#37 - Home Education for Neurodivergent Kids with Pav & Heidi from the Home Education Network

In this episode of the School Can't Experience Podcast, host Leisa Reichelt is joined by Pavlina McMaster and Heidi Ryan from the Home Education Network (HEN) to discuss the challenges and benefits of home education for neurodivergent children & young people.

Pavlina and Heidi share their personal experiences, highlighting how home education caters to the unique needs of these children, fosters motivation, and supports mental health. 

The conversation also touches on the initial fears parents might have, the organic learning process, and the critical importance of creating a safe and supportive learning environment. Both parents of young children as well as teens transitioning to home education will gain valuable insights into the practicalities and emotional journey of home educating.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

00:54 Meet Pavlina and Heidi

01:39 The Journey to Home Education

03:16 Benefits of Home Education for Neurodivergent Kids

05:14 Challenges and Misconceptions

08:34 Motivation and Learning

13:29 Early Signs and Decisions

16:46 Organic Learning and Community Support

20:03 Addressing Fears and Expectations

21:33 Realizations and Accommodations

22:44 Understanding Student Engagement and Coping Mechanisms

24:31 The Role of YouTube in Modern Education

28:01 Parental Support and Home Education

30:23 Addressing Teen Burnout and Mental Health

39:01 The Importance of Community Support

41:07 Conclusion and Resources

Recommended Resources

• Home Education Network (Australia) - https://home-ed.vic.edu.au/
• Save Victorian Parent Helpline Petition: https://www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/save-parentline

Transcript

0:05

Hello and welcome to the School Can't Experience podcast. I'm Leisa Reichelt, and this podcast is brought to you by the School Can't Australia community. Caring for a young person who's struggling to attend school Can't be a stressful and isolating experience, but you are not alone. Thousands of parents across Australia and many more around the world face similar challenges and experiences every day. Today's conversation is with friends of the Pod Pavlina McMaster and Heidi Ryan, who join us from the Home Education Network or HEN. We talk about the different experiences of parents who have young kids who need to learn how to read and write, as well as those of us who have teens who might be experiencing a mental health crisis and burnout. Pav and Heidi have a wealth of experience and knowledge that they're sharing with us today, and I really hope you enjoyed this conversation.

Leisa Reichelt: 0:52

Let's get started. Okay. Well, Pavlina and Heidi, thank you so much for joining us again for our podcast. Really appreciate you coming back and having more talks.

Pavlina: 1:02

Thank you for having us. We're always happy to be here and we're always happy to talk.

Leisa Reichelt: 1:06

I would love just to get a little bit of context for each of you. What's your life story that brings you to be here, having this chat with us today?

Pavlina: 1:13

Okay. We have lived experience. Everybody in our family is neurodivergent. Multiply neurodivergent, I say. So personally, I'm autistic, ADHD, and also PDA and how that expresses itself varies a lot in our family from individual to individual. But what it means is that we all value our autonomy and that led us into home education. My eldest started at school for a very short period in prep and quickly became clear that it wasn't working for him. So we pulled him out, started home educating, and here we are. He's now 18 and he's about to finish his home ed journey, officially, his official home ed journey. But you know, never stops.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 1:59

Yeah, so also like Pav, our family is completely neurodivergent. A lot of this for us was discovered later, not in those early primary or early school years. So it's shaped a lot of how we've made shifts in our life and how we've changed the things that we've done, including moving towards home education. My eldest child went through high school up until year 11 and had lots of issues with school. So they were the catalyst for us looking for other ways to do things and looking into home ed and other options or other pathways. And once we discovered what it really could look like, we realized that for our family and the way that all of our brains work, that it was actually perfect for everybody in the family.

Leisa Reichelt: 2:49

I think we hear so many stories from parents who come to home education as an absolute last resort, that they've tried so many different things in schools, accommodations in schools, different kinds of schools. Tried and tried and tried. Nothing's worked. And with no other options, they come to home education. So I think we hear that story really regularly, but I wonder if we can kind of flip that on its head a little bit. I'm thinking through the lens of neurodiverse kids, what is it about home education that actually really suits a lot of our neurodiverse kiddos? Why is it potentially a great first choice?

Pavlina: 3:29

Yeah, that's a great question. And we find that, because it's individually tailored to each child, you can so specifically cater to their interests and needs and the way they love to learn and how much they love to move their body. And you know what they need to feel good in themselves and feel like they are worthy. You can give them so much space to figure out who they are. And that's really hard, when you're having to mask day after day after day in school and pretend to be someone you are not, just so that you either don't get into trouble or don't stick out or get bullied. Or just to feel safe. It's really hard to know who you are, and a lot of parents report that. You know that when they finally pull their kid outta school, this kid will actually say, I don't know who I am. I don't know what I love. When you think back to their early childhood before school, they've got very definite interests. You know, very definite passions and things that they love to do. And the great thing about home ed is that it allows them to explore those and either delve deeper and deeper into the one thing that they've always loved or expand on that or move into something else that they love. So it gives them that space. And you know, we find that kids who have that opportunity, even if they are feeling when they come outta school like they don't know who they are and they don't know what they love. Given the space and time to recover and to reduce that anxiety and the distress of School Can't, they rediscover that love and joy. So they get the opportunity to live it the way that works for them.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:11

Yeah. Heidi, what are your thoughts?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 5:14

So Leisa, I just wanted to talk about terminology. So when we say neurodiverse, neurodiverse relates to a group of people. So a single person can't be neurodiverse. So it throws me a little bit when I hear it said, you know, our neurodiverse children, what I think you're meaning is our neurodivergent kids

Leisa Reichelt: 5:35

I get that wrong, all the time. All the time. Yeah. People who listen to this podcast probably know I get that wrong all the time and people correct me all the time it still doesn't stay in my brain for some reason.

Pavlina: 5:47

It'll happen eventually.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:48

I don't know.. I don't know, Pav

Pavlina: 5:50

It's like 300 times or something, isn't it? That a human needs, yeah, three hundred times or something, you need a correction for those sorts of things to stick.

Leisa Reichelt: 5:57

I hope not.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 5:58

That's a lot

Leisa Reichelt: 5:58

I hope not. feel free, don't hesitate if I say something a bit dumb or get my words wrong or anything.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 6:05

no, not what I mean.

Leisa Reichelt: 6:07

Okay,

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 6:08

So can I have a go at answering that question a little bit as well about why home ed would be a great first choice for our neurodivergent kids?

Leisa Reichelt: 6:17

What's your perspective on that?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 6:18

Yeah, so I think it's really important to acknowledge that learning doesn't happen in a brain that's activated in that fight flight mode. A brain that's not able to access all those executive functions and that prefrontal cortex. If we're in an environment where we are spending all of our energy just surviving and being hypervigilant and hyper aware of the other humans around us, the sensory space around us, all the things that go on, that we take for granted if that's not an impact for us individually. These young people are really experiencing a lot of that and their brains just don't have the capacity to lay new neural pathways. You're not actually able to build authentic, really decent learning on top of a brain that's in that kind of stressed state. So I think it's really good to consider that that's a huge benefit of learning in an environment that's meeting your needs. Not everybody has the perfect environment immediately. We don't necessarily know what works for us immediately, but we have the capacity, the space, the time, the ability to explore what that is, find what that is. And a bit like Pav was saying, you know, about finding what are the things that spark your interest? What are the things that you like to learn about? What are the ways that you like to learn? What do I need to shift in our environment here? Or what sort of sensory space do we need? I think the benefit is that we're working with brains that are less stressed, and I think that, that is in itself is a really big positive for why this should be something we come at earlier rather than as a last resort. So I guess that's why I would say it would be a good a good choice as early as we can, rather than expending all that time and energy trying to fit into a system that doesn't fit us. Trying to fit the mold or do what everybody else does. It would be great if there were things that worked, but we see time and time again from families that end up coming to us in burnout and end up reaching out for supports. We see it that even the best intentions are still not meeting the needs of a lot of these kids.

Leisa Reichelt: 8:34

Heidi, by the time I pulled my son outta school and brought him to do home education, really the thing that motivated me to do that was that I realized he was starting to be completely turned off the idea of learning at all. Like all of his associations with learning were just so negative, right? And so I'm like, if I keep this kid at school, he's gonna stop wanting to learn full stop. Right?

Pavlina: 9:00

Mm-hmm.

Leisa Reichelt: 9:00

what, what worst way to set yourself up for life than to kill your love of learning when you are 14, right? Like, that

Pavlina: 9:08

Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 9:09

And so, yeah, a big part for me was like, bring him home, get him out of the school environment so that I can reactivate his love of learning again, which just, you know, it's ridiculous thing to have to do, isn't it? To pull them out of school, to make them love to learn.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 9:25

I can relate to that as an adult learner, right? So I'm really fascinated in lots of things and I'm really interested in learning about lots of things. But doing a uni course on something, removes the joy. When I have to analyze it in a really specific way, based on one particular person's expectations about how I prove to them that I've learned that thing, it just removes the joy and it makes it a chore and makes it really unenjoyable, right? It's more painful than it needs to be. Even though the topic might be super interesting and super exciting, and I'm highly motivated. But if I was doing it with no pressure, no assessment, with no reason to, prove myself other than, Hey, I've learned this really cool stuff and I can share that with other people in the ways that work for me. I would be way more keen to learn more stuff at uni, but I don't wanna do the homework, I just want, be able to learn it at my pace in my own way. And I don't think that's necessarily a neurodivergent brain thing. I think it's a human experience that it would be much nicer to learn things in the way that work for us individually.

Leisa Reichelt: 10:32

I have a house full of folks with dysgraphia. They set out to engage with areas of education that they really, really enjoy. So that might be English literature, might be drama. One of them started a grad diploma in counseling. Loved it. But there comes a point where you have to write an essay to be assessed. None of them can do that. It just shuts the whole process down cold. It's so upsetting to see the lack of access that they have, to have that knowledge formally recognized. Because if you can't write an academic essay, your knowledge doesn't count. It makes me really furious.

Pavlina: 11:10

Well, while you were talking and Heidi was talking, I was thinking about motivation as well, because people a lot of the time say, oh, these children, they won't be motivated to do anything when you bring them home. They won't be motivated unless, you are there with a carrot or the stick saying, if you do this then I'll give you this, or, you've gotta do this or else I'm going to take this thing off you. Right. So people worry so much about motivation in kids instead of understanding like, okay, so Maslow who was around in the forties and fifties, he understood the hierarchy of needs that humans have. And he talks about motivation in terms of fulfilling different hierarchies of needs. So your most basic need is for air, right? Water, food. You've got your physiological needs of safety, shelter. If you can't meet those needs, then you cannot move up that hierarchy towards self-actualization. Unfortunately, school does not feel safe for so many of our children. It comes back to safety, it comes back to belonging. And if you don't feel those things, you cannot worry about a person's motivation to learn calculus. It's ridiculous to be talking about being motivated to learn those things when that person is not feeling safe. And what coming home means is that person can start to feel safe again. And when they're feeling safe, they're going to venture out themselves. Humans are by nature curious creatures. We love learning. We're wired to learn. You cannot stop human beings from learning. And what they learn is going to depend on their environment, their interests, and all those things. But if you can meet that safety, then motivation is actually not an issue. You know, I went to teacher school and they talked all the time about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and which one's better, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Extrinsic motivation's not needed when you have safety and you have autonomy, you don't need extrinsic motivation.

Leisa Reichelt: 13:21

In our podcast that we do here, we talk to people about their lived experience of School Can't with their family. And a lot of the time, the earliest clues come from daycare. they're trying to drop their kids off at daycare. It's not going well. There's a lot of separation anxiety. There are a lot of clues really early on that things with school are not going to be easy for these kids. And there are a lot of parents, I think these days who have got really young kids, you know, 5, 6, 7 years old, and they're like, this school thing is just not flying with my kid at all. How should parents with those really young kids thinking about home education and contemplating that as a decision. Particularly these are like kids who read and can't spell and can't add up. They haven't got that sort of basic numeracy and literacy that, you know, when you've got a burnt out teen, they at least have that from school most of the time. What's, the thought process and decision process, like for parents with really young kids who are hitting a bit of a wall with school?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 14:30

So I think one of the first things to consider is that there's not a window, you're not gonna miss a window. If you don't know how to spell your name by prep, because you're heading into a school environment and need to spell your name for prep, if you're home educating, if you are doing a different pathway that doesn't involve a classroom where you have to be. And you have to learn how to write your name so that you can differentiate your work from the person next to you. There will be another experience or reason or need for you to be able to know how to write your name and it will be meaningful for you at the time. And it might be signing your name on a birthday card, for someone that you love. Then they're curious, it's meaningful to them, and they can learn those skills with really minimal support. Kids ask for what they need. How do I spell Heidi, mum? How do I spell it? You start with an H. Okay, how do I do an H? Show me how to do an H, you know? And so we just naturally work through those things with our kids. That's not to say that teachers don't have skills, but teachers' skills are in teaching a bunch of 30 kids these skills all at once. You know, we all have an ability to teach our young people the things they need or to help them find the ways to learn the things they need. We can learn alongside them. We learn alongside our teenagers and young adults, or we send them in the right direction because I don't wanna do calculus and I don't know anything about that, but my kid might, and I can show them where to find what they need and who to ask for help when they need help, and how to find the supports that will actually build those skills for them. The first thing I would say is take away the worry that if we're not being taught by a teacher at school, then we need to be taught in the same way by a parent at home. We learn those things. They do happen. And a lot of it happens organically and authentically. We can teach, we absolutely can. There's so many resources available to us. And there's community to ask, Hey, what did you guys do when your kid was really wanting to do this? I'm having a lot of trouble finding an activity or a way to build that skill with my kid. What did you guys do? So, you know, coming back to asking our communities for support and building that shared environment where people are learning together and alongside each other and it's not competitive.

Leisa Reichelt: 16:46

On the motivation to learn thing, my youngest son was never really down for reading or spelling at all. We were living in London at the time, and I think he realized that the squiggles on the front of the bus told you where the bus was going. And he was very into public transport. And he's like, right, I need to know what the front of the bus says. And it was almost like within a week he'd learned to read. I didn't teach him how to read. It just like magically happened. All of a sudden he could just read. I don't know how he went from zero to a hundred on reading, but I do know it was completely because he was very motivated to know the destination of the buses.

Pavlina: 17:25

and it became relevant to him.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 17:27

For a lot of our younger kids, it's playing on Minecraft and they need to be able to read the chat, you know,'cause they're constantly saying'mum, can you read this for me? mum, can you read this for me?' And then they start to see the pattern of some of the things that are, you know, it's just immersion. Its immersion in language.

Pavlina: 17:43

And in whatever they're interested in, it could be, loving boats and, wanting to read the signs at the boat ramp. It could be loving cats and wanting to read books about cats, or wanting to be able to write your cat's name down. It could be any of those things that lead to, Hey, how do you spell, or how do you write? What does this say? What shape is this letter? It's building on those little skills and learning is not linear. This is the issue we also have for a lot of kids at school, especially neurodivergent kids. Learning is not linear. You do a bit over here and a bit over there, and then all of a sudden you're connecting dots that seemingly disparate things and you know, big aha moments. And then, long, slow periods where it looks like nothing's happening. And then these massive accelerations, It's stop and start. It's bits here and bits there. And then they all kind of meld into this thing. And because we are there for our kids so much of the time, we can help them draw those parallels. And so it's about exploring and asking questions and talking. A lot of learning is incidental learning and conversational learning and you know, there's a lot of resources on our website about that. And I would encourage people to explore those ideas because they are the foundations of learning for humans. Learning is social and that's why home ed works so well, because home ed is social,

Leisa Reichelt: 19:13

Its going to look very different to how we've been socialized to expect education to look like. There's not gonna be the sheets of paper writing A 50 times.

Pavlina: 19:23

Precisely.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 19:24

You can do that, but you'll also notice how quickly they get bored of that and

Pavlina: 19:28

Yep.

Leisa Reichelt: 19:29

that in my house. That would never happen.

Pavlina: 19:33

So true for so many PDA kids, right? Some kids might like it.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 19:36

And that's what we talk about different brains needing different things. And you might have three kids in the same family who all look for different ways of learning that language and learning how to read and might have completely different timelines and trajectories. And it's not necessarily about being behind or being ahead or anything like that. It's just about, this is your pathway, this is your development. This is where you are headed at that particular time. We had a great webinar the other day with Peter Gray about non-traditional ways of learning to read and write. So I really encourage anyone to have a listen to that because it does allay a lot of the fears and a lot of our concerns and our anxieties about this sort of stuff are fear-based because we have these outside expectations placed on us. And that's okay to acknowledge. Yeah, I am scared, I'm scared that my, my kid might get to 30 and not be able to fill out a form because they haven't learned how to hold their pen correctly or answer questions with the exact right, response. But they will learn these things when they're meaningful and relevant. Part of the beauty of home ed is that we are there with them. It's cooperative. We are engaged and engaging, doing stuff with them. We are not just at home going, here's your worksheets. Go do that over there. I'll see you at three o'clock kind of thing.

Leisa Reichelt: 20:56

By all accounts, There are plenty of kids, I think, who get all the way through high school without being able to fill in a form as well, right?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 21:02

Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 21:03

there's no guarantee

Pavlina: 21:04

Absolutely.

Leisa Reichelt: 21:04

to school brings you literacy.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 21:05

Oh. But we assume they can because that's what school's for. So we make an assumption, and this is one of the things about regulations in home ed. We make an assumption that a child in school is actually learning the things that are being presented to them. Our families know that a lot of the times they're not. What happened in COVID was really interesting for a lot of families because they had their kids at home and saw one-on-one what their kid wasn't learning or wasn't picking up from the teaching that was happening. I learned when I took my 14-year-old out of school, we learned then that she was dyslexic. That wasn't something that had come up throughout any of her schooling years. But when I was sitting with her and listening to the way she was doing things, I was like. this makes so much more sense. Now we acknowledge and work around that and have accommodations for that. She knows how her brain works best and we know how to make that work for her. The expectation that just because they're in a school classroom that they're learning all the things that are being presented is quite fallible, even though they're being ridiculously over tested and over assessed. And I think that takes away from actual teaching.

Leisa Reichelt: 22:09

Wow. my son's just about to

Pavlina: 22:10

Also,

Leisa Reichelt: 22:11

and

Pavlina: 22:12

yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 22:12

the same English teacher for the last three years. And because of me earlier this year we finally got him a dysgraphia diagnosis, like a really, he's like significantly impacted by written expression learning disability. He's 17, he's just about to do his last exams to finish school. He had a really significant mental health moment and actually it was from talking to somebody on this podcast, I was able to put two and two together and go, I think maybe he has dysgraphia,

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 22:44

Yeah,

Leisa Reichelt: 22:44

He's an engaged, very interested English student the whole way through. How did he get that far?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 22:49

Well there's also a lot of additional coping mechanisms, so there's a lot of getting by and a lot of ways of coping and pushing through.

Leisa Reichelt: 22:56

And blaming. They just assumed that their answer to him was, you have to try harder.

Pavlina: 23:00

And we say this to children all the time, and they're putting in maximum effort. It's not won't, it's can't. And if they can't do it, why? Why can't they do it? Is there a blocker in their path? Is it completely uninteresting? I mean, that's a blocker, like I'm not motivated to do so many things like fill in Centrelink forms, for example. I have to do them. Someone's got the carrot or the stick for me to fill in forms. But you know, what is stopping our kids engaging with something? Are they just not ready for it? Because developmental readiness, being actually ready for something is a big factor. You know, like I have a kid who's hyperlexic and learned to read at three, and I've got another kid who's dyslexic and wasn't reading independently until 12, but, come 16, 18, you can't tell the difference. You can't tell which one's which because they've both had what they need to become functional readers and engage with texts. One is more comfortable with texts than the other, and that's fine. The one who's dyslexic engages with texts in a very different way, but still gets what they need out of it. So, it's about adaptation and adapting our views of what the expectations should be..

Leisa Reichelt: 24:31

My son who's at home homeschooling at the moment, I think his primary educator right now is YouTube, which at first I found very concerning. But the longer it goes on the more I applaud all the YouTubers who are putting all that effort into educating my son. Because by golly, they put together some engaging, engaging content.

Pavlina: 24:54

Yep.

Leisa Reichelt: 24:54

Driving with my son the other day and he's like, I'm gonna give you a quiz on space Mum. Fantastic. Nothing. I love more than a quiz on space. And he's going, okay, so what would happen if the sun disappeared? we got into this big conversation around, the speed of light. And you know how the magnetic pull operates at the same rate as the speed of light. All the, all of this, all of this stuff. So much of it, right. And I'm like, he finds this really interesting because it's all framed around the cataclysm. It's, it's like a space cataclysm and like that is engaging stuff, right? Whereas you can imagine in class, a science teacher up the front going, right class today we gonna learn about gravitational force, you know, like go to sleep.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 25:36

That might work at a certain time, right? But if he's not interested, then he's not engaging with that. Then at school, but also on YouTube. if that wasn't something that grabbed his interest, he would just scroll past, right? So it is of interest to him at that time. Therefore it's hitting him at the right spot. Often it's a bit short form and it's almost a taster, right? Like oh, great, I learned this stuff, and hey, I might have to learn more about that other thing you said about gravitational pull. I'm interested in that now. So, you know, I learned so much I know how to change my tap washers I've fixed my car headlight on my own and saved myself hundreds of dollars and I've fixed my dryer. You know, I look up YouTube. We do learn on YouTube. Why is that not okay for our kids too? This is what I do,

Leisa Reichelt: 26:16

And the algorithm is amazing, right? He watches a lot of stuff about science. It just gives him more and more science stuff, which feeds that interest even more. Nice.

Pavlina: 26:23

YouTubers by definition have to be interesting, right? Because if they're not, people aren't gonna subscribe to their channel. They often present things in ways that are really memorable to people So that content becomes fascinating and they wanna know more about it. That's when they start doing those deep dives, and that's when they really start expanding their knowledge and understanding. that's when they also start doing critical thinking because, you know, they've watched 10 videos on the gravitational pull, and then all of a sudden there's one that says something completely different. And so all of a sudden they're like, huh, I wonder if that is correct, Or is that one correct? You know, and how do I find out? That's when you really start getting development of metacognitive skills, because that's when they start exploring what it means to think critically.

Leisa Reichelt: 27:17

I feel like my biggest job is to try to support him in developing media literacy.

Pavlina: 27:22

exactly.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 27:23

my teenager still or young adult now still comes to me and says, Hey, I learned this thing on TikTok. And I say, oh yeah, on TikTok, right?

Pavlina: 27:31

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 27:33

It's just like, should we fact check that? could we find more information about it? that sounds really interesting, and I'll add some information and knowledge that I have to that conversation. This is the part about being there and being present because if they were just consuming on their own, its harder to develop that critical thinking and those metacognitive skills.

Leisa Reichelt: 27:53

The thing that I had to really get my head around is that YouTube is like an amazing place for kids to, to teach themself what they're interested in. Going back to those folk who have got the young kids who are starting out on this journey, I think, you know, we want to reassure folks that even though their kids are preliterate and prenumerate in a lot of cases, the fact that they don't have an educational background, that they haven't taught somebody how to read or write,

Pavlina: 28:19

Yep.

Leisa Reichelt: 28:19

or add up in the past, doesn't mean that they won't do a great job of supporting their child that journey

Pavlina: 28:26

Yes.

Leisa Reichelt: 28:27

They won't be negatively impacting their child's learning and life opportunities because they're not sending them into a classroom with an educator.

Pavlina: 28:36

And I think too, you know, we see a lot of parents who perhaps have left school early themselves, lack confidence in their abilities and feel like they are not capable of doing these things because they feel like, well, I couldn't stay at school and I couldn't stay that course, and therefore how am I going to help my child, you know, stay the course with their education. But home ed looks very different to school. It's a very different learning paradigm. And also, we're not teachers. We don't have to be the sage on the stage. We don't have to know all the things. We just have to facilitate their education. We just help them figure out where to find information, resources, mentors, whatever it is that kid is seeking next. And kids will ask for things when they are ready for them. They will ask you to name items, when they're little, starting to explore and see the world outside and they're asking questions about the outside world. That's exactly how home ed continues to work. You know, it just becomes more abstract as they get older. It's more abstract rather than concrete information, and we are perfectly capable of facilitating that because, nobody has their interests at heart better than us. No one cares about that kid more than we do. Nobody's more invested in that child's education. And we do it naturally as parents, you know, we just gotta tap back into that intuition that we've put aside because a lot of the time we've been told that we are not doing the right thing as parents, and have to ignore our instincts. We've just gotta tap back into those and figure out what does that kid need and listen to what that child needs and just help facilitate and provide that.

Leisa Reichelt: 30:23

Heidi, I want you to tell us a little bit about how the experience differs when you've got a teenager who is burning out, not coping. And so you're pulling them into home ed because you've got no other option. What's the home ed onboarding experience typically like then what can parents expect? When do we start to panic? How does that typically play out?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 30:48

So, when do you actually start to panic or when should you start to panic? Because you will start to panic immediately. That's a guarantee, right? You'll panic, you'll worry, you'll think, what am I doing? Have I ruined their opportunities in life? These are all really normal thoughts because what we're doing is stepping away from a majority or a mainstream way of educating. And although it's just as valid, it's not what everybody else is doing. So it's natural to feel fear, anxiety, concern about taking those big leaps. But ultimately, our kids' mental health comes first. Right? From experience, kids whose mental health is significantly impacted at school will take time. Even when that's been removed, they will take time to return to a place of stasis, a place of, calm and regulated. It's not something that happens overnight and often, people are scared when I say that it can take years, it actually can take years. But we have to be realistic because there's no point in me saying they'll be great in three months and then you'll be so thankful that you did it and everything's gonna be fine. Because if that's the expectation, then when that doesn't happen, we do the big panic and we push them back into other places. We push them back into school and we put pressures on them to do things and get up and move and do all the stuff that they might not be ready for yet. I understand the concern and I understand the worry that my kids' in their room, all they're doing is gaming. They haven't seen sunlight in months. It's actually really scary as a parent to think that that's your future. We project, we catastrophize, We are looking far too far ahead when what we need to do is sit in the here and now and go, they're safe and they know that I'm trying to keep them safe. And they weren't safe where they were, or we wouldn't be in this place right now. There's been some significant worries about where they were and where they mentally were often for lots of our kids, and I think if they had a physical illness or something that was really obvious to everybody around them that this kid was that sick and needed that level of support and care, everyone would drop everything and be involved and support. What happens when our kids come out of school in that mental state of unwell is that it's only us. We don't actually get a lot of that community support other than reaching out and finding people who have been there or who understand on a deep, deep level what that means for you and your kid. So acknowledging that this is a stage that this will pass, but that even when it's hard and even when they seem to, sometimes what happens is they've been holding it together for so long, so when they come home and there's no pressure and everything's taken away, they might seem even more unwell and not okay with the world. And they might be more angry at you. They might be mad upset and scared about what the future is. So, our role there is lots of reassurance. Reassurance that you're okay. It's gonna be okay. This isn't forever. I know that this feels crap. It feels crap for me. It feels crap for you. It's, how it's gonna feel until it doesn't. But we are here to build that and make that better. And we're changing the expectations so that you won't have to feel that crap again. that's our role here, you know? And learning, learning can go on the back burner. Remember what I said at the beginning, safety, right. If your brain's not safe, you're not learning anyway. They're gonna learn when they need to learn, even if they miss two whole years just trying to recover. What they're doing in that time is also learning about themselves, about how their brain works, how their body works, what things they need, what kind of recovery they need from things. what things build them up, what things crash them back down again. You know, what are the things that support them? What people work best for them. You know, there's so much self-learning that happens in that time, even when it looks like they're just vegetating. But that's so important. That's so much more important for the adults and the humans that they're going to grow up to be than, you know, year 11 or 12 maths, which they can learn later. My kids did have that struggle about, well, everybody else is doing that at school, and I'm not keeping up. I'm not keeping up and therefore, you know, I'm a failure. And so, we're working with rebuilding over time. That self-doubt and that self-image and that self understanding. We are talking home education, but we are talking human education. Right. I think that's a bigger picture.

Leisa Reichelt: 35:31

I think what you mentioned about comparing, mental wellbeing to physical wellbeing. A lot of people when they are making this decision to bring their kids home from school. Those kids' lives are, I think, often meaningfully in danger.

Pavlina: 35:48

We speak to hundreds of people who are in that situation. Hundreds. You know, it's not just a person here or there. It's hundreds of people who are in the same situation. And it's not something that we're even talking about. And when we talk about School Can't in the media, it's like that doesn't exist. It's that whole cohort of kids who are struggling so deeply. If they could only just lift themselves up by their bootstraps and get their heinies to school, everything would be fine. And we keep forgetting if they could, they would. Right. And we keep forgetting that if they don't have their mental health, what have they got?

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 36:31

The media portrays it as, these kids don't wanna be at school.

Pavlina: 36:34

Yep.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 36:34

That's right. They don't. But it's because there's an issue with the mismatch of these kids and the schools. I think it's brave for people to take these alternate pathways because for every one person that takes a kid out of school and tries to do things that work well for them and their family, there's bound to be several of their family members and friendship circles who are questioning them and who are saying, oh, I don't know that that's a great choice. Or, are you qualified to do that?

Pavlina: 37:05

Heidi was talking before, you know, if you had a kid with cancer, everyone would be around you supporting you. Unfortunately, for a lot of parents who choose to home educate their kid, when that kid's in a mental health crisis, the opposite is true. They get blamed, told they're doing the wrong thing, unsupported. The very professionals who are supposed to be supporting them are often the ones questioning it saying, you're just not trying hard enough. Have you tried taking things away? Yeah, you are too soft. You know, you're not putting your foot down enough. Those sorts of messages are really damaging, and they're really, really hard for a parent who's just trying to support that child in the way that child needs. We keep taking the focus away from being child centered and thinking about the individual child and what does that child need right now. We make it society centered. We make it curriculum centered. We make it professional centered. We make it court centered. We make it adult centered. You know, what do the adults need? They want this problem just to go away and this problem isn't going away because we're not meeting the needs of an individual human being.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:15

A lot of individual human beings.

Pavlina: 38:17

Yes.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:17

Tens of thousands of individual human beings.

Pavlina: 38:20

Yes. Yeah. There was a figure quoted today on the radio, something like 1.3 or 1.6 million kids in Australia is the estimate that are affected by School Can't.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:31

Wow. That's intense.

Pavlina: 38:32

that's a massive figure. That's kids who are struggling to go to school.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:36

Might this not be a parenting problem and actually be something more systemic?

Pavlina: 38:40

These guys are the canaries in the coal mine.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:42

Yeah,

Pavlina: 38:43

And at the end of the day, that's what our neurodivergent kids are. Canaries in the coal mine.

Leisa Reichelt: 38:48

On that note, it is a challenging journey. There are lots of anxious, panicky moments along the way. It can feel very lonely and isolating. Thank goodness we have the Home Education Network to help us. Can you give us a quick rundown, on what is Home Education Network? Why do people need to know about it? Tell us a little bit about the support that's available.

Pavlina: 39:09

Well, we're a completely volunteer run, not-for-profit organization. We're entirely non-commercial, so we have no vested interest in anything. We don't gain any money from suggesting or recommending things. So you can trust that we are completely unbiased. We are a peer support organization. We have lots of publications and information for free on our website, but we've also got more information available for our members. Membership's$25 a year, for a whole family. And that gives access to all sorts of webinars from experts that we've recorded. It gives, publications, we've got a magazine that comes out. We've got a monthly support group for parents of neurodivergent kids and kids with disabilities. We've also got a monthly workshop series for our members. We run camps, excursions, a lot of'em are online. We're now able to provide our members with access to really good online groups that are neurodivergent friendly.

Leisa Reichelt: 40:09

I would say, even if it's just for those once a month, Wednesday evening on the Zoom with the other parents who are,

Pavlina: 40:16

yeah.

Leisa Reichelt: 40:17

home education of neurodivergent kiddos I've dialed into that one a number of times myself. It's been such a huge support.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 40:26

There's a lot of information on the website for people new to home ed as well. So there's a lot of starting information'cause it can be quite overwhelming when you don't know where to look or when you're also being bombarded by providers wanting to sell you something. We've got information for people who don't know where to start.

Leisa Reichelt: 40:42

Super. Well, thank you. I do wanna mention the fact that we have not talked about anything logistical here at all. We haven't talked about the financial and work implications, the time implications. There's a whole logistical thing

Pavlina: 40:55

Yes,

Leisa Reichelt: 40:55

but we'll come back and talk about that again some more in the future. Thank you Heidi. Thank you, Pavlina. I really, really appreciate you spending the time with us.

Pavlina: 41:03

No trouble at all.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 41:05

Thank you.

Leisa Reichelt: 41:05

See you again soon..

Pavlina: 41:06

Thank you for having us.

Heidi Ryan (she/her): 41:07

Thanks.

Leisa Reichelt: 41:07

I loved that conversation with Pav and Heidi, and there were so many other topics that we could have dived into further, but hopefully you've taken some inspiration or some encouragement from what they've shared with us today. I put links to the Home Education Network website in the episode notes with all of the great resources that Pav and Heidi told us about, as well as links to School Can't Australia's website where you'll find lots more helpful information. If you found our podcast helpful, please do take a moment to subscribe or give us our rating or our review. This really makes a huge difference in helping us get the podcast in front of more people who have School Can't kids, and who haven't yet found the community and the information that we share. If you have some feedback for us or maybe a suggestion for a future topic or guest, or perhaps you've been inspired to share your own lived experience story, please drop me an email to schoolcantpodcast@gmail.com I would love to hear from you. If you are a parent or carer in Australia and you are feeling distressed, please remember you can always call the Parent Helpline in your state. A link with the number to call is in the episode notes. Sadly, on the 31st of October, which is mere days away, the Victorian government is shutting down their Parent Line, which is a very disappointing. I have put a link to sign the petition to protest this in the episode notes if you are inclined to do that as a last ditch effort. Thank you again for listening, and we will talk again soon. Take care.