Post-Standard: Parenting a neurodiverse child made me a better in...

Lucy Lang April 24, 2025

Lucy Lang serves as New York State Inspector General. She is based in New York City.

As April marks Neurodiversity Celebration Month, I have been reflecting on the lessons I've learned over the nearly two years since my now 9-year-old daughter was diagnosed with language-based learning differences. It's cliché but true to say that, as a parent, I learn more from her than she does from me. But what I never expected was the extent to which my third-grade powerhouse - braids, braces and all - would impact my work and workplace.

I'm a lawyer by training and a public servant by choice, serving as New York's 11th Inspector General and charged with overseeing the agency that investigates fraud and corruption in New York state government. This work requires collaboration with teams possessing a wide range of skills - investigative, mathematical, analytical and many more - to work with a diverse group of New Yorkers to solve crimes and identify policy and regulatory failures. Like most of my colleagues in law and law enforcement, I have participated in many diversity trainings, including most recently on implementing trauma-informed approaches, which have become a best practice in many public-facing or client-oriented jobs. However, the lessons I've gained from parenting, particularly understanding neurodiversity, have gone much further than any training could in facilitating my, and by extension, my agency's understanding of our staff and the public we serve.

It has started with acknowledging my own biases - deeply baked-in presumptions that people's abilities correlate in some way with how they present, the misperception that the speed with which someone accomplishes a task is related to their skills, or the sense that forgetfulness or the inability to relay facts accurately or in order are indicators of dishonesty. My daughter, like many dyslexic learners and creative people, at times cannot remember the names of people she knows well. She relays stories powerfully but rarely in the order in which they occurred. She is always brilliant, but there is no doubt that she is at her most successful when she is given instructions verbally.

After more than 18 years of hearing people's stories as part of my profession, at times about tragic and traumatizing things, it was only recently, while listening to my daughter recount a schoolyard conflict, that I realized how much my mindset has shifted thanks to her. My evolution to truly appreciating how many people are wired differently from myself and from what I was trained to expect and understand has been as eye-opening as it is humbling.

This has real implications for those of us who are charged with fact-finding, particularly when it requires assessing peoples' credibility. There's no doubt that our evolving understanding of neurodiversity will have profound, yet largely unexplored, implications for the American criminal legal system in years to come. To that end, recently all my colleagues at the Offices of the Inspector General across New York state attended training by the remarkable Haley Moss, a lawyer with autism whose expertise includes neurodiversity in the workplace. She reminded that this should matter to all of us, because in addition to its prevalence all around us, neurodiversity can happen unexpectedly and in an instant, and indeed if we live enough, we are all likely to someday become neurodiverse ourselves.

I hope that these lessons in neurodiversity and teachings from my daughter will make me a stronger boss and leader: that they will make me sensitive and compassionate to my colleagues, that my agency will increasingly become a place that accommodates and leverages a staff that is as diverse as the public we serve.

If others believe, as I now deeply do, that human brains function differently and that this diversity is natural and beneficial for our species, we will only be better for heeding the lessons that my little girl and so many other people are teaching us. Because, as Moss reminded the investigators, lawyers and auditors who work with me in our mission to improve integrity in government: "The future is a neurodiverse place."

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