#10 - Lived Experience - School Can’t Domino Effect with Marissa Taylor Part 1

In this Lived Experience episode Marissa Taylor shares her family’s experience of School Can’t as her various children each subsequently but very uniquely have their own School Can’t Experiences. Marissa shares the very different experiences she’s had dealing with schools in this journey and her learning curve into Home Education. 

This is Part 1 of our discussion with Marissa. In Part 2 she will share how Dr Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS) model has been transformative for her family.

Recommended Resources

• Dr Ross Green - Lives in the Balance website for CPS - https://livesinthebalance.org/

Transcript

Leisa Reichelt: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the School Can't Experience Podcast. I am Leisa Reichelt, and this podcast is brought to you by the School Can't Australia community. Caring for a young person who is struggling to attend school can be as stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. Today we have another of our lived experience episodes. We are talking with Marissa Taylor, who is a mom of five. She describes their family's experience of School Can't as being a bit of a domino effect, although each child's experience was of course unique. Marissa is also a huge fan and advocate of Dr. Ross Green's collaborative and proactive solutions or CPS method, and she has so much to share about how this has helped her family that we've split this episode into two parts. In part two, we're gonna dig specifically into the CPS method. But in this first part, Marissa shares the experience that her family has had with School Can't. Before we start, just a quick content warning. In this episode, we do mention suicidal thoughts, though we don't discuss them in any detail. Please take care while listening and do reach out for support if you need it. Alright. Shall we get cracking?

Marissa Taylor: 1:18

Let's get started.

Leisa Reichelt: 1:20

Maybe just give us some context about you, about your family, anything that you think would be helpful for people to know.

Marissa Taylor: 1:26

Okay. So, we are a neurodivergent family. We are a late diagnosed family or mostly late diagnosed. There's myself, my husband, and my five children. It was actually my fourth child who was three at the time, who went through a full developmental regression and they were the first in our family to be diagnosed as autistic. Going through all of those developmental questions that you generally have to go through, especially when you're starting to see therapists for the first time, through that questioning that led to me realizing it was for my older children as well. It wasn't just for that child in particular. However, as all of that was happening, my children were going through School Can't. It was my second oldest child that started first that was really having a lot of issues first. So once we started supporting that child through the School Can't process, it's like my other kids recognized what was going on. So, it was almost like a domino effect. As soon as one child started receiving supports, it was almost like the other children recognized that they too needed supports. And then it was just one child after another. So, at our crisis point, my fifth child was only 12 months old so I was just raising a baby. Around age three, my fifth child, got diagnosed as neurodivergent as well. And then I myself went through that process, in 2023 and 2024. We're kind of all on our own journey as a family through neurodivergence.

Leisa Reichelt: 3:04

Were you the last to get your diagnosis?

Marissa Taylor: 3:08

My husband is undiagnosed, but we are recognizing the neurodivergence in my husband. but yes, I would be the last one to be diagnosed, at 45 and 46

Leisa Reichelt: 3:21

Yeah. Yeah. As you were going through the process with your kids, did you see it in yourself quickly or did it take you a little bit longer?

Marissa Taylor: 3:28

It took me time.

Leisa Reichelt: 3:30

Hmm.

Marissa Taylor: 3:30

When you have a lived experience of not knowing, you're just a person moving through the world, you don't recognize certain things until you're confronted with it. As my children were going through their diagnosis process and I was learning more about, sensory sensitivities I started going, oh, I can relate to that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's me. So you kind of go through this bit of doubt. What really solidified it and gave me that aha moment, was struggling a lot with my then 3-year-old. The meltdowns were just one after the other. They were very physical in their responses. So there was a lot of hitting and kicking and biting and all that kind of presentation. I was really struggling to figure out how to cope and how to handle this kind of presentation. One kind mother, pointed me towards Kristy Forbes's work in the PDA space and said, you know, this might be what you're experiencing. Check it out and see what you think. At first I just consumed a lot of the free content. She was putting out a lot of the Facebook Lives, a lot of her YouTube content. And then I, it was just all making sense and so I went, yep, okay. I bit the bullet and I started her In Tune With PDA program. think I only got to that module four, and I was like, I paused and I was, I, I sat there and went, this is me. I'm actually learning about myself. Yes, it's my kids too, obviously, but the first thing that just came to me was I'm learning about myself here. And so then I

Leisa Reichelt: 5:10

Wow.

Marissa Taylor: 5:11

to my psychologist and I was like, I think it's me too. And surprisingly at the same time, the psychologist I was seeing at the time, she had just done her training in autism assessments and she said to me, you know what? I can see it now. And we put the two and two together and then I went through the process of formal diagnosis with another psychologist.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:33

How did getting your own diagnosis help you manage what you were having to do in supporting your kids?

Marissa Taylor: 5:41

For my brain, I need a way forward. Like I need to see a path forward, or I need something that's gonna give me information and go, okay, now I have something to hold onto. I can then run with it and see where I end up. So getting the diagnosis was really about information for me. Now that I have this word, autism in my life, what does that mean? And I could then go and forward and do my own learning in this space. It was really about understanding what it meant for myself and then for my children, How to differentiate our experiences. So, sure, I have this experience of life, but that doesn't necessarily mean my children experience the same thing the same way. What I think is fine, they might find very, very overwhelming. So it was really about coming to a place where I had to learn that my brain and my nervous system doesn't mean that my children have the exact same brain, exact same nervous system, and exact same experience of the same thing. it was really just about learning, unlearning, and then relearning.

Leisa Reichelt: 6:46

Tell me about your journey into School Can't. So you said it was a bit of a domino effect. Where did it all start? If you look back.

Marissa Taylor: 6:54

if I look back, if I, if I'm really honest, it was right back in kindergarten when I sent my first child to school. The instant change in their personality, who they are as a person. I went from having a very chatty child, a very experiential child. So someone who had a very high imagination. Um, once school started for them, they went to a complete shutdown. So, what I mean by that is having a child who would tell you everything about their life, everything that's happening in the world, to a child who was just like, you would say, how was your day? And they would respond with, okay. And then you would say to them, well, what did you do today? Stuff. You know, it was one worded, it was shut down. It was almost like, I don't wanna talk about this kind of stuff with you.

Leisa Reichelt: 7:42

It is also like a big cliche though, isn't it? Like people go, oh, well all kids are like that. All kids are hard to talk to. They don't wanna talk to you about school.

Marissa Taylor: 7:49

Yeah, and that came up. So when I would first say to the school, you know, this is how my child is, and they're like, it's normal. Every child goes through that it will settle down. They even said, you know, you'll start to see some behavioral changes at home. Well, they get very testy, very angry. And that's really because they're getting exhausted through the day. They just need time to settle down, and everything will be okay. That never happened. I had constant behavioral problems at home. They were perfect out in the community. They were perfect at school. So it made it really hard. if I went to the doctors or professionals to say, Hey, look, we are having behavioral problems at home, it was really always dismissed and just put down to me. And I was always given that advice of, you've just gotta be a firmer parent. You've just gotta lay down the law. All that kind of really unhelpful advice, which you don't know is unhelpful at the time you just think, oh, okay, maybe I'm just too soft. Or you really start to believe that it is a you problem. It is not a bigger, wider problem.

Leisa Reichelt: 8:51

It's beyond unhelpful though, isn't it? It's detrimental.

Marissa Taylor: 8:54

it is because had I known earlier that there was another way or a different way to handle things, I can't say whether things would've changed or things would've been different. I can't say that because I was never given that opportunity. I was never given that chance to see if something different could have happened, or a different path or a different opportunity could have been taken by us. We were just led down one path and that was it. Because my kids did really well at school. They were social. they had a lot of good friends. They did a lot of extracurricular activities. The teachers would not report any problems until things became a problem. That really started for my second eldest child around Year 5 for them. It, it had nothing to do with academics at all. It was really about attendance issues, just not wanting to go, not wanting to get outta bed, not wanting to, go to school. All the very general things that we can't really pinpoint, an issue. thought perhaps due to age, it may have been a puberty issue. When puberty first starts and you start getting that first surge of hormones, that can obviously change the way you respond to the world. So we thought perhaps, maybe? Not sure. The following year through Year 6 was just. it was almost like everything had come apart. Like every issue that I could think of was coming undone. We weren't just battling one day, it was weeks at a time. We kind of managed somehow to get through Year 6. It was just, it was ongoing battle of go to school, go to school, go to school.

Leisa Reichelt: 10:41

Yeah, give us an insight of what was the morning like? What was a week like? what did normal look like for you back then?

Marissa Taylor: 10:47

So normal was just like, you would have a child that would wake up and they would not wanna go to school, and you would have a constant fight and you would be saying things like, I've gotta go to work. You have to go to school. This is how it's gotta be. When you're in the thick of it, you don't know, you don't have the words to say, you don't have the explanations, you don't have the insight, depth of knowing what's going on. All you know is you have to get through your day. Because we work, because life is busy, because life is pressing, it's just that constant battle. There were some days where everything was fine. There were some days where we didn't have a problem at all, and it was just business as usual. And then there wouldn't, we'd have this period of just days and weeks where it would crash down and you'd be like, I don't get this. I don't understand this. Everything was fine yesterday and now, today is the problem.

Leisa Reichelt: 11:41

That's the thing, isn't it? Every now and then you get a day and you're like, see, you can do it.

Marissa Taylor: 11:45

Yeah. Whenever you mention this to anyone, it was like, yeah, it happens. You just have to keep pushing through it. Again, there was never any alternative suggestion. There was never any let's sit down and try to figure this out. It was always just push, push, push. So somehow we managed to get through year six. I don't, I, I honestly dunno how we did, but we did. My child went into high school and everything was fine. I had no issues through year seven with this child. I was like, everything's good. Everything's fine. must have just been a puberty thing. I didn't think anything of it at all. My husband was a shift worker at the time. I was a day worker, so I worked during the day. my husband worked various shifts, so day shifts, afternoon shifts, night shifts. When year eight came around, the year started off perfect, couldn't ask for a better start to school year, everything worked out well. We took a family holiday, inside school term. So we got the permission to take time off to go on a family holiday. That family holiday was perfect. We were happy. We were a family who just like every other family going about life, as soon as we came home from that holiday, and it was time for school, is when my child just went, they, they literally went mute overnight. We couldn't get them out of bed. There was no warning nothing to suggest this was going to happen. And because it was so instant, completely blindsided by it, our first thoughts went to all the ugly places you would normally go. Like, are you being sexually abused? Is there bullying happening? Like, what is happening in that environment that has caused you to shut down the way you've shut down? But my child insisted that, that that wasn't the case. When we spoke to the school, we were very honest and we said, look, we don't know what's going on. Is there anything happening here at school that we need to be aware of? The school was at a complete loss. Again, nothing on the academic side, nothing on the social side. Everything appeared to be as you would expect it to be, but I had a child that couldn't even get outta bed, who couldn't speak. They, they lost all speech and then obviously I needed to get help and support on board. So I was looking for a psychologist, like, we need help. And that's when the threats started from the school.

Leisa Reichelt: 14:29

great.

Marissa Taylor: 14:29

So we really didn't even get much of a chance to put support in place. It was literally, you have to get your child to school by law. We have a wellness room here. Just drag them to school. Just get them to school. And we started doing that and it was getting really traumatic for everybody. And then the threats started like, if you don't do this, you are gonna end up with a fine and a court order. my husband and I were going, Like why, why we were being treated like we are criminals? We have a child who's in distress. We are trying everything that we can to work out what's going on. We didn't even have a psychologist in place yet. And there was no help from the school in the sense of, well, we've got a psychologist, we'll get that help and support for you. There was none of that. There was just get your child to school

Leisa Reichelt: 15:18

And these threats were coming directly from the school that you'd been trying to engage with?

Marissa Taylor: 15:23

Yeah, directly from the school. And, we got to a point where my husband had lost it because obviously it's stressful for everybody. He'd come off a night shift and when you're coming off a night shift, you're already tired, you're already exhausted. This was the last thing he needed coming home from a night shift. And then I was trying to get ready for work'cause I'm the day worker and you know, and I, and of a sudden there was just me and my child on the floor, crying. I just got to a point and I said to myself, I can't do this like this. This is not healthy. You cannot tell me that this is a healthy way to live. I just stopped and I just, I apologized to my child, gave them a hug, put them back into bed. And I said, I am so sorry. You stay there, I'll work it out. And that was the day I applied for Home Education. Had no idea what that path looked like. I had no idea what it was all gonna amount to. I just knew that something had to change and this was an option. And I knew that it would stop the threats from happening. And so I was getting all this help from the online community about how to manage and go forward with the application and the planning and everything like that. So that's how we first started our journey into homeschool and how our School Can't journey first started. And like I said, it just kind of happened in a domino effect.

Leisa Reichelt: 16:57

Yeah.

Marissa Taylor: 16:58

once I started home educating one child, I was checking in with the other children as you do, like, are you okay? Are you doing well? And everything was fine until they weren't fine. The next child to stop was my younger child. They were in Year 5 at the time. And I was just like, okay, like I didn't know if this was just a case of, my older siblings now at home every day. I want to be at home every day. I didn't know if that was the problem or if there was anything else happening. So again, we persisted with the School Can't. We were like, Nope, you've gotta go blah, blah, blah, blah.'Cause they were in Year 5, I had to deal with the primary school. The primary school was actually really nice to deal with. I didn't have a bad experience with the primary school. We had a meeting with the school and they were really helpful, in the sense that the teacher that my child had in Year 5 was the same teacher that they had in Year 3 and I'd mentioned one of my children had just been diagnosed as autistic. The teacher said, I'm not an expert in this area it may be worth exploring. The psychologist was there and very helpful too. They were willing to do all the assessments. It was just unfortunate that this child couldn't get back onto the school grounds. And I had no idea what on earth was going on. All I knew was this child did not wanna go back to school. I found out through,'cause this child had a really good, relationship with their grandmother at the time, and I do know that there was some kind of social incident that happened. I didn't know exactly what happened. It was just a social incident. that led to them not wanting to go back. For my older child, my older children had a lot of internal presentations, so there was nothing outwardly that I could really say was, was causing it or something that you could really latch onto and go, oh my God, this is a sign, let's go. was nothing like that. So when my older child started having School Can't issues as well, it was really surprising because again, I didn't have any preconceived knowledges of any, any issues or any trouble happening. My oldest child was the one who had suicidal ideation and the, the advice from the psychologist was to look at alternative schooling options. That was the advice from the psychologist. So, okay, I went down that route and I spoke to the principal of the high school. And when I did it was a really disgusting phone call I had with the principal. They basically said to me, all children this age are suicidal. Don't worry about it. I see it every day. Just keep sending your child to school.

Leisa Reichelt: 19:45

Oh my God.

Marissa Taylor: 19:46

when I said, well look, my child has expressed an interest in Distance Education. the response that I got was, look, Distance Education is expensive. We can't just do Distance Education for every kid that wants it, this will blow over. Just keep sending your kid to school. That was the conversation I had with the school principal. My mind was kind of blown because that's not the kind of response I was expecting.

Leisa Reichelt: 20:10

Yeah. Yeah.

Marissa Taylor: 20:12

is thinking about harming themselves. It's just not the conversation I thought I was gonna be having.

Leisa Reichelt: 20:18

It seems like quite a negligent conversation really, doesn't it? I mean, where is the duty of care?

Marissa Taylor: 20:23

I was just, and the fact that they were saying that this is something they handle every day and all kids do it, I'm like, well, what is happening at your school, dude? Like, for real? I hung up the phone and I looked at my child and I said, look, I'm really sorry. They won't allow Distance Education. I'm gonna pull you out of school and I'm going to homeschool you. And my child was like, okay. And that's what I did. I have a child that I need to support their health and safety comes first. Everything else can come next. But this comes first. And that was my priority.

Leisa Reichelt: 20:56

So did you have to quit your job or were you there working on top of home educating multiple children? I

Marissa Taylor: 21:01

eventually had to quit. By the time the kids started, not going to school, our mother-in-law was helping us with the overlap. as I was going to work. she was coming in to help look after the kids so my husband could get some sleep. She was there to help us. But this was becoming beyond, you know, just helping to care for kids. So eventually I took unpaid leave to try and get through the worst of it. And then I tried to get back into work. By that stage, I had also developed, an autoimmune disease, and trying to get back to work whilst you're going through all of this stuff, whilst trying to take care of yourself medically, it all became too much. And I just

Leisa Reichelt: 21:47

Well,

Marissa Taylor: 21:47

I'm

Leisa Reichelt: 21:48

even without the autoimmune disease, it sounds extremely stressful, that must have been a huge thing for you to try to do.

Marissa Taylor: 21:54

yeah. So I had to, it wasn't an easy decision to make because that did take money away from the household budget. I was fortunate enough we were able to work it out, financially. I understand that, not all families can do it, but we were fortunate enough where we could work it out. And that has just been my life ever since. So all that happened pre COVID then I went into COVID as a home educator whilst learning about, you know, my children's diagnosis and everything like that. So

Leisa Reichelt: 22:30

yeah. It sounds, sounds like a lot. How did you tackle homeschooling? So you said you got forced into it very quickly. How did you get started? What have you learned about home educating as part of that process?

Marissa Taylor: 22:44

it was a huge learning curve. It's very much like stepping into the School Can't community when you're first learning about it and you're first trying to learn about. How do we let go of certain expectations? Again, we are so conditioned as a society to think that school is it. There's nothing else. That curriculum is the only way you can learn anything. We so conditioned to believe these certain things. So, going into Home Education was really hard because inside the homeschool community, you will start hearing things like, deschooling, unschooling. You don't have to follow curriculum. You don't have to run your home like a school. There's such a contradiction between what we know versus what we are going to. So again, it was another learning process where I had to unlearn about education and what we think we know about learning and education and school. I had to dismiss all of that and think, okay, I know nothing about schooling, I know nothing about education. What is this really looking like for us as a family? And it took, I would say about 18 months before I really found my feet inside homeschooling. But I had to go through a huge learning process, and that's ongoing. It doesn't stop. So the deschooling process is basically, again, shaking off the mainstream and societal expectations of what school looks like, of what learning looks like. And really focusing on yourself and your family and your kids. It's really honing that down and thinking to yourself, how do I make this work? Realistically, not dreaming about the end goal, but just how is this gonna play out day to day in a realistic sense of the word? And that's where, so everything can kind of collide because I, I do have children with high support needs. Even though my three children were older and already had, schooling experience, it's home now. Home is a safe space. Trying to say to them, well, now you're gonna do schoolwork on top of that wasn't necessarily going to be the right thing. With my two older children-academically, they were fine. There was nothing academically that they had to really do or work on. They were the kind of students who were A grade students. For my third oldest child, they went into a complete full burnout. So they completely shut down at home. There was no way I was gonna get any kind of learning happening. I really had to rethink and reexamine everything. And that will kind of segue us into Dr. Ross Green's work'cause this is where it all came to a crunch.

Leisa Reichelt: 25:49

And on that cliffhanger we are going to wrap up the first part of this episode with Marissa Taylor. We'll post part two very soon. And in that you'll learn all about how using Dr. Green's CPS method has been transformative for Marissa and her family. We hope to share many more School Can't lived experience stories, and if you have a School Can't story that you would like to share, please email us at schoolcantpodcast@gmail.com. It really is a very easy and not scary process to share your story, and I know so many people love hearing these stories and find them so helpful. We have put a link to the School Can't Australia website and to Dr. Ross Green's website in the episode notes for you, and also a link to donate to School Can't Australia. Your tax deductible donations assist us to raise community awareness, partner with researchers, produce resources like webinars and this podcast, which all assist people who are supporting children and young people experiencing School Can't. If you are a parent or carer in Australia and feeling distressed, remember you can always call the Parent Helpline in your state. A link with the number to call is in the episode notes. Thank you again for listening, and we will see you for part two. Take care.