Coercive Control
Not a domestic incident—a public education practice. Coercive control describes the use of surveillance, threats, emotional manipulation, and systemic pressure to limit someone’s freedom, often without physical force. In schools, it looks like forced compliance, reward-punishment charts, and selective resource access. This tag applies a coercive control framework to education systems and asks what it would mean to prioritise relational safety over obedience.
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They keep moving the goalposts while our kids pay the price
It began with a phone call that felt like a lifeline. A new teacher was coming, they said, and maybe this would be the one to understand. We clung to that hope. We paid for another assessment, scheduled more therapy, spent weekends in waiting rooms and weekdays in meetings where the promise of change hovered…
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When schools say a child went from “zero to sixty”
Let’s rip the mask off this polite, professional charade: when schools say a child went from “zero to sixty,” they are lying to protect themselves. They are covering for the adults who ignored every warning, missed every signal, and left a child to be harassed, baited, and humiliated until their nervous system screamed for survival.…
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The brutal truth about schools weaponising therapy to deny your child’s rights
Schools are weaponising therapy as a gatekeeper to support—forcing parents to “prove” worth through endless interventions while shielding systemic harm. The system is broken, not our children.
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Why do teachers punish the whole class for one student?
Collective punishment is when a group is made to face the same consequence because of the actions of one person or a small number of people. In school, this can mean the entire class loses recess, an activity is cancelled, or privileges are taken away because of something one student did. The rules are applied…
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The truth shall set us free: healing from institutional violence in BC public schools
Healing doesn’t begin with massages or mindset shifts. It begins with telling the truth about what was done to us—about what it means to watch your child collapse under institutional betrayal, to be praised for your composure while they take away his lifeline. The system demands civility while delivering harm. This essay is a witness…
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My neighbour asked if I wanted to talk to her friend who is a social worker
It was meant as kindness, like she’d mistaken my roaming the neighbourhood bawling as some sort of cry for help instead of just my typical state as I sift through the details of ten years of institutional harm. I weep because I feel pain and I’ve had to trap it inside and I’m fucking done…
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Field notes from the frontlines of maternal disobedience
This essay charts the intellectual and emotional ground I’ve been covering lately—disability justice, compliance logic, institutional betrayal, and legal clarity. Each section links to a recent piece of writing that names harm, traces its structural origins, and places language around what advocacy does to the body, the mind, and the moral life of a family.
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15 red flags your child’s school is running the playbook on you
How to spot coercive proceduralism before it drains your energy, your trust, and your child’s future. You may have been advocating for your child for months—attending meetings, responding to emails, following every process they set out—yet the accommodations you discussed never seem to appear in the classroom. You might notice your child’s struggles at school…
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How narcissism and PDA collide in the wreckage of trust
Some children refuse control because control has always felt like violence. Because control has worn the face of love and left behind a residue of shame. Because adults said, “this is for your own good” while ignoring tears, violating autonomy, and insisting that compliance was safety. For these children, especially those with a PDA profile,…
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Parenting through gaslighting and grief
In the early days, our relationship was luminous, almost feverishly bright with attention and agreement and what I understood then as love—its intensity, its precision, the way it seemed to reach for every part of me, even the parts I kept hidden, even the ones I feared were too strange or fragile to show. I…
