Below is our recent interview with Sarah Mangiarelli, the Founder of Pieces Of Perception:
Q: Pieces of Perception started at your own kitchen table last winter. What was happening that made you build it?
A: Last winter I hit a wall a lot of parents will recognize, especially parents of neurodivergent children. It started when my son was having a particularly hard time understanding and processing an overwhelming social experience. Like most parents, when I saw that he was struggling, I tried to get more help and support for him. Yet every time a new person entered my son’s life, a new provider, a new counselor, a babysitter, I started over. Same explanations, same history, same trial and error. And because I was explaining him fresh every time, everyone ended up with a slightly different version of him.
So I stopped and wrote down what I already knew worked. I wrote down what I knew triggered him. I wrote down how he processed emotions and returned to calm. His strengths, his needs, my observations, had so much inherent wisdom but I wasn’t pulling all of the pieces that made him him together in a useful manner. Not what a diagnosis report said. What actually worked (or didn’t work) in my house on a Tuesday afternoon.
I gave it to his dad first. Then to the other adults in his life. Then I wrote a version for his sister. Watching everyone begin to operate from the same page changed things faster than anything else we had tried.
Pieces of Perception is that process, built so a parent can feel supported and guided and most of all empowered.
Q: A parent fills out a questionnaire and gets a report back. What’s actually in it, and what does a family do with it on day one?
A: There are two paths. The Action Report is for the family in the middle of something right now, one pressing issue, thirteen sections, about half an hour of questions. The Comprehensive Plan is the whole picture, twelve sections, roughly the same time commitment.
Inside you get a Sensory Map covering seven sensory systems, a Strengths Spotlight, a Communication Quick Guide, a Regulation Toolkit, a Quick Reference Cheat Sheet and a Week-One Action Checklist. It is not a generic report, it is a report built specifically for each child.
Day one, most families do two things. The cheat sheet goes on the refrigerator so anyone in the house can read it in ten seconds. And they start the week-one checklist, which is deliberately small. Not a life overhaul. Not a magic “fix.” A handful of concrete things to try this week, based on each individual child’s strengths and needs. From there, the Care Guides are what you hand to specific people: the babysitter, the grandparents, the sibling, the teacher, the service provider.
Q: The reports are AI-generated, and plenty of parents are wary of that. Where does AI help here, and where does it have no business being?
A: I’ll be direct about this because parents deserve directness. The reports are AI-generated from the answers the parent gives, and they are informational, not diagnostic. They do not diagnose anything, they never will, and they are not a substitute for a clinician. Truthfully, you don’t even need a diagnosis to utilize this program.
What the AI is actually doing is organizing and translating. A parent already holds an enormous amount of knowledge about their child. It’s just scattered across years of observation and never written down in a form another adult can pick up and use. Speaking from experience, I have read more books, articles, studies on neurodiversity and in addition to my daily, lived experience, my brain was swimming with information and ideas, but especially when he was starting to struggle again, I didn’t know how to synthesize that information into an actionable plan. The AI takes what the parent tells us and assembles it into something structured, consistent and shareable.
Every line in the report traces back to something the parent said. Nothing is invented. The expertise is the parent’s. With careful and specific backend instruction, the technology just does the assembly.
Q: You built this outside a full-time job, on nights and weekends, as the only person on it. What did that constraint force you to get right?
A: It forced me to cut anything that didn’t help a family in their first week. When you have a few hours after everyone’s asleep, you don’t build features because they’d be nice to have. Every section in the report earned its place.
It also meant there was no team to hide behind. Before launch I ran a real end-to-end purchase on my own live site, paid for it, filled out the questionnaire like any parent would, and then spent nights and weekends fixing everything that experience turned up. Eventually, I rolled the program out to a handful of beta testers and incorporated their thoughts and feedback into the final design. I don’t think I would have found half of it from a spreadsheet.
Q: Every report includes a guide written for the child, not the parents. Why give the kid their own copy?
A: Well, I will share that at the end of the Action and Comprehensive Report there is a one-page message for the parents. Because honestly, this journey can be really hard and really lonely at times. I wanted to acknowledge the parent’s efforts in continuously fighting for their child. BUT the report for each child – It’s called Your Brain, Your Voice, it’s free with every report, and it comes in three versions for different ages.
Neurodivergent kids get talked about constantly and talked to rarely. There’s an entire apparatus of adults discussing them in meetings they aren’t in, using words nobody has explained to them. If the whole premise of the product is that every adult should be reading from the same page, then the child has to be on that page too. It’s their brain.
And self-advocacy has to start somewhere. It starts with having words for how you work. A kid who can say “I need a minute, loud rooms make it hard for me to think” is a kid who is going to be able to advocate for himself at sixteen and at twenty-six.
Q: You launched September 1st. What’s live now that wasn’t a month ago?
A: A month ago this was a waitlist and a promise (maybe even a little bit of a dream). Now the whole thing is live and buyable: both report types, all add-ons, the free co-parenting guide, the child’s guide, and the Access Program for families who need it.
The quiet part of that answer is that launching meant taking down every waitlist call to action on the site and replacing it with a real purchase path.
That’s a small technical thing and an enormous emotional one.
Q: What’s next in the coming six months?
A: The first priority is listening to the families who use it in these early months and letting them tell me what the reports are missing. I’d rather refine what exists than pile on new products. I want this to be meaningful and supportive – above all else, that is my goal.
Beyond that, there’s a provider and practice side taking shape: a deeper intake opportunity for service organizations that want to offer this to their own families. The goal is that the first session isn’t an informational session, it can be progress.
Additionally, I am about to launch the beta testing phase for a new report called The Next Chapter which will focus on young adults 16+ to support them as they transition into adulthood. This is an aspect of life that needs more attention and support for families.
Q: What’s the piece you’re proudest of that nobody will ever notice?
A: Beyond taking my own pain and struggles and turning it into a path to help others?
The questionnaire has no dead ends. Every single question can be answered. If something doesn’t apply to your child, or you genuinely don’t know, there’s an option that says so.
That sounds like a small design decision and it’s the one I care most about. Blank answers do not make weak reports. But more than that, I didn’t want a single parent to sit in front of a question about their own child, not know the answer, and feel like they’d failed a test. An honest “I’m not sure” is real information. It tells us something. And nobody abandons the form at 11pm feeling like a bad parent.
