Robin was eleven the day he fell and came up swinging. It was recess, and something had happened—a misstep, a bump, a collision on uneven ground. His body hit the pavement. And when he rose, disoriented and humiliated, the first thing in his path was his best friend. So he struck him, over and over.
That friend, Michael, had constituted one of the few stable social anchors tethering Robin to the fraught and often exclusionary environment of public schooling. Following that moment, Michael began to withdraw, and Robin—who already struggled with social inference and the unpredictability of peer interaction—internalised the rupture as evidence of personal failure. He was, in his own view, dangerous. Unwelcome. Irredeemably messed up.
The school, in its formal response, informed us that he could offer an apology. That, they assured us, would go a long way.
Executive function cannot survive neurobiological distress
There is an elementary, neurophysiological fact that appears to elude many educational institutions, or worse, to be wilfully ignored: when a child is pushed into a state of fight-or-flight, the brain regions responsible for executive function—including inhibitory control, emotional regulation, complex decision-making, and language processing—are rendered significantly less accessible. The prefrontal cortex ceases to function as a reliable control centre, and the amygdala assumes dominance, prioritising rapid survival responses over measured thought.
When autistic or otherwise neurodivergent children are routinely placed in environments that exceed their coping capacity—through sensory overload, unstructured social risk, or the removal of regulatory scaffolds—and are then deprived of the necessary accommodations that might anchor them in a state of relative safety, we are not witnessing individual dysregulation but rather the systemic orchestration of distress.
What follows is not behaviour that can be “managed” through discipline or moral reasoning; it is a neurobiological inevitability.
The structural fragility of peer relationships
Friendships for neurodivergent children often depend on an exceedingly delicate balance of shared interest, environmental familiarity, and consistent facilitation by adults attuned to their communicative and sensory profiles. These relationships, though deeply valued, can be extraordinarily vulnerable to disruption. Minor misunderstandings, sudden emotional shifts, or even momentary regulatory lapses may sever ties that took months or years to establish.
When Robin unintentionally harmed Michael, the social consequence was not merely interpersonal but existential. Robin did not simply lose a friend; he lost the only relational context within which school still felt even marginally safe. Without that tether, his ability to participate, to self-regulate, to trust the environment or the adults within it, eroded rapidly and visibly.
We often invoke the mantra that relationships are foundational to learning. But for disabled students, particularly those whose behaviour is misunderstood as defiance or aggression, relationships function as lifelines—regulatory, affective, and epistemological supports that ground the possibility of education itself.
Support is not the temporary absence of crisis
One of the most pernicious narratives in special education is the assumption that the absence of visible crisis equates to success. When a child is quiet, or compliant, or no longer dissolving into explosive distress, the system interprets this as evidence that support is no longer required—when, in fact, it may indicate that the child has given up signalling their unmet needs.
Robin’s dysregulated episode was not an isolated failure of willpower. It was the foreseeable result of a prolonged period during which adequate support was withdrawn, transitional scaffolds were not replaced, and the cumulative stress of daily educational inaccessibility went unacknowledged. That he eventually “snapped” is not a revelation but a confirmation.
To position such events as aberrations that require moral atonement rather than systemic scrutiny is to locate blame in the child rather than in the conditions that predictably overwhelmed him.
Moral responsibility and institutional negligence
Robin did apologise. He expressed remorse in every way his eleven-year-old self could muster. But the weight of that apology, and the social isolation that followed, communicated something far more lasting: that the burden of repair lay with him alone. That his disability was a personal failing. That when things broke, it was always his fault.
This is the opposite of inclusion. This is the opposite of support.
True support is anticipatory. It is structured around the principle of dignified access, recognising that regulation is not innate but relational, not fixed but contingent upon the environment. It is adult responsibility—not student compliance—that determines whether a child remains within their window of tolerance.
When educational institutions repeatedly fail to maintain those relational and regulatory conditions, and then isolate children for the consequences of that failure, they are not simply denying support. They are enacting structural violence.
To leave a child in fight-or-flight, and then demand they exhibit social grace, emotional literacy, and moral contrition, is to punish them for the brain state we induced and refused to alleviate.
This is not a misstep. It is a moral breach.
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Just when it starts working, they take it away
The cruelty of temporary support in BC schools. There is a particular kind of cruelty in getting what your child needs—finally—and knowing it will be taken away. In the fall of 2017, our family reached a breaking point. Our child Robin was refusing…
