Family Experience
Personal stories from families about the impact of collective punishment.
-
Not nothing: on being a parent with feelings in a system that asks for self-erasure
I have spent years trying not to take up space. Years trying not to be “one of those parents”—too loud, too emotional, too self-involved. I have been careful with my tone, careful with my words, careful not to name the hurt when my child was excluded, neglected, or harmed. I told myself: focus on the…
-
The slow boil: delayed support and collective punishment
I think a lot about lobsters, wrestled from the sea and placed in cold water that slowly heats—do they wonder if it’s getting hot in there? How do they decide where the line is and begin to panic? Is it a thought or pure instinct? In kindergarten, my son arrived with a history of trauma…
-
On Stuart Shanker’s Self-Reg
I remember the feeling—desperate, hollowed out, shaking in that way that only comes when the world around you is collapsing and everyone keeps handing you checklists.
-
Few of us remain our best selves in a room starved of air
If you are a parent of a neurodivergent child, you can recite the script before the phone even buzzes. “[Child] had a very good day and really showed leadership with the younger kids” Pause. “But in the afternoon [Child] had some unexpected behaviour. [Child] is waiting at the office.” Praise is meant to help us feel that…
-
The days my children cried, and I told them it would be okay
When your trust has already been broken—by people who were supposed to care for you, protect you, believe you—every new betrayal lands like confirmation. I didn’t come to school meetings as a blank slate. I came with a trauma history. So when they dismissed my child’s needs, ignored the signs, or punished their distress, it…
-
No school at all is better than what he endured
No school at all is better than what he endured. That’s the truth I need to say out loud.The harm was not abstract. It was daily, specific, institutional. The classroom was a place where his distress was normalised.Where his needs were pathologised, and his presence was treated as a problem to be managed.He was punished…
-
The problem with the appeals process
When something goes wrong at school—when a child is excluded, harmed, or unsupported—families are told to “work it out with the school first.” That sounds reasonable on paper. But in practice, it’s vague, unstructured, and often retraumatising. I’ve gone through the Vancouver School Board (VSB) appeals process more times that I’d wish upon anyone. Here’s…
-
When school discipline undermines trust at home
There’s a problem in our schools. You’ll see it on a child’s face when they come home. You’ll hear it in the way they describe something that left them feeling humiliated, angry, or confused—and often, all three at once. It happens when school staff use discipline strategies that completely contradict the values a student has…
-
On moral injury and collective punishment
I did not want to file a complaint. I still don’t—not in the sense that people imagine, with anger or vengeance or a desire for punishment. What I wanted, what I asked for again and again with patience and clarity and increasing despair, was for the district to acknowledge that collective punishment is not just…
-
Rot at the root: Why POPARD must be dismantled from the top down
When I first objected to the strategies POPARD proposed, I tried—truly—to assume good intent: that if I just gave them the right information, the clearest language, the most generous interpretation of their mandate, they would course-correct and stop pushing reward charts onto an already-traumatised child. I wrote careful emails, cited the psychologist’s diagnosis, offered specific…
-
The high stakes of understanding PDA
Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) might sound like just another clinical term, but for many families it represents a daily struggle that is anything but trivial. PDA is a profile on the autism spectrum characterised by an extreme, anxiety-driven avoidance of everyday demands, even those the child wants to comply with drdonnahenderson.com reframingautism.org.au. This isn’t mere stubbornness or “bratty” behaviour – it’s a…
-
Dear other mom, I’ve got a few things to say
I know you’re trying not to make it worse. You write the careful email. You show up composed. You give everyone the benefit of the doubt. You try to keep the tone warm, even when your stomach turns. You’re doing everything you can to stay in the conversation—because you believe that if you’re reasonable, they…
-
Support is a bridge
What happens when schools pretend the bridge is whole. The appearance of help “She gets check-ins from the area counsellor once a week.”“We’ve made sure the classroom teacher is aware of her IEP.”“We’re doing everything we can within the current resources.” These are the phrases they recite—softly, professionally, as though reassurance were a substitute for…
-
Calling the exclusion line
Every morning, when we dial the school’s sick line, we enact a ritual that ought to acknowledge more than a fever or a stomach ache. In theory, this system exists to safeguard children who cannot attend school due to illness. In practice, it masks the institutional harms that shape our decisions, erasing critical context from…
-
The stories we carry: how schoolyard legends and classroom fear shape us
When I was in grade three, I attended an alternative school that felt like a sun-dappled meadow. We painted. We played outside. We had a math teacher who made learning feel like a game, not a test. There was room to breathe. I remember it as freedom. Then, in grade four, everything changed. My new…
-
Parenting through gaslighting and grief
In the early days, our relationship was luminous, almost feverishly bright with attention and agreement and what I understood then as love—its intensity, its precision, the way it seemed to reach for every part of me, even the parts I kept hidden, even the ones I feared were too strange or fragile to show. I…
-
Help please: call for Indigenous perspectives on collective punishment in BC schools.
We are seeking contributions from Indigenous scholars, knowledge-keepers and community leaders to speak to the history, lineage and lived impact of collective punishment in British Columbia’s public schools. Your insights will deepen understanding of how these practices have affected Indigenous children and communities and guide our advocacy for restorative, culturally grounded alternatives. What we’re looking…
-
Maternal scream: embodied rage in a system that punishes and smiles
This rage didn’t appear in a vacuum. It was not spontaneous. It is the inevitable consequence of a system that harms children while demanding that mothers smile back. It is what happens when a process is engineered to fail your child and then punishes you for noticing. They built the conditions. You simply refused to…
-
How regressive school policies limit inclusion
On the first day of school, it all looked so promising that it seemed almost too good to be true—the hallway bulletin boards overflowed with vibrant slogans about kindness, leadership, and community belonging, while the principal’s welcome message spoke in glowing terms about student voice, shared responsibility, and the promise of a positive school culture…
-
How classroom values become ableist barriers
There is no such thing as a neutral rule. Every expectation reflects a theory of the child: what is normal, what is ideal, what is possible. And in most classrooms, these theories are wrong. I was given a list of behavioural values from my child’s class—Division 3. It included items like: stay in the group,…
