#57 - What families taught us: insights from our first 50 episodes

We've just passed 50 episodes of The School Can't Experience — and many of those have been lived experience episodes: families coming on to tell us what School Can't has actually been like for them in real life.

In going back through all of those episodes to prepare this one, something became very clear. Different families, different states, different children, different journeys — but so many of the same themes appearing again and again

Episodes mentioned — listen to the full stories

• Ep 7 — Emma G's Lived Experience
• Ep 9 — Jennie's Lived Experience
• Ep 10 — Marissa's Lived Experience Pt 1
• Ep 11 — Marissa's Lived Experience Pt 2
• Ep 18 — Mark's Lived Experience
• Ep 23 — Eliza Fricker's Lived Experience
• Ep 24 — Jane's Lived Experience
• Ep 25 — Nicola's Lived Experience
• Ep 26 — Kate & Daniel's Lived Experience

Transcript

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 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. Now, today we have a special episode. We have not long passed 50 episodes of the School Can't Experience, and many of those have been lived experience episodes. Families coming on to tell us what School Can't has actually been like for them in real life. Parents, carers, and increasingly young people themselves. In going back through all those episodes, to prepare for this one, I noticed something that you have probably noticed if you are a regular listener as well. Which is different families, different states, different kids, different journeys, but so many of the same themes keep appearing. So this episode is about those patterns. It's about what that collective sharing of lived experience has taught us. Which is the real cost of School Can't, when the system gets it wrong. And what recovery looks like when it finally comes. Now, honestly going back through these recordings was a very moving experience because so many families have come on and reopened old wounds and they've done that because they wanna help the next family avoid what almost broke them. And that generosity is what this episode is honouring. And now I do need to include a content warning. In this episode, some of the clips do talk about suicidal thoughts and self-harm and some fairly distressing moments. We don't go into detail, but do listen with care. And if you're in a difficult place right now, please reach out for support. Possibly leave this one for another time. Links to support are always in our show notes. But let's get started and we'll start at the very beginning. So nearly every family who shared their story with us has said the same thing. When they look back knowing what they know today, the signs were there from early on. Sometimes it was from daycare or before. Sometimes it was the first week of kindy. Other times it was just years before what ultimately turned into School Can't. And nearly every family has also said they were told not to worry. It was fine. The child would settle. What they were seeing was normal. They were probably just a little bit anxious. Here's what it sounded like from a young person's perspective.

Leisa Reichelt 2:29

I wonder, Yani, where was the very beginning for you with school problems? School challenges?

Yani 2:36

I would almost say before school. Because I did, I went to daycare and I always hated that. And then I went from that to kinder and I hated that. And then I went up through all the other grades and I hated those too.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 2:51

So what made so many of these School Can't experiences harder to identify early was the gap between who the child was at school and who they were at home. So schools would report that the child was doing just fine. Everything was okay at school, and parents would start to doubt what they were seeing. Eliza Fricker, who many of you will know from her beautiful illustrations and her many books, including'Can't, Not Won't'. She described this pattern in her own daughter beautifully.

Eliza Fricker 3:20

And so there were those little early on things, but it wasn't until nursery school, where there was a separation, I suppose, of me and her where I really saw things in a different way because I had that input, suddenly on us or my parenting, where my child should be at, you know, and developing. And so that was the beginning because going to nursery school was incredibly distressing for her. Incredibly distressing. And I was told that she would, you know, learn to get on with it. It was just a big change and she would learn to cope with that. And she was probably about two and a half at the time. She didn't, even in nursery, it was very difficult for her. She stuck to one nursery teacher. They said she was very quiet, didn't really talk, and I would pick her up from nursery. It was on my road actually. It was just near to my house. But she would have these huge meltdowns, crying the whole way home and then crying, difficult to settle at home and then would just crash out. I had no comparison. I didn't have another child. It was my first and only child. So we carried on with that. And that carried on through to school. And again, it was, you know, she'll be fine or she is fine. So what, what happened was that I think that quietness in her when she was in school that sort of suppression really, that she learned very quickly to suppress that distress. She was always seen as a well-behaved child in school.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 5:02

For Marissa Taylor, a mum of five whose family experienced School Can't, kind of like a domino effect, one child after another. The pattern was the same. Her kids were social, they had friends. Teachers had nothing to report until suddenly everything just fell apart.

Marissa Taylor 5:20

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.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 6:01

And then there's the experience Nicola described in episode 25. Nicola's a mum of two teenagers and she comes from a really academic background, so has placed a lot of value in education, traditionally. Looking back now, she can see all the signs that were there, but at the time she told herself things that many of us will find very familiar.

Leisa Reichelt 6:23

So you mentioned that general kind of tiredness that maybe the Celiac disease could have explained, but then even with that diagnosis, that didn't go away, every day, all the time, they're just saying, I'm tired. I'm tired, I'm tired.

Nicola 6:37

Tired. My body hurts. know, they would sort of do things the minimum they could get away with or just try not to do it at all. And we're dealing with early teenagers here. They're known for being a little self-involved and a, you know, little self-centered, and maybe a little lazy, uh, as a quite old teenager that I am still on the inside, I would love to not do all the jobs that I have to do. And so you misread the signals. You are like, oh, well, you're telling me you're tired, but that's just an excuse and you should suck it up and clean your room. Um, so yeah, you, know, we go around and making these assumptions because we don't know that life could be any other way. And it's only since coming on this journey that I've discovered School Can't is even a thing

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 7:31

Suck it up. Try harder. They'll settle. It's just a phase. Year seven is hard for everyone. 50 episodes later, what I can tell you is this, if you are a parent who is looking at your child and thinking something is wrong, but the school is telling you they're fine. You are probably not misreading the situation. The child you see at home, after school, after they've been holding it together all day. That is the important information. Many, many experienced voices will urge you to pay attention to that now. Don't wait. And if you're an educator listening to this, that young person who is quiet, cooperative and well behaved in your classroom, they might be experiencing something really different when they leave to go home. Being fine at school is not the full picture and it's often not even the most important part of the picture. So the thing that comes across most consistently across all 18 lived experience episodes, and I mean all of them, is that at some point in their journey, families were given professional advice that made things worse. And it's not because professionals were malicious or incompetent, it's just because the advice was wrong for that child. And the most common piece of advice was some version of make home less comfortable. Take away screens, take away the things your child loves, make staying at home less appealing than school. On the surface, it has a kind of logic to it, but it can be so damaging. Diana's family followed this advice. She was a full-time working mum whose son James had been struggling with school since year seven. The professional advice they were given was to make home less comfortable, be more disciplined, more strict. What happened next is distressing to listen to and was extremely traumatic for Diana and her family.

Diana Keyes 9:31

And then that's when the school came in pretty heavy handed with a behavioural program. They would check in every single day. What were we doing? What was he eating? What was his sleep routines like? And of course, at this point he was deep into gaming. And so getting him to bed was a nightmare.

Leisa Reichelt 9:52

But the assumption from the beginning was it was something you were doing at home that was causing the problem.

Diana Keyes 9:58

So it was all parental based. Your parenting style, you are not enough discipline and that's what it was absolutely all about. You are not disciplining him. You are not controlling, you know, you are not doing the right things as parents. yeah, very much. So then we, trying to do the right thing, and because we had had an experience with our daughter where she was sort of, again, I would say School Can't, but we thought it was truancy. And then you do, you start to think, well, this is my second child. It has to be me. We have to be doing something wrong. And look, I was never a, you must sit there until you finish your dinner type parent. Because I always thought, the child knew when they were full. So I suppose you would say I was a fairly relaxed parent, and so then there's all this self doubt. We got to the point where, and at this point we, we had probably started to find psychologists to help. This is where the whole, you need to make home really uncomfortable for them came in. And so we tried to make home really uncomfortable. We said to James, if you don't go to school, you have to leave the house for the day. You can't be in the house. You can't have the comfort of the house.

Leisa Reichelt 11:16

And the school and the psychologists were okay with that.

Diana Keyes 11:19

I don't think they really knew, if I'm honest, because this is the whole thing, when they go make the home really uncomfortable, it's like, what do you mean by that? And they don't really know what they mean. Well, do you just offer what? not, nothing to eat, but I suppose you make them their school lunch and you put that out and there's nothing else. How do you control that when your two parents who are working and out of the house? Well, I suppose you get to the point where you switch the modem off and you carry it to work with you. Highly impractical. But these are all the things you're forced into. And then, you know, many of us have also experienced some of the violence that comes with that. When, with boys, I'm taking the modem and switching it off and taking it to bed with me. Then parents end up having to call the police because there can be violence as a result. I feel like when professionals say make the home uncomfortable, they don't know what they're saying. And, and, and look, maybe there are examples of some people saying, yes, I did do that and it worked But we, I feel like, took it to the extreme and we then ended up with James basically making a suicide threat because he felt so cornered by us that he, he felt like he had no way out. And I think we feel very ashamed about that and very, yeah, that was really, really hard. And we ended up at the local hospital in the emergency ward. Course. They're totally overwhelmed. Well, you know. And is he going to go into the mental health facility with all the, the time, very, very unwell people. And I just remember sitting there with James and I just said, let's just get the heck outta here. And we just discharged him and got home and I just thought, I'm going to drive my son to a suicide attempt. And needless to say, my husband and I were not coping at all, and we see that all the time on the School Can't Facebook page, people are like literally, literally at the end of their tethers because you're trying to satisfy the school, and keep up with society, I suppose.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 13:46

Education based trauma is real. Diana says that in her closing advice, and I think it's worth repeating. The harm that was done to James and to Diana and her husband in following that advice and positioning the problem as parenting rather than the school system and the environment, that was real and lasting. Marissa Taylor described a similar moment. Her child had gone mute overnight, completely shut down, and the school's response was to threaten fines and a court order.

Marissa Taylor 14:18

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 (Host) 15:07

Marissa ended up on the floor crying with her child that morning and apologising to them. She applied for home education that day. She had no idea what that path looked like. She just knew they could not keep going as they were. Rachel, who is an occupational therapist and a School Can't mum described being told to allow the school to physically manage her son's distress at drop off. As a mother and a professional that didn't feel right, but she also felt a pressure to defer to the experts, to the professionals who apparently knew how to handle this situation.

Rachel 15:44

That kind of became more obvious once he was in school and the demands were much higher. Need to separate and the need to kind of be more independent, and follow directions of other adults without too much support. Yeah, so I guess it became obvious, uh, initially that he was having difficulties with that. The school kind of took a very hard line around it and just sort of saw it as a typical, well, we just need to pull him off. Um, the child needs to be pulled off the parent, and then once they calm down, they'll move on and it'll be okay. For my child, we've known that before, that that doesn't really work. It would usually escalate the distress and cause aggression. So we've kind of had meetings with the school before they transitioned'cause they already struggled at the kinder transition points. And yeah, talked about that. But unfortunately it didn't really get handed through or followed through on. So we had points in time where, you know, my child bit a teacher because they restrained him and told me to leave in the morning and I had to go to work as well. So it was sort of this big and I didn't know what to do and felt like, you know, I should listen to them. And so, yeah. So we went through that and then that required us providing a lot more intensive support for the next two and a half nearly years of attempting to be at school.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 17:02

I wanna make sure we're really clear here because I know some people who are listening to this will be educators and health professionals. The families in these clips in all of our podcasts are not failed by bad people. They're failed at least in part by systems and frameworks that position School Can't as primarily a behaviour problem or a parenting problem or an anxiety problem that has to be exposed away. Now, the cost of getting this wrong is enormous and it's the families that pay this cost. What they are asking for. What I think all of us are asking is that professionals who work with our families understand that the advice that they give us has consequences that play out in living rooms, on bedroom floors, in school car parks, and in hospital waiting rooms. I'd like us to spend a couple of minutes now on a topic that doesn't come up nearly enough in the professional literature around School Can't, if it comes up at all. But it comes up in just about every single lived experience conversation we've had. This is the cost to the wider family, not just the child, the whole family, and particularly to mum. Every family who has shared their story with us has described giving something up. A career, a sense of professional identity, financial security, friendships, health. Sometimes all of these things. Remember Nicola, the chief of staff we talked to earlier? She described this experience vividly.

Nicola 18:37

So I was a chief of staff, for an Australian email company. We had, 50, 60 employees across the States and India and Australia.

Leisa Reichelt 18:47

That sounds very demanding. Yeah.

Nicola 18:49

I just couldn't, couldn't manage the stress of the kids at home and the demands of the job simultaneously. And so something had to give.

Leisa Reichelt 18:59

Well, Can you give us a bit of a sense of what a day in the life was like back in this peak time when you were working full time in this big job and you had all the stuff going on at home as well. What was that like?

Nicola 19:12

There was a lot of guilt. It was post pandemic, so we were supposed to be in the office, not full time, but semi-regularly. I didn't feel like I had the energy to do that or the, the sort of social capacity. There were times where I got on the train and got halfway in and then got off the train and went back home again because it seemed too much to fit it in. I was still juggling my work stuff, but I was taking these breaks all the time because I had to, you know, ferry a child to an appointment or go and check on them and make sure they were okay or get on the phone to research things or make appointments or talk to the school. Half of my brain at all times was sitting there going, what are we gonna do next? So I think I've researched every school in Victoria where I live, looked at so many different external supports to see which one do I think might work for my child, researching home education. Where could I find a support group that my kid might go to, to form new friends. Talking to friends and family who would give me well-meaning, but unhelpful tips. There was housework and making dinner. My husband was working at the same time too. And, and so there was a lot of juggle. And then a lot of, you know, I had plenty of mental health things, so I had appointments to go to. And just, not enough sleep. My whole body was like physically vibrating from time to time just'cause of the degree of stress. And I thought, this is, this has got to change. So I actually resigned from my job. I couldn't do that job part-time. So I thought, I need a, a total break and let's, let's try and get the family back on track. And now, three years later or whatever it is, I'm working one day a week. And that's, I think, the most that I can manage. And that's having come to terms and be at peace with my eldest not doing any kind of formal schooling.

Leisa Reichelt 21:07

How has that been for you, giving up that career and leaning into this new lifestyle?

Nicola 21:14

It has been years of grief and like it's not. It's not one big lump of grief, it's about 60 lumps of grief. The first one is, why is this even happening? My kids are really unhappy and I'm really unhappy, and this is not the life that I wanted for me and them, and and so something has to change. The life that I thought we would have is not what we're gonna have. Then I would fasten on the next plan of whatever it might be, whether that was, you know, we are gonna try a different therapist, or we're gonna try a different school, changing the hours or we're gonna try not having to wear school uniform. And every time, I was like, yeah, okay, this is hopefully gonna work. And then it didn't, then I have to go back to the drawing board and try this again. And so it went from, okay, well maybe we're doing VCE Unscored. Okay, well maybe we are VCE Unscored part-time. Maybe gonna do VET, maybe we're gonna do this, that and the other. Maybe we're gonna do it online. What if we don't do any high school at all? Each one of these things, it got to the point where every time it happened, there'd be another bout of grief and loss and like, where I thought we were going versus where we ended up.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 22:34

60 lumps of grief. For those of you who are in the middle of it right now, and for those of us who have been through it, this could be one of the most accurate descriptions we've ever heard. And then there's Jane from episode 24 who had been working in marketing and advertising. She followed a pathway that will be familiar to many of us from a full-time career she really loved, to part-time work and ultimately not being able to work at all as she followed her son Johnny's journey through primary school Here, Jane describes when she decided she had to give up a job she loved.

Leisa Reichelt 23:06

What was that like for you? Were you a career orientated person?

Jane 23:10

Yeah. I was realistic when he got a diagnosis, I had become realistic that I couldn't work full time. There was a grieving process there because I was ambitious. I worked in marketing and advertising, and I was ambitious. And going from a full-time job to a part-time job, the types of jobs you go for are a lot lower. They really are less responsibility. So they do feel, it felt like a bit of a demotion, but I felt like that was the only option to support my son was to be working part-time so I could look after my own mental health because he does have extra needs. Working part-time was the only option. But yeah, giving up my job was heartbreaking. I worked for mental health charity ironically. It was an amazing, safe environment for me when I went throughout, through, throughout this whole process. I used to walk into work and I'd be about to fall apart. And one of the play therapists would come and go. Are you okay?

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 24:03

I also wanna acknowledge something that Mark Thompson, the first dad to come on the podcast raised, and that is the experience of fathers and carers in this space, which carries its own specific weight.

Mark 24:16

It's really hard because for me, the whole working 40 hours a week thing was such a big thing to let go of. All the societal pressures and expectations to do all the things, be strong, to, you know, all of that stuff was just, it, it weighed heavy on me. Even though in my own head, and I'm working in mental health and having my own stuff, I know more than anyone that's not the case. You don't have to, it's okay to speak and reach out. In those moments, I just couldn't do any of that.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 24:43

Shame. That word comes up again and again. The shame of not being able to get your child to school, the shame of not working, the shame of not being the parent you thought you'd be or having the life you thought you'd have. These are real costs that most professional frameworks don't account for, but they are real and they compound everything else. so if this is what your life looks like right now, I want you to know you are not alone. And that many of the people in these recordings who have been where you are, want you to know it won't stay like this. It will get better. So what did help and what does recovery actually look like when it comes? I wanna be honest about something I noticed going back through all of these recordings, recovery almost never looked like a formal program that worked. It almost never looked the way anybody planned. It looked really specific to each child, really personal, and it was often completely unexpected. It looked like ice skating. Emma's child, Ushi had been bedbound. She'd been misdiagnosed. She'd been through interventions that had made things worse, and then slowly, finally something shifted. Not because of a program, but because of ice skating.

Emma 25:59

You know, she is managing to do so much. Like last year she was doing, team aerobics, which she really liked at school. That was the thing she managed to do. And she picked back up gymnastics. So she did gymnastics on a Friday and one hour of team aerobics. It was in school, so she was part of the school, she was part of the team, it's just like keeping them engaged with like the friendship side of things, but not, have to do the other stuff. This year she started ice skating, and she started studying Russian because she loves ice skating. So she's going to Victorian Languages School on Saturday morning to study Russian from nine til 12.20, which to me is an incredibly long time, but she comes out of it absolutely buzzing'cause relational safety. The teachers are really nice. She's passionate about the subject.That relational safety gives her energy,

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 26:49

Relational safety, teachers who are really nice and being passionate about a subject. Those are three conditions that made a real difference for Ushi. For Jenny's daughter, Bethany. It was horses. Bethany has a PDA profile, Pathological Demand Avoidance, which meant that even things she really wanted to do could feel like demands she couldn't meet. So Jenny leased a horse.

Jennie 27:14

I knew she loved horses and her best friend had horses. So I leased a horse. Now it was really baby steps. I was paying all this money for the horse and she'd go out maybe once a week for 10 minutes and just patted and brushed it. But over time she was eventually riding it. It was very slow. The thing I need to emphasize, that it's not a quick process. It is baby steps and sometimes steps backwards. She then started not going out to the horse, but I backed off and then before I knew it, she was asking to go out. But if I asked her, do you want to go out to the horse? It'd make her not want to go. She said, every time you asked me, I felt I couldn't go, even if I wanted.

Leisa Reichelt 28:03

There's that PDA profile, huh?

Jennie 28:05

She said, because you told me to, it felt like a task. That's her words. Even though she loved the horse, I made it into a task accidentally.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 28:16

Bethany said, every time you asked me, I felt like I couldn't go, even if I wanted to. Because you asked me to. It felt like a task. So this is the PDA experience in a nutshell, right? And it's one of the reasons why following their passion only works if you are genuinely following and not steering. And that is something that I have had to learn the hard way myself several times. Now, for Diana's son, James, recovery came in increments that were almost too small to see. A once a week grocery shop with dad, three suburbs away. Food delivery runs. And eventually distance education with the family scaffolding the learning experience together at home. And then years later, university

Diana Keyes 29:00

He got a low ATAR, as we knew he would get because the scaling with Distance Ed and the subjects he had chosen. Et cetera. But with his autism diagnosis, with Distance Ed, you get a few extra marks and he applied to a uni that's considered sort of in area. So with those concessions, and I just think because universities have discretion, he got into his course of choice for the first round offer. So think we are all killing ourselves trying to get our kids a ATAR of 75 or 80 or whatever. Well, I can say you can get to uni with an ATAR of a lot, lot, lot less than that.

Leisa Reichelt 29:44

That's very good to know.

Diana Keyes 29:45

yes, absolutely. Now where he is today, he is at face-to-face uni. Thankfully a lot of it can be done online. We said to him, just do two subjects per semester, and he got through last semester. It's not to say he finds it easy, but he has found it manageable.

Speaker 19 30:08

And for Simone and Yani, one of our most listened to episodes. Recovery looked like a very memorable day at the beach. No agenda, no pressure, just Simone deciding one morning at the school gate, that enough was enough.

Simone 30:23

suppose one day we have to talk about is the memorable day where we wagged the day together.

Leisa Reichelt 30:30

This is Beach Day, yeah?

Yani 30:31

Mm-hmm.

Simone 30:32

Yeah.

Leisa Reichelt 30:32

Tell us about Beach Day.

Yani 30:34

so I got dressed, got in the car, we drove to school, got to the gate, I was like, I'm not getting in. I'm not going in there, mum, I'm not going. And I don't remember what you did. I only remember the part where you were like, oh, I'm not doing this again. I don't care. Let's just go, Let's just go to the beach. And I was huh, well And, and I was like, okay, let's go. And I really like that about my mum. quite spontaneous sometimes, and especially when I was a kid. And we had a lot going on. Sometimes you would just come up with something really fun to do sort of make up for it. And sometimes I couldn't predict what you were gonna do. Like I had no idea.

Simone 31:22

I don't think it was to make up for it. It was more to let go of trying to make things different,

Leisa Reichelt 31:29

What's your version of Beach Day, Simone?

Simone 31:32

My version of Beach Day, it was, it was sort of like, um, stuff it, we're not doing it like this, this actually really doesn't matter. It actually doesn't matter. And who gives a stuff if we don't do what we are meant to. Um, we're just gonna totally, drop it and do what we need to do.

Yani 31:55

I think my favorite part was seeing my mum as somebody who was fun and not just somebody who made me do things that I really, really, really didn't wanna do.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 32:06

Trust, comes before learning. Relationship, before curriculum. A moment of genuine connection. One person who really gets them. This is the precondition for everything else. Wendy, a high school teacher who is also a foster parent to her son, Jax spent years trying everything. Every professional intervention, every accommodation, and then she found a small specialist school that really saw him.

Wendy 32:35

A year ago, I would never have said we were here, but we are here. And I know there are parents who would laugh at that now. I would've laughed. I would've hated me now. Good for you. With things happening. I don't care about the awards. Please don't, please don't think that that is something that really got me impressed. The thing that I cared about is that he's seen, and that he's acknowledged and that his struggle has not been discounted. I hope that for everybody in that experience.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 33:05

He's seen, Jax feels seen. That's the crucial thing. Now for professionals who are listening, this is what families are asking for. Not a perfect system, not unlimited resources, not the absence of difficulty. Just for their child to be truly seen and understood. For somebody in that building to really know who they are and accept that, and to care. I always close out our lived experience episodes by asking the same question. What would you wanna say to someone who is on their own School Can't journey right now? After 50 episodes here is what our families want you to know.

Leisa Reichelt 33:46

For everyone who's listening, who's on whatever part of the School Can't journey that they're on right now, what would you like to say to them? What would you like them to know?

Marissa Taylor 33:55

Understand regulation. In our community, we are highly stressed. it's not just our kids that are going through it. We are going through it too. And we can't do our best thinking, we can't do our best decision making when we are emotionally hijacked ourselves and living from our own fight flight response. If I reflect back on my own journey, it wasn't until I made the decisions to get us to a place of regulation where we could just have that moment to breathe, get supports in place, and really start to figure things out, that's when the path became much clearer for us. Before then, I was just fumbling my way through trying to figure out what what we needed. But once you have that moment of time and space where you can really calm your nervous system, start thinking rationally about things. Really start planning out how is my life gonna look realistically if I go down this path, or if I do this? You can start to logically put things in place and explore all your options rather than just putting up a wall going, no, this is too hard and I can't do it. Find your space of regulation, find what's gonna ground you as a human being, so you can make the decisions you need to make for yourself and for your family.

Kate 35:10

I would say I believe you. I believe what you're saying. You're not broken, and your children aren't broken. a lot of our children are neurodivergent and the system doesn't know how to engage with us and our families. Even though systems and people in those systems make you feel that you're crazy or too sensitive or too soft on your kids none of that is true.

Leisa Reichelt 35:42

Jennie. if you could go back in time and tell yourself something, when would you go back to you say?

Jennie 35:48

I would go back to year five and six in primary school because that's when the social issues started and I thought it was just puberty. No, there were problems. Secondly, should have looked back and looked at everything. I was scaffolding. She couldn't remember to bring anything to school unless I packed her bag for her. She wouldn't have known to do homework, nothing. And even then, I still got phone calls from the school saying she didn't bring her hat. She can't play in a playground. And yet I handed the hat to her, which is the ADHD, like she was so unorganized at home and wouldn't follow multi-step instructions. And I scaffolded by giving one two steps, but didn't have a conscious thought about that at all. But now I can see what it was. And the other thing is, and the most important thing is have a introspective approach. Have a look at yourself, your own ideas, your own expectations and have a good think. Am I pushing my own agenda onto my daughter? Am I wanting her to do this, this, and this? That's my goals, not hers. That's a big one.

Leisa Reichelt 37:19

It's a hard one to step away from though, isn't it?

Jennie 37:21

and also to realize that success isn't going to uni and having lots of money. Success is getting by within your means happily and with your mental health intact.

Diana Keyes 37:37

I would like to acknowledge how tough the journey is and how isolating it is. And yeah, It's like nothing else I've ever experienced. It is a very tough journey. I would also like to say that education based trauma is real, and so I think sometimes when our kids don't go to school, it's for their own preservation that they're, they're trying to, they're trying to protect themselves. And I think there is an art in knowing when to go enough is enough And I'm going to do homeschooling. You know what's enough for you and your child and nobody else knows that.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 38:25

And the last word of course, should go to one of our young people. This is Yani, who is 18 now, and studying at TAFE and doing really well. Yani has a message for the young people who might be listening and for the adults around them.

Yani 38:38

I think the main thing that I would want to tell an adult around that child would be that the child isn't trying to be an inconvenience or make life harder for the adults around them. School is just not an easy thing for a kid. That kid may not do things in the same way that other kids will end up doing them. And I think that is, that's fine. Sometimes you just have to accept that and that, um, you'll sort of just have to find your own way of doing it.

Leisa Reichelt (Host) 39:17

I would like to close by thanking every single family who has shared their story with us on this podcast so far, and everyone who will share it in the future as well. This episode was built entirely from your generosity. You came on and you opened up old wounds and you told the truth about what it has cost, what has helped, and what you wish you'd known. This is a gift to every family who finds this podcast when they need it the most. If there is one thing you take from today, I hope it's this, these families got through it. Not because they found the perfect system or the perfect professional, and often with a life, a very different shape to what they had first expected. They got through because they kept going. And they focused on that connection and they focused on mental health and they let go of what wasn't working. And they followed their kids and young people and what they needed. And you can do that too. Links to all the episodes we've referenced today are in the show notes. And if you know someone who needs to hear this episode, please share it. If you're a parent or carer in Australia and you're feeling distressed, please remember, you can always call the Parent Helpline in your state or call Lifeline on 13 11 14. Please don't hesitate to reach out for extra support. Thanks again for listening. Here's to our next 50 episodes and we will talk again soon. Take care.