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Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Pause, Purpose, Play podcast with me, your host, Michaela Thomas, your expert on all things ADHD, compassion, and perfectionism. And today, I wanna talk about something that I don't think we discuss enough because it is laden with shame, and that is what happens when your child is excluded from childcare.
So if they're no longer able to go to after-school club, breakfast club, holiday club, wraparound care, child minders. It may be that the setting simply says, "We can't meet your child's needs," and that can be really, really difficult. So I wanted to talk about that today. And even if your child doesn't have behavioral problems to the level where s- a school has said this to you, I think it's a good one to listen to because it still links to the shame we feel around our child's difference.
if you have a neurodivergent child that is struggling or you feel like you constantly have to advocate for them and fight for their needs to be met, then this episode is still really, really important to you Because you might have had those conversations, you might have had that sort of lump in your stomach where you think, "Oh my goodness, I'm gonna be told off," or, "My child is being told off."
And you might feel your whole nervous system rallying because it feels like you're ramping up for fight or flight. You know, do I need to push back? Do I need to advocate? Or do you just wanna sink through the ground and disappear and think, "Oh my God, I'm mortified. Can't believe my kid did this."whatever it is, I think it's important to discuss it because on the surface it's about childcare, and that is crucial in, in more ways than one, and we'll get to that.
But underneath that, it's also about shame. It's obviously a practical problem because suddenly you lose the support. a lot of us parent in isolation, maybe don't feel like we can trust, family members or friends to have our children. Maybe their needs cannot be met there, or they have exhausted those options too, or maybe you live far away from your, loved ones who could have supported you otherwise.
So maybe you actually really need the paid support or the organized support as part of school, support that you might have been relying on to be able to do your job. You might have been relying it to rest, to get respite, to recover, to care for the other children, or to simply survive, to go for a walk without someone interrupting you.
It might be that the childcare setting fills a lot of different needs for you. I, I personally feel like my workday has to fit everything, like including going to the gym, going for a walk, doing some errands, doing my actual job, like doing this, recording this episode. and I couldn't do that if my child wasn't in school, or my children weren't in school So the emotional impact on you is far deeper than just a practical one of how do I go to work?
How do I work when, if I, my child can't do wraparound care? And we talked about that in the
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previous episode as well, a little bit about how difficult it is to need that support and why we feel bad for relying on support or needing that support. So I think that the key word being respite, that in order to do this important work that we do of meeting our children's emotional needs, we need that respite.
We need our bodies to go once in a while where you just get to settle. Because I've seen this happen, with clients of mine where they have said, "I have nowhere to go. I have-- my child has been through five different schools," or, "I've tried private school, I've tried public school, I've tried, grammar schools.
I've tried all the different options, and what am I doing wrong?" Right? That immediate question that can come in as a mind gremlin. What am I doing wrong in order for my child to not be accepted in school? So that can be self-blame and self-criticism, and sometimes it can be, "Why can't my child cope with this?
What is wrong with them?" And then you feel guilty or, or ashamed for having that thought or that question. What is wrong with them? Why can't they just do this? And that is then obviously feeling really, bad about the fact that you're directing any blame or shame outwards to- towards your child. So this is really multifaceted, right?
There's so many levels to this, Because you can also direct some of that fight or flight outwardly towards the school setting. You know, how very dare they exclude my child without meeting their needs? You know, how is that neuroaffirmative? How is that neuroinclusive? And, you know, what, what does that mean?
What happens now? So we can have questions like, "Why does everyone else's child seem to manage this, and why can't mine?" Or, "What does this say about me as a parent? Why can't I help them with this?" But also, most painfully maybe, like, "What happens now? What are my options? What do I do?" Because often the families who need that support the most are the very families who find support becoming harder and harder to access.
We all know how difficult it is to seek out, funded support because it involves forms, it involves making phone calls, invo- involves reaching out and actually saying, "I need help." It involves describing in a concise way what the problem is when you have a lot of shame around it. Maybe you don't want to say what happens at home or what happens at school because it's, you know, anxiety provoking and shame inducing.
So if you have a child who's neurodivergent, maybe they're highly sensitive, maybe they're very emotionally reactive or, explosive, having a level of intensity, maybe they're demand avoidant, impulsive or anxious, autistic, ADHD, or a combination of all of the above, you are probably carrying a huge amount of extracurricular things on top of your work: school meetings, advocacy, emails to send to school, worrying some more, overthinking what your options are, then researching some more, maybe chatting to ChatGPT about what to do and how to phrase an email, like I do.
The emotional labor, the invisible labor of doing all of that, that constantly holding your child in mind. I often say you're only as happy as your saddest child, and if your child is struggling in school, yes, there's impact on your ability to work, which is then impact on the family if you cannot bring in the same level of income, or if you're at the risk of losing your job or losing your business or having to cut down your hours more and then decreasing income, it's a lot, right?
And then one of the systems you were actually relying on suddenly disappears. You were relying on being able to put them in school. Because that's why we need to think about how childcare isn't just childcare. Childcare is while someone else is caring for your child, someone else is holding your child in their care, right?
So even if you feel that school isn't meeting their n- needs optimally, it is still an extra pair of hands. It's still another person who's holding your child, so you get some capacity back, so you get some breathing room, recovery time, respite
And it's just knowing that for an hour or two, if they go in for breakfast club, someone else is helping to carry that load. Maybe that means that you don't have to do the breakfast battle at home, and they will eat something in breakfast club. Or they have two breakfasts, and you can actually be more sure that they're gonna manage to get through the school day 'cause they've topped themselves up enough energetically So when that disappears, either because your child refuses to go, we talked a bit about that in the previous episode, when your child refuses to go or is too anxious about it, or it is taken away because your child gets excluded.
They get told that if their behavior does not improve, they will be unable to go to this, setting. So when that disappears, parents find themselves not only losing that practical support and the respite, but also losing hope. And I really want to sit with that. And if you, in any way, notice this mind gremlin that this means that you've failed, I just wanna challenge that for a moment.
It really doesn't mean anything about you as a parent. The fact that a setting, a childcare setting, school setting, cannot meet their needs does not mean that you have failed. Sometimes the systems fail. Sometimes systems, and often systems, have limitations. Often systems have staffing levels that are just not adequate for the needs, and we know that, and we know teaching assistants who are on their knees pleading for more support for, for additional input for various children who they see struggle, who they see could do better if they had more support.
Sometimes environments are overwhelming for children, and there are people who call schools trauma factories. I believe Alex Partridge talks about it like a trauma factory, because sometimes children generally need more support than a setting can provide, and that setting just isn't right for them. This is where
sometimes people choose to home educate or unschool, uh, or flexibly school, and we're not covering that today.
This is much more about when you want your child to go to school, and you rely on that childcare or a childcare setting, not necessarily school, preschool, and it's just not available. That is not parental failure, right? And I know there's a lot of parents I support who carry enormous guilt and shame around this because they feel that they somehow should have prevented it, that they should have, maybe they should have parented differently or handled things differently or set different boundaries or, you know, "Should I have been harsher?
Should I have been firmer? is it that they don't respect my authority?" Or actually, "Should I have advocated differently? Should I have made school more aware of their needs?" you know, it's coulda, woulda, shoulda, right? You're hearing the theme here that, that we think of hindsight is actually a terrible companion for your, for your mind because you would always be available for that overthinking when you think, "Ah, I should have done it that way."
But you have access to information then that you didn't have at the time. Hindsight means literally you're looking backwards to something that's already happened. And hindsight thinks that you should have been able to predict the future somehow. Well, if-- but if only you would've known that this was gonna happen, maybe you would've done things differently.
Maybe you would've, chosen a different school. Maybe you would've made the SENCo more aware or whatever it might be. But the reality is that when it comes to school settings, childcare settings for our neurodivergent children, we are doing the best we can with the information and the energy and the support available at the time we have.
We are often so reactive just facing one day at a time that it's really difficult to, to be able to even put the right support systems in place. This is what school is supposed to do. And I wish that more parents were aware and gave themselves this permission to grieve the loss of support if your child has been excluded.
It doesn't mean that you don't want to be with your child or don't-- that anything wrong with you if you don't want to homeschool or home educate or unschool. Actually, you're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to be sad. You're allowed to be exhausted and frustrated and long to go to work. That's okay too You are allowed to admit that actually losing wraparound care provision has a huge impact on your family.
You know? So if you then have to fit all your work in between 9:00 and 3:00 or whatever, and also adding a commute in, for instance, that doesn't make a very long school day. It doesn't make you selfish to be torn between your work and meeting your child's needs. It makes you really human, and probably the most common thing I see in mothering is that, those two dimension, working as if you don't have a child to go and pick up, and parenting as if you don't have a job to go to.
It's a, it's an impossible equation, and it's even more challenging for neurodivergent parents of neurodivergent children. But I just want to end with this, that, you know, whatever your child is struggling with in school, and I'm sure that you have ideas around what you want to do as the next steps, whether you want to make formal complaints or whether you're, you know, coming back to the EHCP, if you have an EHCP, whatever it is that you need, this episode is not so much about the practical, like what do I do now?
It's much more about noticing that your child's struggles is not a reflection of their worth and is not a reflection of your worth. And sometimes children just need more support, and sometimes families need more support. And recognizing that is not weakness, it's a real strength and wisdom to be able to notice that we have now reached capacity, and we cannot do any more than this.
So I just wanted to send this as a little bit of compassion for you if you've experienced this. And if you know someone who has, or someone who is really battling with their school, maybe send this across. So just a little permission slip, a little reminder that it's not your fault, and it's not your child's fault either.
But what's gonna be helpful rather than harmful for you to do right now with the information you have at hand? What are your options, and how can you take the pressure yourself to do that perfectly? Because you can't. It is between a rock and a hard place. It's a hard situation. So until I speak to you next time, where we're gonna talk a bit more about parental burnout in ADHD families, I want you to really, really take care of yourself