Divergent Learning Diaries

Our brave child has made a decision to return to school.  This is after ten months in burnout recovery.  Today was her first day back.

It is not our decision for her to go back.  We have allowed her to take the lead.  I am sure there are many parents who believe they need to lead, they know what’s best for their child and therefore they’ll take the lead in such matters.  If they can get away with that its likely that their child is not PDA.   Patti, our daughter, is now in Year 9. She is a proper PDAer and is a big fan of autonomy.  She’s decided it’s time she faced down her fear.  So she did.

Anyway, she hated it.  

She went in at 10.15am. She stayed for lunch, she spent some time in the SEND base and she attended one whole lesson.  We are bowled over by the sheer strength this must have taken her.  What a little warrior.  

But she is now desperately dysregulated.  Also she has a headache.

So, what went wrong?

Well firstly no doubt many would argue that just going back to school is a huge mountain to climb for a child who has been out for such a period of time.  Others might argue that burnout recovery takes longer than ten months.  I would agree with both perspectives.  Working within a secondary school I am fully versed on the challenges the environment presents. But as I stated already, I didn’t really want her to go back until she was ready.  But she has been desperate to return.  So maybe it was always going to be hard for her to attempt this.

Next,  and this is the big one, she looked around and saw that she had no friends.  She has been unable to sustain a peer friend yet.  Sadly, a very best friend has been the object of her desire since early childhood.   The emotional torment that has plagued her over the years following failed attempts to secure friends for anything longer than a short period has gradually broken her down. There was a cruel episode of bullying from a large group of her peers online a few months before she was unable to attend.

We talk alot about the size and complexity of the mainstream school environment and how this can lead to overwhelm and meltdowns in our autistic children.  This has been (and continues to be) true for Patti.  But it is also true that, her  inability to read social cues, to say the right thing, to try way too hard to please only to annoy others, to fixate on individuals who then can’t cope with her demands has meant that the connection she has wanted most has eluded.  What a sad and debilitating thing to have to face at 13 years old.  

Poor Patti feels completely blighted.  Her desperation for friends turns out to be the big reason she wants to go back.  She wants to be ‘normal’.  To have the pleasure of peer company, shared laughter and interests that most children take for granted (don’t get me wrong, I know in reality even the neurotypicals are teen friendships are incredibly fraught) is her big ambition.   I rather expect she’d pawn us all off for the price of a lifetime guarantee of a BFF.  But this evening, hiding behind a locked door, the fear that may prevent her from returning tomorrow, is seeing her peer group.  Or rather, them seeing her.  Or doing the wrong thing in front of them.  Or saying the wrong thing out loud.

For this evening, today’s  failure to connect to others is all that will cloud her mind.  ‘I want friends mum.  Why can’t I have them? I want them right away.’  What follows are our assurances that friendship will come.  When the time is right.  When the right people cross her path.  But in order to find the right people she must not twist herself into shapes that she thinks other people want her to be.  She just has to be her.  

Who knows how the week will end.  We have two more days to go.

We are so proud of her for trying this morning.  Her determination is awesome. She attended a whole lesson!  Something that she hasn’t done since October 2023.  She had no support in this class.  School have said they can’t support Year 9 students in the way they do Year 7 and 8.  This is despite knowing what she has been through and how much she needs persistent validation and support.  This is disappointing but sadly not surprising.

I have been a teacher for around 25 years.  I have loved being in schools.  Some of the most wonderful experiences I have been part of have been in schools working with and supporting children.  Seeing them developing and stepping into inspiring futures. But to watch your child squeeze themselves into a situation that fills them with horror is not something I can contemplate seeing for the next 189 school days.  

I genuinely believe that school isn’t for every child.  And I increasingly know that for far too many children, particularly neurodiverse children, the experience of school lingers at the heart of many of their traumas. The social communication challenges that are experienced by our autistic children are incredibly difficult to overcome in a secondary school environment, an environment  which on average educates over a thousand young people.  Young people  who can’t imagine what the ND school experience could possibly feel like and who will therefore have no idea that their misplaced reactions towards our vulnerable autistic children may end up causing them real harm.

For now my focus is going back to Patti.  I am laying next to her reminding her to breathe slowly while she drifts off to sleep as she is starting to feel the panic set in, thinking that I must be the worst parent in the world for letting her force herself back into the place that left her so broken.