Neurodivergence

Concepts and lived experiences related to autism, ADHD, sensory processing, masking, executive functioning, and other neurodevelopmental traits.

I’m a seventh grade failure

Institutional capture refers to the process by which individuals — parents, children, advocates, even dissenting professionals — are absorbed into the operational logic of an institution to the point where they begin reproducing its framework, its language, and its priorities, without necessarily endorsing them or recognising what is happening. It is distinct from agreement. You do…
Masking and Human Rights law in BC

Autistic students (especially girls) often hide (“mask”) their natural behaviours to avoid peer conflict and “fit in” at school. When educators implicitly or explicitly demand this masking – for example by discouraging stimming or forcing conformity – it can amount to a form of discrimination and harm under BC and Canadian law. This article examines…
The masking tax: how autistic girls absorb bullying invisibly in BC schools

Autistic girls in B.C. schools often develop sophisticated masking or camouflaging strategies to hide their autism in order to fit in and avoid bullying. In the short term this can make them appear “fine” – leading teachers and administrators to assume no support is needed – but the “masking tax” is high. Decades of invisible stress and exclusion build up as girls…
Meltdown monster: how exclusion makes bullying worse

I often think back to the school principal telling me that when kids see my son, they don’t see an autistic child, they just see a child being mean. When a disabled child melts down at school—after sensory overload, social stress, academic pressure, and chronic misattunement—schools rarely ask what led up to the crisis. Instead,…
What 8 years of advocacy took from our family

I advocate because I love my children and I want them to be well. Because I know the accommodations they require are entirely tenable, requiring only modest shifts in how adults think and respond. Because it is unbearable to watch them be slowly debilitated by a system that insists their needs are excessive and their…
The dishwasher, the hard drive, and what counts as progress when your child survives school

My son unloaded the dishwasher today without being asked. This is the first chore I can remember him doing of his own accord since he was a toddler—before school taught him that compliance means danger, before demand avoidance became the fortress protecting what remained of his autonomy, before each day required such total depletion that…
On subjectivity, vicarious belonging, and institutional violence

Winter light, girls singing, a boy listening from the front seat. A mother tries to witness without interpreting what nine months of isolation cost.
Inclusive schooling solutions

I have spent years documenting institutional harm. Documentation feels natural to me, perhaps because my professional background as solution architect and business analyst. Professionally, I’m used to solving problems, but in education, not having classroom experience, I feel very clear that I can say what works for my kid, but I can’t say what works…
Champlain Heights Annex School (VSB SD39): a neurodiversity-informed conduct critique

Champlain Heights Annex School’s Code of Conduct promises a safe, inclusive, equitable, welcoming, nurturing, and healthy school environment. The document aligns explicitly with Vancouver School Board’s District Student Code of Conduct (AP 350), affirms the BC Human Rights Code, and structures behavioural expectations through a three-level consequence framework extending from classroom redirection to formal suspension.…
The cost of saying ‘change costs nothing’

Long before it became common sense, the spherical shape of the Earth was already known. Astronomers, mathematicians, and navigators across multiple ancient cultures—within the Hellenic world, in ancient India, in Islamic scholarship—had measured the Earth’s curvature, calculated its circumference with remarkable accuracy, and built navigational systems that depended on that knowledge. This was not speculative…
When schools ask disabled children to accept being hurt

I used to have a pretty good dialogue with my kids, before they experienced a lot of institutional harm. The conversations flow less freely now and less seldom, but back then, we chatted a lot and I often recorded the conversations, for proof, having experienced enough gaslighting from the district to know I wouldn’t be…
How public schools tax disabled families twice

My son has been home for nine months. The school asks periodically about return timelines, performing care through language. They say they would like to see him back at school. Meanwhile, his nervous system tells a different story: sleep patterns regulating, appetite returning, capacity for joy expanding in direct proportion to distance from their supervision.…
When evidence changes nothing: what 2,842 families reveal about institutional refusal

The International Council of Multiple Birth Organisations published a study in 2020 examining school placement decisions for twins and higher-order multiples across eighteen countries, surveying 2,842 families whose children had attended school for at least one year. The findings confirm what families of multiples already know from lived experience: schools operate placement policies that prioritise…
A school advocacy vocabulary

What families experience in schools is often described as a series of unfortunate incidents: a meltdown here, a missed accommodation there, a relationship breakdown framed as “complex family dynamics.” But these events are not random, isolated, or accidental. They are patterned. They recur across schools, districts, and provinces. They follow recognisable logics, deploy familiar language,…
The good twin, the bad twin, and the system that needed both

Before school taught them roles, they played tea party—taking turns serving and being served. Seven years later, I can’t say with certainty whether one would fetch the fire extinguisher if the other caught flame.
Manitoba’s “positive behaviour agreements” and BC’s PBIS infrastructure

Jillian Enright identifies the central contradiction in Manitoba Education Minister Tracy Schmidt’s 2025 announcement of “positive, student-centred approaches” grounded in what the province calls positive behaviour agreements: these agreements present themselves as collaborative documents created between students and staff, yet the power imbalance renders genuine collaboration structurally impossible, leaving students to validate pre-determined behavioural expectations…
When children write the rules

The teacher’s letter arrives home with careful reassurances about fairness, dignity, and professional expertise, yet embedded within its polite paragraphs sits a fundamental contradiction: the rules governing this seventh-grade classroom emerged from the crowdsourced preferences of twelve-year-old children rather than from pedagogical research or developmental understanding. Ah yes, the wisdom of crowds—particularly effective when the…
POPARD’s PDA doublespeak

I noticed that POPARD is advertising another workshop on Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) in April 2026, titled Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA): What We Know & What We Are Learning. The description is familiar: PDA is framed as a “growing topic of interest,” something “some clinicians and researchers describe” as an autism profile. The language is cautious,…
When provincial bodies dismiss parental expertise: POPARD, sticker charts, and the refusal of heterogeneity

In the previous essay, I examined neuroimaging research demonstrating that autism and ADHD are not internally homogeneous diagnostic categories but rather contain multiple neurologically distinct subgroups, often with opposite patterns of brain structure alterations relative to controls. The Pecci-Terroba study reveals what categorical intervention logic refuses to accommodate: diagnosis alone cannot determine whether a specific…
Subgrouping autism and ADHD based on structural MRI population modelling centiles

A June 2025 neuroimaging study examining brain structure patterns across individuals with autism, ADHD, and combined diagnoses, published in Molecular Autism by Pecci-Terroba and colleagues applies population modelling to cluster participants based on centile scores for cortical thickness, surface area, and grey matter volume, using HYDRA—a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm that identifies subgroups based on…

Neurodivergence

End collective punishment in BC schools