Hi! I'm Amanda.

Rooted started with my own kids. They're third culture kids — born and raised abroad, at home everywhere and nowhere in particular — and when we moved to the U.S., I watched them try to figure out where they belonged in a place that was supposed to already be theirs. I went looking for a middle grade novel that could sit with them in that specific, disorienting kind of homesickness — the kind that isn't about missing a place so much as missing a sense of fitting anywhere — and I couldn't find one. So I started writing it instead.

Where Rooted came from

Why I write about ODD

Most of what's written about oppositional defiant disorder is written about kids, for the adults around them — which is necessary, but it's not the whole picture. I write from the perspective of someone who lived it, as someone trained to understand it clinically, and as a parent currently in the thick of it. That combination is what I bring to the Parenting & ODD side of this work — not just strategies that are evidence-based, but ones I turn to with my own son.

As a kid, I was the one adults were trying to understand — I'm AuDHD and had oppositional defiant disorder myself, long before I had language for what that meant or why I felt the way I did. Being misunderstood as a child led me to study psychology and pursue a career in special education. Now I spend my days helping kids with special needs while raising two neurodivergent kids of my own. I've been the child in the hard moment and the adult trying to reach her. That's the whole reason I write in two directions at once.