Jeannie was born four pounds, a premature twin, and although her brother arrived even smaller at three pounds six ounces, he now weighs over 100 pounds. She does not. At nearly fourteen, Jeannie weighs 55 pounds and has been medically assessed as biologically eleven. Her growth has stalled, her energy is low, her development delayed—and still, her school continues to treat her physical condition as incidental, her eating disorder as secondary, her needs as negotiable.
For years, Jeannie has struggled with avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID), a condition that exists in the DSM but barely registers in school policy. Her paediatrician has been clear: this is a medically significant eating disorder, rooted in neurodevelopmental disability and compounded by chronic institutional distress. Jeannie is autistic, has ADHD, experiences sensory overwhelm, and masks so effectively that her distress goes largely unseen. When her body refuses food, it is not performance. It is protection. It is the final threshold of coping when every other access route has been blocked.
When smallness is misread as innocence
In the classroom, Jeannie is consistently misperceived. Because of her diminutive stature, staff often interpret her as younger than she is. They respond to her needs as if she were six years old on the carpet, not a teenage girl navigating hunger, trauma, and complex disability. She becomes legible to them only as a quiet child with mild quirks—never as a nearly-grown adolescent whose size is the direct result of systemic failure.
This misperception is not harmless. It allows adults to frame physical boundary violations—like being touched, bumped, or crowded by a much larger peer—as developmentally typical, even when that peer weighs over 200 pounds. It allows them to dismiss her withdrawal from unsafe spaces as avoidance rather than discernment. It allows them to overlook the immense and measurable toll that years of unmet needs have taken on her body.
Jeannie is not small by nature. She is small because her body has been holding too much. Because she has had to mask, to wait, to explain, to endure. Because she has been told that access must be earned, that hunger must be discreet, that survival should look graceful.
When a medical recommendation is treated as opinion
In May 2024, I wrote to the school, clearly and respectfully, to express a simple concern: Jeannie was not getting enough to eat. She was returning home with full lunches, experiencing stomach pain, and facing barriers to eating during class time. Her paediatrician had advised that she should be encouraged to eat continuously throughout the day, with food available on her desk—just like any other medical accommodation designed to prevent pain and support function. I compared it, quite reasonably, to her need for glasses. Both are tools her body requires to access learning.
The school’s response was to affirm that a “plan” was in place. A plan that required Jeannie to ask. To move. To separate herself from her peers and sit in the ‘time out area.’ A plan that placed her nourishment on the other side of social courage and executive functioning. A plan that, in practice, resulted in skipped meals and physical discomfort. When I pressed the issue, I was told the intention was to build resilience. To encourage stamina. To uphold a classroom routine.
But my child is not failing to eat because she lacks resilience. She is failing to eat because the accommodations she requires are being framed as indulgences, and her disability is being treated as something she should overcome through grit. The problem is not her regulation. The problem is the barrier. And I named it.
I wrote back: “Putting barriers in front of Jeannie eating is not building resilience, it’s actually causing her to fail to thrive.”
That was over a year ago. Since then, her biological development stalled, until summer arrived and she finally started to eat again in earnest.
A diagnosis does not guarantee belief
Despite a formal psychoeducational assessment confirming autism, ADHD, trauma symptoms, and a learning disability in mathematics, and despite multiple medical letters affirming her ARFID diagnosis, Jeannie was denied an H designation by the Vancouver School Board, prior to G designation being put in place. They claim her condition is not serious enough to qualify. They claim her needs are not severe.
This refusal is not rooted in evidence. It is rooted in disbelief—the institutional habit of requiring girls to collapse completely before their suffering is taken seriously. Jeannie is unable to eat. She chews her cheek instead.. She carries home full lunches. She cries in the car after school. Her weight has flatlined, her energy dips early, her body is biologically years behind. And still, the school pretends she’s just being disobedient.
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She graduated and this is what she learned
On raising a badass advocate, unintentionally. I didn’t set out to raise an advocate—I set out to raise a child. A child who might feel safe in her body and steady in her breath, who might look out at the world and feel…
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Apparently, starving yourself isn’t a serious mental health condition in VSB
There is a kind of harm that unfolds slowly — a hunger that accumulates across weeks and months, tucked beneath the surface of routines and well-meaning systems. My daughter is autistic, has ADHD, and a feeding disorder called ARFID. She eats quietly, cautiously,…
The cost of being good
Jeannie has done everything asked of her. She has seen therapists. She has worked with OTs. She has practiced rituals, used timers, accepted modifications. She has brought safe snacks. She has tolerated classroom unpredictability. She has spoken up, quietly, and often without being believed. And when she couldn’t tolerate it anymore, she removed herself from the classroom—a choice that was framed as avoidance, even when made to escape a dysregulated peer who repeatedly violated her space and whose size dwarfed hers.
This is the pattern: when autistic boys escalate, they are understood as overwhelmed. When autistic girls withdraw, they are read as disinterested. Jeannie is not disinterested. She is exhausted. She is hungry. She is doing everything she can to function inside a system that treats nourishment as an extra, not a right.
When the harm becomes cellular
This is what institutional harm looks like when it moves from policy to bloodstream: when growth halts, when menstruation delays, when biological age no longer matches the calendar. This is what happens when schools frame eating as a behavioural issue, when food access is contingent on self-advocacy or permission, when sensory overwhelm is interpreted as rudeness, when being quiet is mistaken for coping.
Jeannie’s size is not a metaphor. It is data. It is medical evidence. It is the result of an education system that withholds belief until a child disappears enough to be seen.
What care requires
She does not need more flexibility. She does not need another conversation about snack blocks or buddy benches. She does not need to be told to ask nicely, to wait her turn, to build stamina. She needs her food at her desk, in the classroom, in ways that feel normal and easy. She needs adults to understand that ARFID is not solved by good intentions. It is addressed through certainty, structure, and proactive, neurodivergent-informed support.
She needs support embedded in design, not exception. She needs access built into the architecture of the day—into how classrooms are run, how staff are trained, how needs are logged and honoured. She needs eating to be treated as as ordinary as breathing, and as essential.
She is growing, still. She is fighting for her life, softly, daily. She knows what safety feels like, and she knows what being believed looks like. And in a world where disbelief comes dressed as policy, belief is the first act of care.
