Disabled Parenting

The school system is not designed to support families when the caregiver is disabled or chronically ill. These posts reflect on institutional ableism, neuronormative bias, and the systemic erasure of disabled parents in education. What happens when the person writing the emails, attending the meetings, and asking for help also needs accommodations to participate fully? Here, we trace the invisible labour of disabled caregiving—exhausting, ingenious, and often ignored. The Disabled Parenting Project (DPP), part of the National Research Center for Parents with Disabilities, is a community-led initiative that shares lived experience, challenges systemic discrimination, and generates policy-relevant research by and for disabled parents—including those navigating neurodivergence.

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The children don’t see autism, they see meanness

How schools weaponise ableism through gendered care expectations. Harm amplified by systemic ableism The principal once told me, almost as an aside, that the children “don’t see autism, they see meanness.” It was meant as an explanation, but to me it landed as an indictment of a school culture—to let that ableist misunderstanding stand unchallenged.…
Human Rights Tribunal complaints are designed to exhaust

There is a silent calculus embedded in every human rights complaint: how much of your energy, your time, your composure, and your life force are you willing to lose in order to gain a symbolic victory that cannot feed your children or restore your nervous system? For those of us who have faced institutional harm—particularly…
The orange shirt I folded

I was folding laundry late one night, brain running on the kind of background grief that rarely quiets, when my hand closed around the orange shirt. I moved to set it aside—automatically, instinctively—because I remembered September was coming, school would be starting, and Orange Shirt Day would follow quickly after. That shirt would be needed…
The compliance economy

In their article Of Sinners and Scapegoats: The Economics of Collective Punishment, J. Shahar Dillbary and Thomas J. Miceli argue that collective punishment emerges not merely as a failure of precision or fairness, but as a deliberate mechanism for preserving internal group cohesion. The scapegoat, must be non-random, visible, and different, and their suffering must be…
The unseen wounds of advocacy: caregiver burnout, moral injury, and embodied grief

Caregiver burnout in BC schools reflects moral injury and systemic betrayal, as mothers fight exclusion and harm while advocating for disabled children.
Bound by blood

Maternal embodiment and the unbearable violence of institutional disbelief. We were once one body There is a biological, emotional, and moral reality so fundamental that no policy manual can contain it, and no professional training can domesticate it—my child once lived inside me. His limbs pressed against my ribs before they ever touched the outside…
Too competent to help, too angry to believe

The impossible performance of grace in systems that harm our children. Holding two pieces in tension This essay is written alongside a truth that cannot be softened. A truth that spills out, unsanitized, unmanageable, and fully lived. A truth that takes the form of intrusive thoughts, violent imagery, desperate poise, and carefully practiced restraint. That…
How do you live with yourself

Part of my neurodivergence is fatalism; part of it is hyperphantasia; part of it is the inability to look out at a beautiful landscape without imagining loss, rupture, and death, because even as a small child on the ferry to Victoria, while other people were looking out over the water and the mountains and the…
I have thought about writing her a letter

I have thought about writing her a letter—something long and deliberate, something shaped by memory and moral clarity, something that names what occurred and places it in her hands before the door finally closes. The idea moves through me with a kind of gravitational pull, neither urgent nor calm, just pressing and circling. I return…
What spoons can’t explain

The spoon theory was a revelation once. A metaphor for invisible disability. A way to say: I don’t have limitless energy. Every action costs. But like all metaphors, it eventually failed me. It suggests I have a drawer of spoons to begin with—something measurable, something I can manage. Something that implies I am in control.…
The price of being the one who says the hard thing

There is a moment that plays out in a thousand variations—at school pickup, on the playground, during track and field events—when a parent turns to you, warm and casual, and says, “How are things?”, and for the briefest fraction of a second, you forget the rules and answer honestly. You begin to speak—not with rehearsed…
Why school advocacy is a women’s issue

This site exists because public education systems harm children—and then gaslight the people who try to stop it. Those people are not randomly distributed. They are overwhelmingly women. Advocacy is a women’s issue not because women are naturally better at it, or more available, or more nurturing. Advocacy is a women’s issue because institutions depend…
Engineered famine in public education

In British Columbia schools today, we are not facing a behaviour crisis—we are facing a famine of care. This essay weaves together personal memory, systemic critique, and deep empathy for teachers and families alike to ask why our schools are starving the very relationships that children need to learn and thrive. It calls for an…
This broke me: a parent’s experience of school advocacy

Parenting is not a monolith. Neither is disability. Every family walks a different path, shaped by bodies, resources, identities, and institutions. This piece reflects one perspective—mine—as a disabled parent navigating systemic harm, health collapse, and the fierce love that remains. It is not universal. But it is real. The cost Parenting disabled children is not…
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.
Barriers in the Vancouver school system: a parent’s perspective

For families raising neurodivergent children, navigating the school system can feel like surviving a labyrinth built to exhaust you. What should be a place of growth becomes a terrain of harm and dismissal. Beneath the polished language of equity and inclusion lies a set of invisible barricades—attitudinal, communicative, spatial, systemic, and technological—that quietly erode trust…
“Urgent: Third Request” — what to do when schools ignore your emails

You write the email. You name the problem. You describe, in detail, what your child is experiencing and what they need to be able to participate. You’re respectful, clear, and solution-focused. And then—you wait. For many families, especially those raising disabled or neurodivergent children, this scenario is far too familiar. The moment you speak up—especially…
Not nothing: on being a parent with feelings in a system that asks for self-erasure

I have spent years trying not to take up space. Years trying not to be “one of those parents”—too loud, too emotional, too self-involved. I have been careful with my tone, careful with my words, careful not to name the hurt when my child was excluded, neglected, or harmed. I told myself: focus on the…
Few of us remain our best selves in a room starved of air

If you are a parent of a neurodivergent child, you can recite the script before the phone even buzzes. “[Child] had a very good day and really showed leadership with the younger kids” Pause. “But in the afternoon [Child] had some unexpected behaviour. [Child] is waiting at the office.” Praise is meant to help us feel that…
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…

Disabled Parenting

End collective punishment in BC schools