There was an email, sent in a moment of exhaustion, where I mentioned that I was considering a Human Rights complaint. The next IEP meeting rolled around, and suddenly the draft was almost unrecognisable—careful, thoughtful, neurodiversity-affirming. For the first time in eight years, it sounded like something written for my child rather than about my child.
It should have felt like relief. Instead, I felt shook. Because the body keeps a record. Mine remembers every meeting where I was spoken over, every year when accommodations were forgotten, every emergency that could have been prevented, every time my child was inconsolable or withdrawn. It remembers driving home from school, head buzzing so loudly that I couldn’t form sentences, screaming into the void, and then unable to work because the meeting had hollowed me out. It remembers learning to fear the words collaboration, goals, outcomes. The coercive proceduralism.
When the body has rehearsed betrayal for years, safety feels suspicious. I sat there nauseous, tight-chested, dry-mouthed, trying to seem calm so my daughter wouldn’t see my dread. When something finally goes right, the body doesn’t relax—it feels ready to fight for your child.
-
Coercive proceduralism, bandwidth theft, and the colonisation of neurodivergent childhood
Families of neurodivergent children are often coerced into endless therapy to access school support—yet the harm lies in the institution, not the child. This essay explores how coercive proceduralism and bandwidth theft turn care into compliance, and why rest, not more intervention, may be the most honest path to healing.
The long season of being ignored
Reading Kim Block’s essay about delay, I recognised the entire architecture of those years. Delay as punishment. Delay as filtration. Delay as a quiet violence that empties families of energy until they disappear from the system’s inbox.
How many dinners with friends did I miss while we were still in the hopeless / ignore category? How many walks or concerts did I forfeit to write follow-up emails, log dates, document silence? How many versions of myself dissolved in that waiting room of bureaucracy before someone decided we were worth trying for again?
The cruelty of delay is its plausibility. Every postponement sounds reasonable. Every unanswered email is an oversight. Every rescheduled meeting is regrettable but understandable. Yet the sum of these “reasonable” things is a slow erasure of human life. Delay metabolises hope.
Conditional care
When I saw the new IEP, I wondered if the difference was that I had finally become a liability. Maybe the hint of a complaint triggered competence. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe someone genuinely cared.
But this is the horror of conditional care: once you’ve been harmed enough, even goodness feels strategic. You start to interpret compassion as risk management. You wonder who else is still languishing in the ignored pile because they haven’t found the right words, the right allies, the right threat.
The inequity of access doesn’t end when the document improves; it just shifts from omission to rationing. Someone decided that this time, my child’s suffering was administratively inconvenient. That is progress, but it isn’t justice. A sword still hangs above our heads.
The arithmetic of loss
No one counts the hours stolen from family life—the invisible cost of administrative neglect. The picnics declined, the friendships left untended, the parts of yourself consumed by correspondence.
Each delay transfers the cost to families. We pay in time, in health, in the hollow ache of never catching up. When educators finally do the right thing, it’s right to say thank you. It’s also right to mourn what was taken while we waited to be believed, and to feel the weight of what safety costs after years of fear.
A small, exhausted hope
The IEP was good. Truly. The staff were kind, attentive, open to feedback. I said as much in the room, and I meant it. But walking home, I felt frazzled—relieved, sceptical, and completely spent. Every milestone forward feels heavier because of what came before. The progress itself drags an albatross of memory.
It’s hard to trust a system that only shows its humanity when threatened with accountability. Maybe this is what healing looks like in public education: learning to feel hope without mistaking it for safety, to accept a moment of decency while remembering the years devoured by delay.
-
25 signs that your IEP team is disabling your child
In the space where families gather with school teams to shape a child’s Individual Education Plan, the language often carries more weight than paper can bear, for each phrase can open a door toward inclusion or quietly plant the seeds of exclusion, and the difference lies in whether the plan nourishes capacity or erodes it. […]
