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 if I hadn’t shown up on the first day of kindergarten with hope in my heart.
As if I hadn’t tried everything I could to make school feel safe.
As if years of broken promises should be cast aside—ignored, excused, forgotten—so I could once again mortgage my relationship with my own children, trying to convince them that the adults in charge had it handled. That everything was fine.
It is not fine. And pretending it is, just to make professionals feel reassured, is not trust—it is emotional labour extracted from already overburdened families.
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We did everything right, but we were failed
Introducing Robin’s story and the cost of manufactured scarcity In British Columbia, the promise of public education is being quietly dismantled. Not with headlines, not with declarations—but with slow erosion, strategic omission, and institutional neglect.
Trust as performance, not reciprocity
Over time, I came to understand that what the school wanted from me was not truth, but performance. Not evidence, not partnership, but reassurance. I was expected to model trust, not because the school had earned it, but because my failure to do so disrupted the illusion that everything was working.
It was, in essence, a demand for deference.
I was told—sometimes subtly, sometimes directly—that I was making things harder by asking too many questions. That my tone, my frustration, my exhaustion were undermining the “relationship.” Not because my concerns were untrue, but because I was showing the strain. And in their eyes, that made me the problem.
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The moral cost of leaving children in fight-or-flight
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…
Burnout is not a personal failing—it’s a systemic outcome
But what they were noticing wasn’t hostility. It was burnout. It was the inevitable result of being endlessly reasonable in the face of unreasonable systems. I had done everything right—collaborated, complied, softened the truth, absorbed the impact. And still, support was withdrawn. Still, my child came home dysregulated. Still, I was asked to do more.
And when I finally stopped pretending—when I stopped shielding the school from the truth of what was happening at home—that was when they decided I was no longer collaborative.
But burnout is not evidence of personal failure.
Just a PArent
It is a measure of systemic neglect. When families like mine fall apart under the weight of care, it is not because we didn’t try hard enough—it’s because the systems around us never held their share of the load.
Disabled families carry memory. That’s not a flaw—it’s a wisdom.
What the school refused to acknowledge is that my mistrust did not come out of nowhere. My children were abused in daycare. We entered the school system already carrying the weight of institutional betrayal. And still—I tried.
But when accommodations were denied, when plans weren’t followed, when harm was downplayed or erased, that original distrust was reignited. And rightfully so.
This is not unique to my family. Across British Columbia, schools are expected to serve families who come from refugee camps, from war zones, from homes marked by domestic violence, intergenerational trauma, state intervention, or systemic neglect. Some, like us, come from broken centres—settings that did not protect our children when they were most vulnerable.
To expect these families to blindly trust institutions—without reflection, without repair—is to pathologise their wisdom. It is to ignore the very histories that schools claim to honour when they speak of inclusion.
We are told that children need to practice self-regulation. But what of institutions? What of schools that make repeated mistakes and demand trust in return?
Institutional betrayal and the limits of “professionalism”
This is a classic pattern of institutional betrayal—when systems we depend on for protection actually cause harm. In education, this betrayal is often obscured by layers of professionalism, documentation, and polite language. But the harm is no less real.
The emotional burden is then reframed as a relationship problem—a failure of interpersonal trust, rather than a structural failure to support. The parent who names this dynamic becomes “difficult.” The parent who persists becomes a liability. And the school that failed to act becomes the victim of tone.
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The politics of politeness: how tone-policing silences parent advocates
When a parent dares to speak plainly about harm—especially when that harm is systemic, ongoing, and inflicted upon a disabled child—they are swiftly met with a familiar response: watch your tone.
What gets erased is the simple fact that trust must be earned—through action, through follow-through, through honesty. Not just once, but consistently. And when schools mistake parental silence for respect, or exhaustion for agreement, they miss the warning signs that a relationship is already broken.
In short: it is not the job of parents to project trust. It is the job of institutions to be trustworthy.
Just a Parent
Beyond the “unhealable pile”
Perhaps most devastating is the quiet designation some families receive: the unhealable pile. The ones staff quietly decide are too complicated. The ones whose trauma is too big, whose vigilance is too persistent, whose trust is too damaged to ever be convenient.
But these are the very families schools must be built for. Because inclusion is not defined by how well we serve the easiest kids from the calmest homes. It is defined by how we hold those whose faith has been earned the hardest—and broken the most.
We don’t need schools to perform trust. We need them to embody trustworthiness. That is a higher standard. It requires self-reflection, consistency, accountability, and care. Not just for students—but for the families who walk beside them, carrying histories they never asked for, and truths too heavy to carry alone.
