Speaker 1Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as $0 for therapy in seconds at GrowTherapy.com slash ACAST. That's GrowTherapy.com slash ACAST. GrowTherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
Speaker 2I had kind of arrogantly thought, well, I'd written this, you know, successful book about autism. Of course I know about ADHD, but I didn't. And when I properly learned about ADHD, I realized not only do I not know about it, but most of us don't know about it at all.
Speaker 3Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat, and enjoy the conversation. In today's episode, I'm joined by Jessie Hewitson, author of ADHD, How to Raise a Happy ADHD. ADHD Child. With neurodiversity on the rise and a third of children now being diagnosed, it can be a really scary and often lonely place as a parent when you are navigating, as Jessie did, a child with neurodiversity and with burnout. What Jessie does in the conversation is she shares very compassionately her journey with two children, one with ASD and one with ADHD, and how she now. navigated that in terms of advocating for her child, being able to identify what changes and behavior needed to happen in terms of parenting a neurodiverse child, and navigating that local authority, finding the right school, and also that whole process of school refusal. The book is packed with really useful advice written in ordinary speak, I think I would say, layman's terms, ones that we can take some. really great advice. It talks about the differences in terms of how ADHD presents itself with girls, looking at patterns of masking behavior and adaptive, how to tackle local authorities when it comes to accessing funding and finding the right space and place for your child, as well as how, as parents, we can make adaptations and modifications to the way that we parent so that we can create environments at home that feel less. less of a battle for our children. This is really a great conversation. And in that process for Jessie, particularly in that process of supporting her children, she has also come to identify ADHD in herself. So I know this is going to be a super, super helpful, but also super, super practical episode. So without further ado, here's Jessie.
Speaker 2Oh, thank you. I'm so delighted.
Speaker 3And thank you for that intro. Oh, my goodness. I have got lots of sort of things that I want to talk about, but I think let's start from the beginning. I've read your incredible article, which we will share the link in with The Times, but also the link to the book, which is phenomenal. I'm intrigued by how your son's journey began. And am I right in thinking that your son was the one who came back after a school assembly and it was that that started things in terms of his journey? Towards being diagnosed?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's correct. So one day he came back from home and said, quite matter of factly, Mum, I've got DHD and I was quite confused. Like, what on earth is he talking about? And then suddenly the penny dropped. They I remembered they'd had a assembly about neurodiversity that morning and he ran out of the room and my husband and I had a good old chuckle that his attention was so poor he'd missed out the A of DHD. But then suddenly I remember we stopped laughing because we were like, oh, God, you know, I'm going to die. You know, what if he's right? Because I think, you know, he was an extremely, extremely active child, never sat still for drawing. You know, the moment he started school, he was getting into trouble. I mean, he got sent. Well, we sent him to the nursery attached to the primary school that he went to and he was sent to the headteacher at the age of three while still at nursery. So there was that small sort of, oh, you know, what if he has just identified something? And then from that moment on, my son was absolutely convinced he had ADHD. He said everything they said about ADHD was me. But if I'd had my time again, I would have picked up the phone that moment and made an appointment with the GP and, you know, got him on a waiting list. But I didn't do that just because I didn't want to be sort of that parent seeking a label too quickly that, you know, I think I let people who are saying that ADHD is overdiagnosed get into my head, really. And I regretted not. I regretted not investigating it sooner.
Speaker 3And that's such a common theme and narrative that's coming out, certainly whether you look at it from the space of children, but also I think it's coming out from the space of adults.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, I think there's a huge sort of social shaming that's going on because, you know, we've got politicians, we've got columnists in papers, you know, we've got this chorus of people saying ADHD is overdiagnosed and that people are just seeking labels to feel special and in response to normal life problems. And so, you know, I, looking back, I realised those people had affected me and made me feel embarrassed to pick up the phone and seek, you know, answers to really valid questions. And what upsets me about that is these people saying these things don't know anything about ADHD. And what happens is that it means, you know, children don't get identified as soon as they might. And often that means, is that when people get identified, it's at a point of crisis. And that's the thing that allows parents to overcome the shame.
Speaker 3Yeah, because that crisis means it almost galvanises you. Yeah. You've got to take action. And at that time that he came back from school and said he had ADHD. Yeah. What were you seeing or was being presented from a school perspective that had any concerns or was he, were there not really big things showing up?
Speaker 2Well, in retrospect, the classic things were happening. You know, we were getting calls. We were getting calls from the deputy head once or twice a week about his behaviour. There was quite a common pattern, actually, because my son is this larger than life character. He's absolutely hilarious. And he comes across as very extrovert. And I think at school he came across as very confident. But actually the truth was he wasn't confident and he was anxious, but his anxiety was displayed in a ADHD way. And I don't, I think had he displayed it in a neurotypical way, I think the teachers would have picked up on it, but really, the more anxious he gets, he got the more sort of out there he was in the class, sort of interrupting teachers and trying to make people laugh a lot. And in retrospect, I think he was trying to stop people telling him off and he wants people to like him by making them laugh. But it was in a horrible way, sort of increasing the chances of what he didn't want to happen, which was negative feedback. So I think, you know, the teachers struggled to work him out. And so did we say the teachers really didn't have much of a chance to figure out, because as parents we hadn't engaged with it either. And I think, I think it is hard when people present anxiety in different ways to see what's happening underneath.
Speaker 3Yeah. And I would imagine statistically there's probably a very small number that present anxiety in the way that we might typically expect it to be presented. Most will mask it behind all sorts of things. And that's why it's so important that we don't just look at the behaviour that the child is presenting to us in that moment, but try to consider what might be the emotion that's underpinning that behaviour.
Speaker 2Yeah. And I think especially when something just continues and continues and continues, no matter how much that child is being told off, I think it would be helpful for there to be assumption, OK, no child wants to be repeatedly told off. So, you know, with that in mind, what is causing them to continue that behaviour despite us, you know, giving them obvious clues that we don't like it. And
Speaker 3how old was your son at this
Speaker 2point when he was being told off? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was from straight away. I mean, I do feel that I dropped off a child who was kind of OK, you know, at the age of three. And by the time he got to nine, he had a breakdown. I absolutely love his school. In fact, it was his last day yesterday and I cried for four hours solid because of the relationships I have with the school. So it's not a reflection of the school. It's a reflection of my delay, our delay as parents to get to grade. with what was happening for him and also the school's lack of resources to you know properly support him do you harbor do you carry with you a sense of guilt that you hadn't acted earlier definitely yeah and i think guilt you know when you have neurodivergent children is just a fact of life that we're having to deal with i mean i think guilt and motherhood go hand in hand don't they which is stamped above i don't quite understand why as mothers we do suffer this really overwhelming sense of guilt in a way that dads don't but but i think we do but i think when you've got a child and there's massive systemic problems and you know i wrote the book how to raise a happy children but i don't you know it's trying to get neurodivergent children to be happy is a tall order and i'm not sure it's it's consistently possible so i think you know failure is part of the process of being a parent of having neurodivergent kids so you so guilt is something i struggle with a lot yeah yeah yeah
Speaker 3and i think have you have you found that as the journey has progressed that you're able to reframe some of that guilt or does it just get replaced with some new guilt at each age and
Speaker 2stage uh yeah no it just gets replaced i try you know it does just get replaced i mean i think me writing the book was a slight act of penance because i do sometimes think you know we can assume we know our children because we're spend lots of time with them but i went through this very difficult process of him having a breakdown of realizing i didn't know him and really i had to face up to that fact and i had to you know go back to the drawing board and learn but i had kind of arrogantly thought well i'd written this you know successful book about autism of course i know about adhd but i didn't and when i properly learned about adhd i realized not only do i not know about it but most of us don't know about it at all that's the issue is that we don't as a society or and i would say this in the potentially in a global sense understand what adhd is yeah and i love that bit in
Speaker 3the book about how you break down what we think of and how actually the letters of adhd do not in any way when we look at the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder really describe the patterns of behavior can you expand on that and you know what are the myths about what adhd is and what are the myths about what and what is it actually
Speaker 2yeah so i think why we don't understand what adhd is is because of its name it's terribly defined so its name is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so if we take attention deficit that just isn't factually true so it's inconsistent attention so for example my son used to spend quite a long time sitting drawing and i thought well what adhd kids can do that for 20 minutes when they're five but that was me not understanding what adhd is so adhd is about well one of the things is about inconsistent levels of dopamine in your brain and you know dopamine is one of the things you need to focus and because adhd is have too much of something called dopamine transporters which means the dopamine is flushed away before it's done its job we have to rely on dopamine often not showing up when we need it to what you can do to help you focus because you don't have dopamine is you can work with things that interest you and that produces serotonin so the serotonin was what was allowing my son to sit down because he was you know enjoying what he was doing or you rely on cortisol the stress hormone and how you achieve that is by leaving something to less the last moment and then in a mad panic you're doing it because someone's about to shout at you so adhd is also not only do we have inconsistent focus rather than an absence of it but we also can have focus because hyper focus is you know a key feature of adhd so you've either got like far too much attention or too little and when you've got far too much of it it can be very hard to prise yourself away from what you're doing so it's really all or nothing so that's the attention thing dealt with and then we've got hyperactivity i mean that is quite misleading because you know according to nice one in three adhd's aren't physically hyperactive yeah so if what you assume about adhd is an absence of attention and a hyperactive person you're going to miss out on a whole load of adhd is in fact you're you're going to spot very few yeah and the last one is you know a disorder you know i think the neurodiversity movement in my mind has completely argued that it isn't disorder you know there's no right brain uh the fact of having a you know variety of brain types is a a fact and be a good thing and all different brains come with positive and negative positives and challenges
Speaker 3yes and i think that that's a really crucial way that we look at things just generally we talk a lot about individualized nutrition we talk about individualized in terms of our physicality but we don't do that in terms of our brains and not all of our brains are different we need and and require different affordances in a classroom regardless of who we are and whether we're neurotypical or neurodivergent
Speaker 2yeah absolutely absolutely yeah i mean i think if in an ideal world you would have different schools for different brain types and different learning styles what's interesting from the
Speaker 3way that you've described the attention deficit piece and the hyperactivity piece is really crucial because so many parents will literally exactly as you said will say i don't have a child that's bouncing off the walls and they seem to be laser focused in certain areas that they really love therefore that can't possibly be it maybe they're lacking motivation or they just need to try harder and so we find ourself not even getting the close to considering that as a possibility as a barrier to them in terms of where they you know how they're interacting with things yeah it strikes me from the all or nothing that you spoke about is it sounds very blurred between this concept of adhd and asd the autistic spectrum yeah as well
Speaker 2yeah there are some key overlaps so one of them is that hyper focus so where they do meet in the there's a theory called monotropism and what monotropism is is that some people you know want to be in their attention tunnel hyper focusing on one thing and they just want to be left alone until they're ready to come out of their tunnel and polytropic people who are often neurotypical are able to sort of spread their attention more thinly and find it easier to come in and out of tasks now adhd and autistic people are monotropic and it can be a little bit more difficult to be quite stressful to move your attention and and there are people who are rejecting the labels of autism and adhd partly because of the focus on disorders and you know both of those things seem to take a neurotypical brain as a yardstick and the you know the further away you stray from neurotypical then you're kind of labeled disordered yeah so there's a movement of people calling themselves monotropic because they see it as a central theme of their lives so that is one thing in common but i think people who i respect who are looking into it now some people are suggesting that between 50 and 75 percent of people who have both adhd and autistic my sense is going forward i suspect we're not going to be called adhd or autistic we're all going to be neurodivergent
Speaker 3yeah yeah and it is it is i think it's that changing away from this notion of disorder to much more a narrative around brain types yeah you know when we think of the very early years of psychology we studied psychology from a male lens and certainly in terms of kohlberg's moral development women were therefore seen to be less than men because we went through the process of moral judgment very differently yeah so we were thought to be less than rather than different yeah so psychology's got a whole history of taking one type as the gold standard and everything else is inferior or disordered or wrong as a result of that yeah as you say
Speaker 2these kind of medical descriptions a lot of it is based on value judgments rather than objective truths you know so for example with autistic people you know they've had a lifetime of being stigmatized because they're not normal but you know has anyone looked at neurotypicals you know neurotypicals can be illogical obsessed by conformity and you know very judgmental yeah so i think neurotypical brains just happens to be the majority not the best no exactly but you did ask me about what adhd is and what it instead of physical hyperactivity i think it's really helpful to focus on mental hyperactivity because that is something that is 100 true for adhd is so it's a ping-ponging brain that often there's a sort of rapid thought process going on that's one thought leads to another to another to another and you don't always have a chance to think those thoughts through and adhd is confined you know it's frustrating that they just want to switch their brain off sometimes because it's working over time
Speaker 3yeah that's really helpful and from your journey with your son with your youngest son you talked about the fact he then had this breakdown what then happened so he
Speaker 2well preceding it there were very long distressing meltdowns at home and i remember it just got to the point where you know it was so upsetting i just said right this can't continue and so So, yeah, we stopped him going to school and the school were absolutely brilliant. They didn't, they recognised that he wasn't able to go to school. So I'm just so grateful to them that some parents are then pressurised to force that child back into school and even threatened with, you know, the police are going to be sent around. And I think had they done that, it would have absolutely broken us as a family. So what then happened was actually, we did actually receive quite a lot of sort of support. And in a way, I think we were extremely lucky in that we were at a very good school. But also we were going through the EHCP needs assessment. And then once he was off school, you know, it was very hard for the council to say, oh, he's fine, you know. But also because I'm quite clued up, I was able to write a letter to the council saying, right, you still need to provide him with an education. He's not able to go to school. So then they paid for it. I had to get a tutor to come round. But what makes me sad is there was this expensive support. But had, you know, had support been put in sooner, it would have been cheaper for the council. But also my son could have avoided a breakdown. So had we identified him sooner as parents, had the council funded the school appropriately, you know, all of this might not have happened.
Speaker 3And that's, I think, a really crucial part as parents will be listening to this. Some will be out the other side. Some will be out the other side with the EHCPs and funding. Others will be at the beginning of their journey. It is a thankless, exhausting task. And all the while, your gorgeous young person is then creating all of this, these narratives and belief systems about their capabilities, their worthiness and their self-esteem becomes hugely eroded. How have you tackled the
Speaker 2rebuilding of that? Yeah. I mean, that's. That's absolutely right. His self-esteem plummeted and his anxiety, like, skyrocketed. And what I would say is that once you've got to that position, it takes an awful lot of time, doesn't it, to kind of try and rebalance it. So what we've done, I was fortunate in that I was able to change my work. So partly, I think, why I hadn't recognised how bad things had got from at school was because I was really busy at work. So I just hadn't engaged with it. So I realised, you know, I can't continue. I was doing quite a sort of high pressure job. I couldn't continue that. So I was lucky in that I could renegotiate it. So I was able to, well, A, take a sabbatical for six months, but B, work from home, which is what I'm doing now and going part time. We started going back to the sort of parenting classes. And in a way, that was I was really resistant to that because I'd done it all with my first eldest son, who's neurodivergent. You know, sometimes it could be an absolute waste of time. I'm ADHD. Myself listening isn't like the thing I most love doing. So so but there was one parenting class and really I did it because I wanted to show that I was going to do my part for camps and show willing. I don't know if I went into it really ready, you know, with the best mindset. But it was called NVR, nonviolent resistance. And it was like 12 weeks, once a week. And it was absolutely amazing. And so what it was is it was a parenting technique. It sounds like. It's teaching you how not to hit your child, which is it's not about that at all. It's actually about focusing on connection with your child, even when you're having challenging moments. So it's about de-escalation, prioritizing what's important, not trying to deal with things in the moment when everyone's upset and focusing on, you know, you can't control situations, but you can control your responses to things. And it gave me a framework, you know, when you've got an extremely unhappy child. So really, I sort of lent to curb my instincts and, you know, park whatever frustrations I was feeling to later. And then when he was calm, say to him, oh, you know, I was really sorry for you, that that was so upsetting for you. And it upset me, too. What can we do next time to make it easier for you? And you give a brilliant example.
Speaker 3Can you talk us through about going to the cinema? Yeah. Can you talk us through that and how that relates specifically to the sort of. The parenting classes that you've been to?
Speaker 2Yeah. So it was quite in the early days. My son didn't really leave the house for quite a while. And I'd arranged for him to go to the cinema. And I think I was holding on to the cinema trip as a sign of normality. Yeah. And I had it all organised. And we went to the cinema to watch film. And when we got there, but we I couldn't get him out the house very easily. So we were sort of running late. I promised him with sweets, but we didn't have enough time to go and buy the contraband sweets. You know, in the East Asian next door, which you smuggle in. So I rushed in, hoped that he was kind of going to overlook that, which was such a mistake. Like what child forgets about the sweets? No child, no, it doesn't matter what, you're atypical or not, but you don't forget. And so then we arrived and he was like, right, I'll have these sweets, please. And it was like one of those cinemas where it costs like 10 quid for like a bag of popcorn with like three popcorns in it. And I was like, no, I'm sorry. We cannot. We cannot buy those sweets. They're like crazily expensive. And he then was like, right, I'm not going to see the film. And actually, the situation quickly sort of became out of control, really. And I was so, so upset with him, you know. But then I had this moment where my NVR training kicked in and I realized, actually, I can't control things. So my eldest son was with me. I just said, can you take him back home? He was my youngest was very upset. He went back home. And what NVR teaches you is about reconciliation gestures. So it's just something to say to your child, I love you in those moments of distress and I care for you. So what I did is, well, first of all, I managed to get the cinema ticket refunded. And that was one of my concerns in the moment was, you know, I've spent all this money. It's going to be wasted. But actually, that wasn't true. You know, they refunded it. And then I did go to the local sweet shop where prices were more reasonable. I bought like this. Huge load of sweets. And I arrived home and I just said, said to my son, I'm so sorry. I didn't want you to miss out on your sweets. And yes, you were right. We did agree to it. Here they are. He then ate like a ridiculous amount of sweets. And then we watched a film at home and we actually had quite a lovely afternoon. And then later on, when he was in the bath, I said, oh, Morgan, that was, you know, pretty horrible in the cinema, wasn't it? And he said that actually it was noisy in the cinema. It was lights. It was. It clearly was just from a sensory perspective, overwhelming him. And I, you know, I realized actually what was going on for him was a huge level of anxiety about leaving the house.
Speaker 3Yeah. And yet we get so it's so easy for us to get caught up in that narrative that we're being a permissive parent and that we're letting our children rule the roost. And we said we were going to go to the cinema. So this is what we're going to do. And almost seeing his act of, no, I can't do this as defiance that we then need some. Punitive measures. Yes. Whereas actually underneath is this incredibly vulnerable, hurting young man who's saying I'm overwhelmed, but I don't have the words to be able to express I'm overwhelmed. So instead, I want out.
Speaker 2That's 100 percent it. And I think also, like, what do we want from these situations? What do I want him to learn? Do I want him to learn no matter how distressed you are, no matter how bad the environment is for me, I have to force myself through that process. Or do we want him to learn that, you know, I can calm down and explain to someone what it was like for me and come up with a plan to make it better next time? I'm sort of sort of
Speaker 3very aware that there are so many families that are going through this journey at the moment and really not out the other side at all. How what would you offer them in terms of advice about managing those almost like those early period of time where they're either they've recognized their. There might be something not quite right or school are recognizing there's something not quite right, but things have not yet been put in place or even considered to be put in place.
Speaker 2Yeah. So I think it's trust your instincts. You know, I think that small voice in your head that goes off at certain points that you sometimes overall, I think, listened to that. And I think also, you know, don't really agonize whether your child is or isn't ADHD. Like, let a doctor make that decision and just get them on the waiting list. So in retrospect. If, you know, as soon as my son came back to say, I've got DHD, I should have just got them on a waiting list. We would have had a year for me to agonize over whether he wasn't or was. And I think I don't know why with ADHD, like if you've got a sore knee, you don't think, is this X or am I just making it all up? What you do is you go to a doctor and they decide what's going on with your knee. So I don't know why we have to go through this process of, you know, this sort of exhausting back and forth in your mind. Like, are they? Aren't they? I think there's this perception that if you go on a waiting list, you are going to end up with a label. I think people worry about that, that you're going to. on this journey and it's going to build momentum and only lead to one road but that's not true people are told sometimes that they don't have adhd i mean it is true that the vast majority of people do get a positive diagnosis but the reason why is normally we've all left it so late that it's reached crisis point and you know the only people who are seeking their diagnosis often are the people where you know very clearly there is something happening there and now we're going
Speaker 3to take a quick pause for a word from our sponsors therapy's biggest impact doesn't
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Speaker 3you and as you say i mean you may well be waiting a year and when your year weight comes up you still have the choice to be able to say actually in that in those 12 months it's clear it isn't that yeah something else has happened and we don't we don't now want that particular place whereas actually you can't in 12 months time if you're not on the list get to that
Speaker 2same spot yes that's exactly it the only way to do it is that way you're certainly future-proofing yourself like if the situation's going to get worse we've got that appointment on the horizon yeah which is actually a really lovely way of providing an extra layer of assurance yeah for you and also what i would say is when i was on this nvr course there was a dad who was explaining he'd gone to a museum with his adhd son an autistic son i think as well the son had quite a sort of spectacular meltdown at the museum and it caused this massive sweary ruckus and he said that you know all he felt the sort of judgment of the other parents his security guard was sort of looming in their sort of area to take take over and i don't know if you mind me swearing no absolutely not but the dad said he had this very clear thought in his head was fuck you all because he said fuck you all because you don't have to pick up the pieces afterwards so what he did is he said to the security guard you know can you just leave me to this because i know how to you know handle this situation and he just decided to ignore the judgment of everyone else and avoid the sort of performative takeover telling off that often people want you to do in those situations so what he did was he let his son just like scream blue murder until he ran out of steam and he kind of followed him at a distance and said you know sometimes said i can see you're really upset you know and then once his son had calmed down they left they went home and then they talked about what had happened i find that phrase quite helpful my head to to remind myself you know it's like shorthand of like what other people think that matter isn't the important
Speaker 3thing but that so drives our behavior doesn't it whether neurotypical or or neurodivergent child doesn't it is that whole everyone is judging me they are assuming that i'm a parent that has lost control and my child is being i'm allowing them to behave in a socially unacceptable way yeah do you think that that's almost got worse is that almost more of that than there has been in the past because you know we do have a lot of people who are sometimes people who've you know children have had massive meltdowns in supermarkets and people have come up to them and said you know i think you did a brilliant job so we do sometimes get that but i almost feel like that concern about judgment and shame is even more amplified than it has been
Speaker 2before i don't know if i've spotted that really but i think it's so hard you know you just it's you have to practice that thicker skin don't you you know i'm a people pleaser it doesn't come at all and you know it's hard with family as well i think it's just something you have to do really no matter how tricky it feels but i think i think it's that the neurotypical world there's rules to it and often when we think about this what people want us to do is for our children to abide by rules that work for people with different brain types and i i think those rules aren't always logical and i think it's just it's just a matter of time until we get to the point where we can you know there is a problem here that if you're asking let's say neurodivergent or autistic children to abide by rules that aren't logical don't make sense for them i think that's really stressful for them because i think for particularly for autistic people but i i think for neurodivergent people possibly neurotypicals as well if something is logical makes sense there's a kind of security there so i think autistic people cling to logic because it helps them in a sort of uncertain world it makes things more predictable so i think if you're demanding that autistic child follows rules that don't make sense for them i think that's a really difficult place for them to be in so i think because i'm autistic in adhd i always had this slightly flexible slash questioning approach to the rules but you know i think let's let's be the shield really as parents from society's judgment you know and teach your child yes we all live in a communities and we definitely do need to bear other people in mind and we can't just behave as we like all the time if there's a negative impact on other people but at the same time if your behavior isn't hurting someone else yeah even sometimes if there are rules in place we can live in a way that's right for us totally
Speaker 3and we're not responsible for someone else's sense of discomfort yeah yeah that's their discomfort but actually living within that what we need is is that important
Speaker 2isn't it and i think that's one of the things i notice the difference between happy neurodivergent adults and those who aren't i perceive one key difference is that the people who aren't happy are not good at identifying their challenges in a specific way or and that means they haven't come up with strategies or or get support and they don't ask for help because they feel like they should be able to do everything and so they fail and then beat themselves up and then they think that they're a bad person a lazy person an inconsiderate person whereas happy happier adults are the ones who have been able to identify what they struggle with come up with strategies for it and also work out what are the things that i just never can do no matter how many brilliant strategies i've got and just give myself a free pass for that yeah and i think as parents if we can be part of that process of helping your child identify what their struggles are and come up with a sort of brainstorming way then you're you're equipping them for a future where they can do that for themselves
Speaker 3and is that the strategy that you then use when it came to then easing your son back into school well
Speaker 2i mean he's been out for 18 months so what he did go back to school and then it didn't it didn't really work so what my strategy for that was i took the view to him yeah i'd love you to go back but if it doesn't work for you it doesn't work you know we realized we were on this thing we couldn't control really yeah so he he is about to start at a special specialist school and yes i think a specialist school this is i'm hoping that is going to be part of the process it certainly will be part of my conversations with him yeah and how
Speaker 3did you because i think there will be a lot of parents listening that will would really love to get the children in that position to be able to get into the specialist school because the simply cannot and will will never serve them yeah was yours an easy transition an easy well i don't actually i take that back there's never an easy yeah but were you able to straightforwardly demonstrate that that's what they needed and that the local authority were therefore able to do that or were you battling again in terms of then getting that put
Speaker 2in place the the second time was easier in all truth i had a almighty battle with my eldest son you know we ended up paying for a lawyer going to court spending twenty thousand pounds because because the local authority was going to send him to just a school that no one you know no one thought was okay really but the second time i think because i'm clued up but also i think because my son had you know stopped being able to go to school i think we got lucky do you know i think that's what scares me i think it comes down to blind luck because i think someone senior in the send department at my local department is going to be very familiar with my youngest son case that i mean i'm only guessing here because it was a much more straightforward process thinking oh my god has this local authority just like revolutionized how they do things but I know from other parents that is not a consistent theme I think we yeah just got lucky but also at the same time I think you know I think there's so many children that don't have that breakdown which can precipitate everyone to examine their needs and what support they really need and in a way that's worse yeah potentially because uh they just go through their lives never getting the support they need and maybe internalizing things or things are really bad for them but they've never exactly reached crisis point so look I wouldn't it wasn't an easy process no I worked very closely with CAMHS we were fortunate to have a good experience with CAMHS I know the system you know and in my book actually I tried very hard to create a really good resource for parents trying to work out how to navigate it so I knew about how to build the evidence that we needed and working with the professionals to get the evidence that we needed but it no it wasn't straightforward at all and I'm scared actually because what little we do know of this big reform that the department for education is planning is that they want fewer kids in specialist schools and that terrifies me because these big comprehensive secondary schools they're just fundamentally not okay for autistic or neurodivergent kids you know it is like building schools for wheelchair users and not including ramps in it you've got a sort of hostile sensory place for people and you're just shoving them in and unless they do something drastic and they're not going to be able to do something drastic immediately I just think it's going to do an immense amount of harm yes
Speaker 3I was going to say because we're still slightly waiting on bated breath to find out what those reforms are going to be but there's always that anticipation that it's going to be much more restrictive and rather
Speaker 2than what really upsets me is that they've looked at the situation thought oh it's almost like they think too too many specialist school placements is the problem whereas in my mind it's abundantly clear they've built too few specialist schools yeah and okay if we want to have more neurodivergent kids in mainstream you know that could work but we need to make schools smaller we need to make them more neurodivergent friendly and none of that's going to happen overnight
Speaker 3no not when you've got as you say these huge academies with five six form entries for each year group oh it was going to be it was
Speaker 2going to be 10 form entry that they were sending my eldest son the local authority saying it was more kids in one year than was in his entire primary school so yeah these schools are enormous yeah that's a whole
Speaker 3other conversation we can have Jessie but that I don't think that would serve any child 300 in a year yeah it's just it's not serving I want to ask you because you've said a few times in our conversation about that you have also neurodiverse as well at what point in your in the journey your children's journey did you then start to sort of ask yourself or think oh actually I'm seeing some things here that relate to me
Speaker 2yeah so when I I wrote the book on autism eight years ago and um speaking to the autistic women the stories were incredibly familiar and I just sort of thought oh well you know obviously I'm somewhere between the two you know I've got traits but you know I'm not autistic and then as time went on I started to think oh well I'm not autistic I'm not autistic I'm not autistic I'm not autistic you know I made really good friends writing my autism book you know one particularly close friend is autistic and over time I sort of spent more time talking to autistic people and becoming you know friends with them and then also because my eldest went to a specialist school loads of the parents are neurodivergent themselves and sometimes I turn up and people just assumed I was autistic or ADHD and I'd have to say to them oh no I'm not and some of them say oh okay and then other people just looked at me with that like so I was getting clues you know from people and then just over time I just realized yeah I probably am and I'm okay with not knowing and then all of a sudden I thought I need to know so I went off and got assessed for autism and got my diagnosis and then I was writing my the ADHD book and um you know I realized for the first time you could be ADHD and not hyperactive and I didn't know that yeah and also I found out about inattentive ADHD and I was like oh my god I'm not hyperactive and I didn't know that and also I found out about inattentive ADHD and I was like oh my god I'm not hyperactive ADHD which is where your kind of brain is not engaged and you're kind of in your own world a lot of the time and oh my god that is me you know and I just thought that was everyone but my memories of school is being in a lesson having no idea what I was meant to be doing because I'd obviously zoned out when the teacher was talking and trying to look for clues at my friends next to me and then thinking I was copying and then you know then they were covering their work and that kind of rising anxiety of oh you know I'm about to get told off because I can't do the work but also I just spend a lot of my life in my own head and I struggle sometimes to follow what people are saying and I've always beaten myself up for not having better control of my brain but also am I not caring you know I found that really difficult because I do feel like I care very much about my friends so why can't I easily listen to what they're saying sometimes and I just I worried it made me a not good person and you know and as I said I'm so not hyperactive it's embarrassing like I never go to the gym in an evening I like watching channel 4 true crime documentaries on this over you know that didn't tally with my image of what an ADHD person looks like but again when I was interviewing ADHD women their stories were my stories and also coincidentally at that time my eldest was also being diagnosed with ADHD and the and I didn't say anything but at the end my the doctor turned around to me and said right let's talk about you and she said do you realize how much you zone out and I said yes but doesn't everyone and she looked at me with a firm but twinkly eye and she said no Jessie they don't they don't
Speaker 3and I'm guessing that was the first time you heard you knew about this inattentive ADHD at that time I'd only started learning about it yeah do you know it changed your understanding of your sons in terms of your interaction with I mean obviously I knew you I know you've done a huge amount of research and in terms of writing both books but did it shift your relationship with them in any way then subsequently having the diagnosis yourself
Speaker 2well part of the reason I did get the diagnosis was for them I wanted to show them really that someone they love is the same brain type as them and and it's been quite lovely because sometimes I can say to them oh this thing that you find hard I do too you know and you know I can say oh I find I find listening hard as well and it doesn't make you a bad person you know and so having that kind of shared kind of experience I guess and it's I don't know if it feels exactly like us against the world that's that's kind of too dramatic but there's something in it that we're there this kind of like bubble of understanding each other
Speaker 3yeah and also in lots of ways they get that despite that you know some of the challenges such that come with their you know with the way that their brain type operates in certain situations as well as the great stuff is that they can see an end product they can see that you are writing you're creating you're having conversations you're connecting with people your empathy all of those things is that there's a path and the output can still be supremely fabulous oh oh
Speaker 2that really moved me actually you uh describing me but that's so you know it's true likely to do
Speaker 3what they see them what they say and they can see you are evidence in front of them every single day that there are that their brain operates in a slightly different way but it operates in a way that is incredible if channeled in the right direction for
Speaker 2them yeah and I I often do think about this like if imagine if you went through the assessment process and the person who finally identified your child as autistic the doctor was autistic themselves and you took them in incredibly seriously and they were a nice doctor and you know wouldn't that be a really positive message for parents
Speaker 3yeah
Speaker 2definitely oh jesse
Speaker 3thank you so much I think we could talk for ages I think we probably over talked but thank you so much we will be sharing all the links would highly recommend jesse's book go out and buy it it is in the show notes as is the link to her wonderful um times piece thank you jesse thank you you
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