29, no. 1 (2015): 25–34.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01691864.2014.967723

Lew-Levy, Sheina, et al. “How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills?” Human Nature 28, no. 4 (2017): 367–394.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-017-9302-2

Marfo, Kofi, Linda Biersteker, Jenieri Sagnia, and Margaret Kabiru. “Responding to the Challenge of Meeting the Needs of Children Under 3 in Africa.” In Africa’s Future, Africa’s Challenge: Early Childhood Care and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Marito Garcia, Alan Pence, and Judith L. Evans, 201–222. World Bank, 2008.
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/135791468211777082/pdf/427000PUB0Afri1sclosed0Feb025020081.pdf

Meijer, Joost, et al. “Autism and the Right to Education in the EU: Policy Mapping and Scoping Review of Nordic Countries Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.” Frontiers in Education 4 (2019).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337907380_Autism_and_the_right_to_education_in_the_EU_policy_mapping_and_scoping_review_of_Nordic_countries_Denmark_Finland_and_Sweden

Mita, Aiko, and Shinichiro Kumagaya. “Knowledge Pioneered by Tojisha: From the Perspective of an Autistic Person.” ResearchGate, 2024.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399208640

Nsamenang, A. Bame. “(Mis)Understanding ECD in Africa: The Force of Local and Global Motives.” In Africa’s Future, Africa’s Challenge: Early Childhood Care and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Marito Garcia, Alan Pence, and Judith L. Evans, 135–146. World Bank, 2008.
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/135791468211777082/pdf/427000PUB0Afri1sclosed0Feb025020081.pdf

Onuegbu, Ngozi Florence, Caleb Gbiri, and Olawale Olawale. “Child Handling Cultural Practices for Neuromotor Development in Infants in a Cohort of African Population: A Prospective Analytical Study.” Journal of Neonatology and Clinical Pediatrics 7 (2020): 063.
https://www.heraldopenaccess.us/openaccess/child-handling-cultural-practices-for-neuromotor-development-in-infants-in-a-cohort-of-african-population-a-prospective-analytical-study

Rogoff, Barbara. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford University Press, 2003.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Cultural_Nature_of_Human_Development.html?id=HSkaQ3FTsLIC

Sahlberg, Pasi. Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Teachers College Press, 2011.
https://archive.org/details/finnishlessonswh0000sahl

Sumiya, Michio, et al. “Emotion in Friendships of Autistic Japanese Adolescents.” Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 2018. (Note: URL below points to a PLOS ONE article — journal attribution requires verification before publishing.)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0191538&type=printable

te Mahau / Ministry of Education, New Zealand. Neurodiversity Bundle / Ako Panuku Resource Collection. 2023.
https://akopanuku.education.govt.nz/bundles/12/neurodiversity

Zentner, Marcel, and Tuomas Eerola. “Rhythmic Engagement with Music in Infancy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 13 (2010): 5768–5773.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1000121107