The days my children cried, and I told them it would be okay

My children never wanted to go to daycare.

They cried every morning. But not normally. Their little hands clung to me with aching force, and I peeled their fingers from my arms one by one, whispering the same quiet lie I had been taught to believe: it will be okay. I told them what my friends told me. That they would stop crying as soon as I left. That it was just separation anxiety. That it would pass.

So I kissed them goodbye. I walked to the van. And I cried there too.

I cried because I didn’t believe it. Not really. I waited and watched and wondered if they were still crying inside. And then, one day, they stopped crying. But I didn’t. Because what changed wasn’t trust. It was resignation.

And that broke me.

Because I knew, with a kind of mother-knowing that doesn’t need evidence, that something had shifted. That they had stopped believing they could be heard.

What the bruises said when no one else would

The cracks began slowly.

My son came home with bruises. With scratches. With sores. And then, worse than all of that—he stopped talking. We started asking questions. The answers were slippery. Evasive. Thin.

When he began wearing dresses—sparkling, twirling, joyful things—we brought books to help the staff understand. To support his gender nonconformity. To open a conversation. We later learned those books had been hidden. The box quietly removed. No one said anything.

Then came the day that changed everything.

I arrived to pick him up, and a staff member casually told me, “He came out from behind the couch today and played.”

I stared at her. Behind the couch?

She looked at me blankly. “Yeah. Usually he hides there. But today he came out.”

Usually.

I asked how long this had been happening. She shrugged. Like I was the one not making sense.

It was then that I filed the complaint.

What the investigation found

Eventually, the health authority confirmed what I had feared—what I had somehow already known. My son had spent most days for nearly six months behind the couch, unseen. He had been placed in a locked room multiple times. He had been subjected to extended timeouts—on the stairs, beside the playground, in the heat. If he stood up or asked to come in, the timer reset. Sometimes for almost an hour.

He was regularly paired with a child who hurt him—who once threw him from the play structure. This too was known. And permitted.

And I was told nothing.

No injury report. No behavioural notes. No support plan. Just silence.

I knew something was rotting and dead inside me when I got the report.
How could I have sat outside crying?

A Parent

Kindergarten, and the lie of the fresh start

When we enrolled in kindergarten, we brought it all with us—the reports, the trauma history, the long paper trail of harm. We met with the school and shared everything. They said they understood. They said, “Let’s wait and see. Sometimes children do better in kindergarten.”

They meant well.

But waiting is not neutral. And “let’s see” is not safety.

Families like ours don’t arrive empty-handed. We arrive with grief. With vigilance. With children who have already been hurt, already lost trust, already learned to mask. We do not need a blank slate. We need something extra.

We need teachers who know that silence can be a trauma response. That regulation doesn’t always look like eye contact or hands folded on a desk. That punishment does not repair nervous systems—it retraumatises them.

And we need schools that understand that collective punishment—this blunt, sweeping tool used to shame children into compliance—is a betrayal so profound it reverberates through generations.

Because when you punish the many for the struggle of the few, you teach every child that weakness is contagious. That neurodivergence is dangerous. That safety is conditional.

And for children who have already survived institutional harm, that lesson does not feel theoretical. It feels like confirmation.

We are part of the system too

Our family is not an outlier.

There are thousands of families like ours—parents carrying paperwork and binders and heartbreak, hoping this time will be different. Children with deep sensitivity and big emotions and bodies that hold trauma.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for recognition.

We are part of the system too.

And when the system uses punishment to restore control instead of connection, it repeats the very harms it claims to oppose.

We need something different. Something careful. Something rooted in the radical belief that children—all children—deserve to feel safe, not just in theory, but in practice.