"We're trying all the keys"
Five words from my son's fourth-grade teacher, said near the end of a recent parent-teacher conference. She meant it as reassurance. A way of naming what we'd all been doing together this year: the strategies attempted, the adjustments made, the things that landed, and the things that didn't.
She said it warmly. I nodded along.
But something in me went somewhere else entirely.
The Room Full of Flying Keys
There's a scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone that shot to my mind. It's the room full of flying keys.
Harry is on a broomstick. Hundreds of winged keys swarm around him in a chaotic blur. Somewhere in that swarm is one key that fits the lock on the door. The only way forward is to fly into the middle of the chaos, stay with it, and keep reaching.
When you have a child whose brain is wired differently, you know that room. You live in it. Not once, but in every domain that matters: mornings, transitions, homework, friendships, confidence. The keys don't come labeled. Some that worked last month won't work next month, because your child is growing and the lock has changed. The question is never whether a key exists. It's whether you can find it before everyone involved runs out of energy.
When his teacher said those words, that image became crystal clear. And something clicked into place that I'd been circling for a while without quite landing on.
Going In with a Shared Map
We went into this school year differently than any year before.
Not because we had it figured out. Any parent of a neurodiverse child who tells you they have it figured out is either in a particularly good week or hasn't hit the next transition yet. But we had something new: a shared picture.
My wife and I had been using Lumi for several months by then, and what it had given us, more than any specific strategy, was a common language and a living model of our son's profile that we could both work from. For years, she had been the one carrying most of the coordination with specialists. Most of the mental weight of understanding what he needed and translating that for everyone else. That burden hadn't disappeared entirely, but it had been distributed. We were finally looking at the same map.
That changed the first meeting of the year with his teacher and learning specialist.
I've been through that kickoff meeting every year since first grade. This one was different in a way I felt immediately. More specific. More tactical. Genuinely collaborative in a way the prior ones hadn't been, not because the school wasn't trying before — they're incredibly supportive, but because we showed up differently. We weren't comparing general impressions. We were comparing notes. We walked out with a real plan, shaped around how our son actually processes information rather than how we hoped he would.
What a Real Loop Looks Like
What followed was the most collaborative school year we've had. It's not perfect; I want to be clear about that.
There are domains where the keys still haven't turned. Places where the gap between what's in my son's head and what makes it out into the world remains real and hard. There were moments this year where I sat in a meeting looking at evidence in front of me and felt my stomach tighten, wondering if we'd made the progress I thought we had.
But here's what was different: I wasn't navigating those moments alone. Neither was my wife. Neither were his teachers.
There's a version of this journey, one I've lived and millions of families are living right now, where each person in a child's life works in isolation. The parents have one picture. The classroom teacher has another. The learning specialist has a third. The tutor has a fourth. Everyone is trying keys, but nobody is comparing notes about which ones fit, which ones almost fit, which ones opened something unexpected. Knowledge gets trapped in each relationship. It never circulates.
What I watched happen this year was the feedback loop actually closing.
When something worked at home, a way of breaking a task into smaller steps, a sequence that helped my son get started, a tool that unlocked something, it made it into the conversation with his teachers. And what they observed in the classroom made its way back to us. Not in a formal, bureaucratic way. In a real, ongoing way, as if everyone was working from the same playbook.
His teacher learned to read him. To recognize that what looked like being stuck was often processing. That the burst of output after the long pause wasn't a surprise or a mystery; it was just how his brain works. That understanding didn't come from a textbook. It came from her paying attention, from us sharing context, from a year of all of us navigating that room of keys together.
The Ramp
We were talking about tools during the conference. About the digital scaffolding that has helped our son express what's in his head, the ways certain accommodations change his output compared to a blank page and a pencil.
My wife said something that brought the whole table to a pause.
"It's like a ramp. You wouldn't tell someone who uses a wheelchair to take the stairs."
The room went quiet for a beat. And she was right. When the accommodation matches the need, it's not a shortcut. It's access.
So much of what we've been doing this year, the strategies, tools, different approaches to the same assignment, they aren't workarounds; they're ramps. They're the infrastructure that lets a child show what he actually knows, instead of being blocked by the mismatch between how the task is designed and how his brain is wired.
Raising Adults
Then his teacher said something I want to hold onto for a long time.
"We're not raising kids. We're raising adults. How do we want him to feel about himself? How do we want him to be able to navigate the world?" These were guiding questions among the faculty she shared with us.
That reframed the whole conversation. If the path to a destination looks different than the one we imagined, if the key isn't the one we expected, does the path matter as much as where it leads?
I don't have a clean answer. I don't think anyone does. What I do have is a child ending the school year more confident, adaptable, and self-aware than he started it. A team around him that is working together in a way that feels genuinely new. And the knowledge that we've found many keys that work this year, with more still out there.
We'll keep searching to find them.
No One Should Search Alone
When his teacher said "we're trying all the keys," she was talking about all of us. Not just my wife and me. Not just her and the learning specialists. All of us, sharing what we find, adjusting together, making sure no one is searching that room alone.
That's the shift I want to help every family make. Not just a better set of strategies — which are certainly helpful — but a tighter feedback loop. A shared picture. A team that's actually working from the same map.
And yes, Lumi is a big part of how we’re building our map. It has held the picture steady, especially as our approaches evolved. It’s giving us language we bring into those conversations instead of starting from scratch every time. Not to replace the team surrounding our family, but to make sure everyone on it can see and learn from the same things.
We're finding our way. Not the way. Ours. And there are certainly many more keys to find.
Join Us
If you're carrying the map alone right now — or don’t have one at all, if the loop between home and school has never quite closed, if you've been trying keys without knowing which ones the people at your child's school have already tried, you don't have to keep searching in isolation. We're building Lumi to solve these exact challenges.
Lumi is in private beta with a small group of families. The ones who come in early are shaping what it becomes.
Notes
This post reflects my family's experience. Every child's and adult’s profile is different, and what works for one family won't necessarily work for another. What I believe is universal is that no family should have to do this alone, and that the knowledge about what works for your family shouldn't stay trapped in one relationship when it could benefit all of them.
