Family Experience
Personal stories from families about the impact of collective punishment.
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Too competent to help, too angry to believe
The impossible performance of grace in systems that harm our children. Holding two pieces in tension This essay is written alongside a truth that cannot be softened. A truth that spills out, unsanitized, unmanageable, and fully lived. A truth that takes the form of intrusive thoughts, violent imagery, desperate poise, and carefully practiced restraint. That…
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How do you live with yourself
Part of my neurodivergence is fatalism; part of it is hyperphantasia; part of it is the inability to look out at a beautiful landscape without imagining loss, rupture, and death, because even as a small child on the ferry to Victoria, while other people were looking out over the water and the mountains and the…
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I have thought about writing her a letter
I have thought about writing her a letter—something long and deliberate, something shaped by memory and moral clarity, something that names what occurred and places it in her hands before the door finally closes. The idea moves through me with a kind of gravitational pull, neither urgent nor calm, just pressing and circling. I return…
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Institutional gaslighting of caregivers
You refuse to forget, because forgetting would mean abandoning your child’s reality—and you have already watched too many adults do that with a straight face and a professional tone. You refuse to downplay what has happened, because the harm is not theoretical—it lives in your child’s nervous system, in her school avoidance, in her refusal…
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Wait and see: a mother’s warning
Before kindergarten began, we told them—unequivocally, painstakingly, with as much specificity as we could muster—that our son had been harmed in daycare, that he had a long line of diagnoses and was awaiting an autism assessment, that his nervous system was thrashed, and that he would require sustained, full-day relational support in order to experience…
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The architecture of exclusion: how schools erase, silence, and wear down families
Schools are supposed to be spaces of inclusion and support—but for many families, especially those raising disabled or neurodivergent children, advocacy is met with a wall of politeness, professionalism, and performative listening that hides a deeper violence: rhetorical control. One of the most common tactics is tone policing: the redirection of attention from a parent’s concern…
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Summer school blues: on being excluded from the gifted program
In the spring of 2018, I applied to the Vancouver School Board’s summer Gifted/Challenge Program for my twins, Jeannie and Robin, who had just finished kindergarten and were, in different ways, already outpacing the curriculum. Robin was already captivated by the ancient world—particularly Egypt, with its pyramids, its rituals, its mythologies of death and continuity,…
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A survival guide for children in schools that don’t keep them safe
“If no one listens, go to the bathroom and call me. I will always come.” This isn’t just parenting. It’s crisis management. When schools become unsafe—when accommodations are denied, when support staff are missing, when harmful adults are brought back again and again—families like mine develop our own protocols. We build them from repetition, from…
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She called the police and the principal told them not to come
They used to be friends—Jeannie and Adam, two children who grew up side by side, navigating the same schoolyards, chaotic birthday parties, playdates, and a sense that their differences were both misunderstood. They went to the reptile show together and settled into the rhythm of primary school routines, and the kind of familiarity shared by…
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On free IVF: love and systemic neglect
BC is funding IVF, but not the care children need once they’re born. Love is enough. The system isn’t. This is betrayal dressed as hope.
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Punished for bed wetting
I’ve woken up in the middle of the night to help my children when they’ve wet the bed—perhaps after a bad dream or too much water before bedtime. I remember helping them change their clothes, stripping the bed, telling them gently: it’s okay. It happens. It’s a small moment that reminds me what care looks…
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Fight flight fawn freeze: surviving school
There are children who throw chairs when cornered, children who slip quietly out the door or hide behind the portable, children who don’t speak for hours, who go limp, who answer every question with “I don’t know,” and children who nod and smile and say “okay” to everything—until they collapse at home, trembling and broken,…
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Anxiety is not an overreaction: why neurodivergent distress demands a different response
There is a kind of anxiety that rises up like a wave—not sudden, not irrational, not the result of faulty thinking or poor coping, but steady, cumulative, and earned. A body that has learned the world is not safe, not soft, not designed for it. A body that has been punished for asking for help,…
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When they knew it hurt, and did it anyway
I was clear. I was specific. I was unwavering. I told the Vancouver School Board that I believed behaviourist strategies were harmful, violated my child’s dignity, and contradicted our family’s ethics—and that continuing to use them without consent would cause further harm. They used them anyway. Over and over, the school district returned to strategies…
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Forgiveness, or whatever comes after disbelief
A friend asked me recently why I hadn’t filed more external complaints—human rights complaints, formal grievances, legal action. And it’s true. I should have. There were so many moments where I could have, where I had grounds to. And I believe deeply in the importance of external complaints. I’ve written about them. I’ve supported other…
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To the neurodivergent kid who got blamed
Worried your mistake might get your whole class punished? That fear isn’t yours to carry. Here’s why—and what you can do.
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How it broke me open: the unbearable clarity of seeing things as they are
I know another reason the collective punishment incident was so devastating for me, like truly sent-me-spiralling kind of devastating, wasn’t just because of what was done to the kids (although yes, obviously that too), but because of what it broke in me, in how I’d been holding things together for so long with this scaffolding of…
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The cost of being careful: how punishment rewires the brain for fear, not learning
There are classrooms where children learn to think, and there are classrooms where children learn to be careful. Too often, we pretend they are the same. But when punishment—especially collective or public punishment—dominates the emotional tone of a learning space, what emerges is not intellectual risk-taking or social responsibility. What emerges is fear. Surveillance. A…
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Not a stick in the mud
When I told another mom recently—someone kind, someone well-meaning, someone whose son used to play with mine back when things were easier—that I was feeling fragile about him being home since March, and that it had all gotten heavier than I expected, she responded gently and said, “Would he like to come over for a…
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Trust as performance: when schools want deference, not dialogue
One of the most infuriating parts of being gaslit by my children’s elementary school was the repeated suggestion that I simply didn’t trust them enough. That the reason my child was struggling wasn’t because support was missing, or harm had occurred—but because I had failed to signal trust. Failed to pretend everything was fine. As…
