About Normal Zebra

Normal Zebra exists to help adults understand neurodivergent children beyond behaviour.

It was created from a simple but persistent question:

What if what we’re seeing on the outside isn’t the full story — or even the most important part?

For many families and educators, behaviour frameworks don’t quite fit.
The explanations feel incomplete.
The strategies feel mismatched.

And the child at the centre can end up misunderstood or managed in ways that do not fully reflect what they are navigating internally.

Normal Zebra offers a different starting point.

Where it began

Normal Zebra was developed by a parent who spent years navigating neurodivergence — both personally and within her family — while repeatedly noticing the same gap:

Adults were being asked to respond to behaviour without enough support to understand the internal experience driving it.


Over time, patterns began to emerge.

Not patterns tied to diagnoses alone, but patterns in:

  • sensory load

  • emotional demand

  • cognitive effort

  • capacity and overwhelm

  • context and environment


These patterns showed up consistently — across different children, different settings, and different challenges — yet were rarely brought together in one coherent way.

Normal Zebra grew out of this pattern recognition:
a way to translate lived experience into a structured, usable framework that adults could actually apply.

What Normal Zebra is

Normal Zebra is a neurodiversity-affirming framework designed to help adults:

  • make sense of behaviour through internal state and context

  • recognise signs of overload before things escalate

  • respond with greater accuracy, compassion, and clarity

It focuses on what’s happening underneath, not just what’s happening on the surface.

The framework is:

  • parent-led, grounded in lived experience

  • non-diagnostic, and not a substitute for clinical assessment

  • supportive of existing practice, not a replacement for it

Normal Zebra does not offer behaviour programs, reward systems, or one-size-fits-all strategies.

Instead, it provides language, structure, and tools that help adults interpret behaviour more accurately so their responses can be more effective and more attuned.

Normal Zebra is used by parents of ADHD and autistic children, as well as by educators and professionals supporting neurodivergent learners in everyday settings.

Who it’s for

Normal Zebra is designed for:

  • Parents who either

    – already know their child is ADHD, autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent, and are still trying to make sense of
    everyday challenges, or
    – sense that something isn’t quite fitting, even when explanations feel unclear, incomplete, or contradictory

  • Educators who want a deeper understanding of behaviour without adding unrealistic workload

  • Professionals who value contextual, whole-child perspectives alongside formal assessments

In all of these cases, the common thread is the same:

behaviour makes more sense when internal experience and context are taken seriously.

What it is not

Normal Zebra is not:

  • a diagnostic tool

  • a behaviour management system

  • a promise of quick fixes

  • a judgement on parenting or teaching

It does not pathologise children, nor does it minimise the real challenges adults face in supporting them.

Instead, it aims to create shared understanding, a common language that reduces blame, increases clarity, and makes better responses possible.

A note on the name

A “normal zebra” doesn’t exist — and that’s the point.

The name comes from a phrase often shared within neurodivergent communities:


“You’re not a strange horse — you’re a normal zebra.”

It speaks to the experience of growing up feeling out of step, not because something is wrong, but because the environment, expectations, and explanations were built for someone else.

Normal Zebra exists to challenge narrow ideas of what is “normal”, and to make space for difference without alarm, dismissal, or blame.

Normal Zebra was developed by Clare Mallard in Aotearoa New Zealand and is informed by local schooling contexts, while remaining relevant to families and educators internationally.

Resources, tools, and professional learning are being developed thoughtfully and deliberately. Care is taken to ensure they are ethical, practical, and genuinely helpful.

If you’re here because something hasn’t quite made sense for you or your child, you’re not alone, and you’re in the right place.