Coercive proceduralism, bandwidth theft, and the colonisation of neurodivergent childhood

There is a procedural violence embedded in the way schools inquire about external therapy—not in the asking itself, which often appears benign or even concerned, but in the way such inquiries are entangled with eligibility, credibility, and the distribution of scarce support.

Over and over, in meetings purportedly dedicated to collaboration, I have been asked what therapy my child is receiving—as though external treatment operates as a gate key to internal accommodation, as though willingness to submit one’s child to corrective intervention demonstrates readiness to be granted access to what is already a legal and moral entitlement: education that respects their needs.

The cruelty lives in the double bind. Because for children with an H designation—who may have an ADHD profile, or whose distress is behaviouralised—the system demands evidence of therapeutic compliance to unlock even partial support. And even then, that support often arrives laced with conditionality, temporality, and requiring families to continue managing an invisible emotional contract in which the school retains the power to withdraw care for any reason.

Meanwhile, children with a G designation—who have been formally diagnosed as autistic—are theoretically entitled to support based on their profile alone, with no duty for families to prove anything further.

Yet in practice, the asymmetry remains: those who already bend themselves in service of school expectations are granted the thinnest tolerance, while those who fall outside the comfort zone of the classroom are treated as suspect unless continuously submitted for outside recalibration.

Bandwidth as currency

When my children were suffering, when they were being misunderstood, punished, and broken in classrooms that misread their signals and pathologised their refusal, I did everything I could think of to soften the harm. We tried occupational therapy, counselling, art therapy, play-based therapy, social groups, medications, and endless home-based accommodations. I filled out forms, booked sessions, used every hour I had after work, and built calendar systems to ferry them across the city in an attempt to meet what felt like an implicit demand: prove your commitment, prove your hope, prove your fitness as a parent by submitting your children for endless rounds of therapeutic correction.

What I understand now, with a sorrow that pierces me with its clarity, is that we were never the ones in need of recalibration.

Just a Parent

My children were not broken. The problem was the conditions they were asked to survive. The harm was institutional, cultural, logistical, and political. It arrived in the shape of unsupported classrooms, shaming behaviour plans, delayed assessments, impossible demands, teacher training rooted in compliance and correction, and a culture of blame so thick that it coated everything in the sickly residue of parental failure.

My children were doing what anyone would do: they were trying to survive. And my desire to help them made me complicit, for a time, in the belief that survival could be achieved through compliance with a system that was already starving them of oxygen.

The psychologist’s rebuke

There is a moment I will never forget. After years of self-doubt and confusion, my daughter was finally assessed and diagnosed by a kind, brilliant female psychologist who is also autistic, and who knew exactly how schools misread autistic girls. I sat across from her, desperate to know what we could do next, what program might help, what method we had not yet tried.

And she looked at me—clear-eyed, kind, and unflinching—and said something like: Do you think that, after surviving a full day in an institution that is not designed for her, your daughter should then be sent to therapy? Hand that child an iPad and leave her regulate.

It was the opposite of neglect. It was a radical intervention. It was the first time someone had affirmed that rest is resistance, that withdrawing from systems that misread you was a sign of health, not collapse.

Since then, I have watched dozens of families, mostly of neurodivergent children, spend their entire lives in logistical purgatory—shuttling from session to session, always half-hopeful and half-exhausted, trying to do the right thing, trying to save their child’s future while institutions siphon off their energy and misdirect it into private service systems that rarely touch the root of the problem.

Children are not broken. The system is.

I no longer believe that therapy is inherently helpful. I believe that therapy, when chosen freely and resourced appropriately, can be life-giving. But I also believe that coerced therapy, system-induced therapy, performative therapy, and compulsory therapy function less like care and more like a process of individualisation, in which the problem is always located in the child and never in the institution that failed them. And as a mechanism to keep their parents busy, while their children circle the drain.

I believe that asking a child who is dysregulated by classroom exclusion to attend therapy after school hours is a form of cruelty. I believe that sending a child who has just been restrained, or denied recess, or humiliated by their peers, into another adult’s office to talk about their behaviour, is a violence disguised as care.

I believe that neurodivergent children are often punished by proxy—sentenced to emotional labour in service of other people’s discomfort—and that therapy, in this context, becomes an institutional ritual meant to demonstrate parental diligence and absorb systemic liability.

And if we are talking about therapy—if we are talking about who should be doing the work—I think often about what it would mean for the staff to attend therapy. What would it mean for the adults who enforce compliance, who write the behaviour plans, who call the meetings where they inquire about your external services, to submit themselves for relational repair, accountability practice, trauma-informed deprogramming, and restorative reflection on the ways they have participated in institutional harm while telling themselves they are helping?

Toward collective repair

Therapy, when wielded as a condition for care, becomes a mechanism of coercive proceduralism—a way to impose additional burdens on those already marginalised, a tollgate that requires emotional currency from families who are already spending everything they have just to survive. This is bandwidth taxation.

What I want now is simple. I want us to stop treating neurodivergent children as broken. I want us to stop asking families to fix what the system refuses to acknowledge. I want us to centre the child’s right to rest, to joy, to play, to selfhood unshaped by a clinical gaze. I want to abolish the presumption that resilience must be earned through submission to every possible form of intervention.

And I want to say this with full clarity: those beautiful, sensitive, reactive, attuned, emotionally porous children you call difficult or delayed or challenging or complex—they are not the problem. They are the evidence of your crime of rationing joy and instilling agony in our system. They are the barometer. They are the most accurate index of the harm we tolerate and the hypocrisy we disguise.

Their refusal is diagnostic. Their distress is data. Their meltdown is a mirror. Their collapse is a consequence.

So let us stop pretending that a therapy plan is the price of a support plan. Let us stop asking parents to prove their commitment by sacrificing every evening, every dollar, every remaining scrap of energy to compensate for what the school failed to do between 9 and 3. And let us begin the hard work of shifting the frame—toward collective repair, toward institutional responsibility, and toward a vision of education that no longer requires children to pay to belong.

A note for parents considering therapy

I want to speak directly to the parent who is sitting with tabs open, wondering whether one more therapy might help, whether a new modality, a new clinic, a new name might finally unlock relief—wondering whether choosing therapy signals hope, or whether declining it suggests resignation. You are not alone in that question.
I believe in therapy, deeply. I have witnessed its power to heal, especially when it honours the child’s pace, the family’s values, and the true source of suffering. But I do not believe in therapy as currency, as obligation, or as reputational armour for systems that fail to provide care where it is owed. And I am 100% clear—as is the evidence abundantly so—that therapy for the adults in a child’s life is demonstrably more effective than therapy for the child, particularly when the child’s distress is relational, systemic, and ongoing.

So if you are considering therapy, I offer you this lens: therapy is most effective when it treats the wound, not the warning sign. It should be a container for safety, not an instrument of blame. It should honour your child’s fatigue, not add to it. And it should never be used to make your family more palatable to institutions that have already failed you.

If therapy will bring your child joy, if it will expand their world, if it will help them understand their own story in a loving and empowering way—then that is therapy worth pursuing. But if the only reason to say yes is to secure a support plan, prove your credibility, or fulfil an unspoken expectation—then it may be the system that needs repair, not your child.