The Aware Mama

07/02/2026

"Hundreds of mothers are quietly navigating the same thing." https://bit.ly/3YHIUdY

31/01/2026

17/01/2026

Recently there have been a few folks new to my page, questioning whether I should be discussing PDA.

Questioning if I could EVER understand what living with PDA is LIKE.

So, let's clear this up.
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Q: Do I have a PDA child?

A: I actually have TWO of them.
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Q: Do I know much about PDA?

A: I am MYSELF a PDA person.
My dad and brother are also PDA.

I've been a paid speaker at an International PDA Conference.
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Q: But did I formally try to LEARN about child development and psychology?

A: I have 15 credits in child development, 3 credits in lifespan psychological development,

and 1000 supervised classroom practicum hours with ages 0-6.

But all that is ON TOP of my University of Michigan degree in Anthropology,
with minors in
Psychology, Women's Studies, AND Sociology.

During my college years, I spent 18 months as a research assistant to an Educational Anthropologist,

and another 2 years as an assistant to a specialist in Human Plasticity and Epigenetics.

Plus, I hold 2 certificates in Conscious Discipline.

So...YES I have done my research.
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Q: But what about professional EXPERIENCE with kids, PDA people, and families?

I have approximately 20 years experience in licensed classrooms and childcares.

And more than 8 years experience in CLS, Respite, and Supported Employment programs for kids, teens, and adults.

I've also been a one-on-one parapro to an Autistic PDA child in school.

And I worked in public health outreach for AmeriCorps--
offering mental health guidance
and social skills development
opportunities,
for teens living in shelters.
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Q: But when you talk about your PDA kids, they don't SEEM like mine.....

Yours must not have the really BAD meltdowns, the aggression, or the school refusal. ....

You probably don't even have holes in the walls, right?
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😒 A: WRONG!

I've been there. In fact, I've experienced the same patterns over THREE generations.

I grew UP with dysregulated people at home--
with police wellness checks,
screaming, biting,
and holes punched through plaster.

Sometimes the problem was my brother. Sometimes it was my dad.

Neither of them got the support they needed. Each antagonized the other.
_____________________

And me?

Growing up, I internalized my PDA so intensely that everyone thought I was just a nerdy, Neurotic, control freak--
prone to decision paralysis,
anxiety attacks, and
weekly episodes of hysteria.
_______________________

🤱 Then after I became a parent, I watched my PDA Au-DHD children struggle intensely with demands.

There were holes kicked through our internal doors....

Incidents of sibling aggression so bad, that someone needed stiches...

We had our share of
school suspensions
and broken, dining room chairs.

But I kept learning how to regulate my OWN body and mind, so I could model for my kids and be their SAFE SPACE....
their CO-regulator....
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I reduced demands,
moved to home schooling,
and gave my kids
a TON of autonomy.

I gave up ALL traces of the Authoritarian Parenting I grew up with.

I used Conscious Discipline to help me DELAY TEACHING MOMENTS until my kids were calm enough to actially learn.

And I let my kids equalize so much that they were convinced I was just their personal assistant.

And... it GRADUALLY got better!!
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My kids still struggle, but because I accomodated their nervous systems for years--

incidents of physical aggression and property destruction became RARE.

They have FRIENDS now.

Adults see them as RESPONSIBLE, now.

They can play TOGETHER without me playing referee.

They wash their own clothes and tolerate medical care.

And they EVEN offer
to HELP me around the house.
___________________________

But they are still young.
They still rely on me.

One of them still resists hair washing...and the other can't cope with 3 part directions.

Plus.... I haven't forgotten all the work it has taken us to get to this point!

So, I'm gonna KEEP on talking about PDA,
Autism,
Parenting Neurodivergent Children,
and accomodating disability.

I think I've earned the right. 😊
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Are YOU an "expert?"

Maybe you have a special interest that you have researched intensely...
or just an area of life that you
have learned A LOT about
through your kids...

What is it?

Star Trek? Chappell Roan?

Fiestaware? Sister Wives?

Food Network Shows?
Sourdough fermentation?

Disney movies? Dog breeds?
Axolotls? Lego?

Minecraft? Ancient Rome?
Mr. Beast videos?

🍞 👽 🥣 🎶 🏺🤙👸 🍄 🌱 🐾

16/01/2026

Brilliant post!!!!

School can look different in 2026, if you want it to.

Around this time each year, that familiar dread used to creep in for me. Bracing myself for another year of school, hoping it would be better this time.

School isn’t for everyone.
Or more accurately, traditional schooling isn’t for everyone.

There are other options, though, and many families don’t even realise they exist. We certainly didn’t at first. Over the years, we’ve tried a few different pathways, and I wanted to share them here in case it helps someone else feel a little less stuck.

Over time, after trying private school and public school, we tried unschooling, Distance Education from home, and eventually Year 10 and part of Year 11 at TAFE, which I can’t recommend highly enough.

FYI: I’m in NSW, so you’ll need to check what’s available in your state.

Here are some of the pathways that might be worth exploring:

✏️ In-school Distance Education
Some public schools offer Distance Education on school grounds. Kids learn online with teachers, supported by a staff member in the room. This can work well, but for us it was only a short-term option and still meant walking through the same school gates.

✏️ Distance Education (from home)
There are schools that run Distance Education fully online. We enrolled with Cairns School of Distance Education, the largest in Australia. With a doctor’s exemption, there were no fees. Classes are live or can be watched later, electives are included, and the community is beautifully diverse. Travelling families, kids who struggled in mainstream, kids learning between adventures.
Downside: only one level of Maths and English.
Upside: camps, meet-ups, and even a school formal in Cairns.

✏️ Homeschooling
Homeschooling allows families to take learning into their own hands. You register with your state or territory and outline your learning approach. Some families follow set curriculums, others create their own. Each year, you show progress in learning. One of the biggest strengths is the community. There are endless opportunities beyond textbooks, including cooking classes, sports, creative workshops, and hands-on learning.

✏️ Unschooling
Unschooling sits under the homeschooling umbrella but is completely child-led. There’s no formal curriculum. Learning happens through interests and curiosity. Cooking, nature, coding, art, play. Parents facilitate rather than instruct, and learning becomes part of everyday life. For many kids, it’s incredibly empowering.

✏️ TAFE
Kids can complete Year 10 at TAFE in just three months (around 15 hours a week). It’s fee-free for under 17s. The classes are practical, the support is exceptional, and for us, it was genuinely life-changing.

Every child is different. What works for one won’t always work for another. But there are options, and sometimes just knowing that can make the road ahead feel a little lighter.

If you’ve got questions, I’m always happy to share more about our experience. 💛

11/11/2025

It’s never just about the cheese sandwich.

Join Dr Naomi Fisher and myself for our brand new The Art of Low Demand Parenting on Food.

We will be talking about the pressures of food and how we can support our children through this.

Midday, Monday 10th November.
Recorded ticket option.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-art-of-low-demand-parenting-food-tickets-1736300695119?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

(Illustration from Thumbsucker by Eliza Fricker)

18/08/2025

Must read!!!

10 key takeaway quotes from The Weekend Australian Magazine’s August 16-17, 2025 piece, ‘The Kids Are Not Alright’ by Ros Thomas.

“My phone's like a magnet. I'm permanently distracted and then I feel really bad about myself."

“According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 29 per cent of girls and 17 per cent of boys aged 15 to 24 were diagnosed with depression or anxiety in 2023. The current generation of teens is on track to become the loneliest and most socially isolated cohort in human history.
The data is grim. Our kids are not OK.”

“Evidence shows the launch in 2007 of the first iPhone with its inbuilt "selfie" camera, followed by Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and TikTok (2017), coincided with a marked decrease in adolescent sleep and the time they spent with friends - two factors linked to the deterioration in young people's mental health.”

“Instagram internal research, leaked by an employee in 2021, revealed the app is aware it creates anxious girls. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," a slide from one internal presentation in 2019 stated.”

“I ask him if boys are choosing social media over a real relationship with a girl. "Absolutely.
It's easier, more available and less effort, with no risk of humiliation, embarrassment or failure. It's there for you whenever you want, you don't need to put any time or effort into it."”

“The American social psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Haidt, 61, has been vehemently arguing the case against social media for children since 2019 He's convinced that teenage phone addiction doesn't simply correlate with the youth mental health crisis, it's the driver of it. "Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and unsuitable for children and adolescents," he says.
Haidt wants parents to understand the consequences of this. "We have vastly overprotected our children in the real world - we have to give them more freedom. And we have vastly under-protected them in the virtual world - we give them an iPhone and an iPad and we say, 'Here, we're going to let you be guided into adulthood by a bunch of random people on the internet chosen by algorithms for their extremity'. That's how you're going to rewire your brain."”

““Thirty per cent of my time in this school is spent dealing with parents' inability to parent. They don't know how to do boundaries. They don't know how to remove the phone when kids are being inappropriate. They allow their kids to have their phones by their beds all night, pinging them non-stop. No wonder they're not sleeping and seeing stuff they shouldn't see. They come to school in a mess. Too exhausted to learn. And this is the cycle destroying our kids.””

““Phone addiction is particularly lethal for teenaged brains. And yet there is this weird reluctance from State Departments of Education to mandate a proper ban on phones in schools. Maybe it's fears of parental blowback, I don't know. But if just one Minister came out and said, 'Right, phones are now completely banned in schools and here are the locked boxes or pouches to implement that, just imagine how much that'd help?' We don't let our 13 year olds drive or drink - why on earth do we let them keep something this lethal in their pockets at school? As educators, we've got to put child safety first."”

“A 2023 survey by University of Chicago researchers studying "collective traps" in product markets. They reported that out of 1000 college students, 58 per cent said they would pay to "live in a world without social media".”

““What we find is a surprising consistency of
regret, among parents and among the young adults who went through puberty on smartphones," he said.
"Most of the parents and nearly half of the young adults wish that the major social media platforms had never been invented."”

Head to the comments to grab the link to the article. It’s free to read at the moment.

14/07/2025

25/04/2025

I’m hearing from ever more parents of primary school aged children that their children really don’t like school. They say that it’s boring, that they have to sit for long hours listening. Parents say that young children are taught things which they, their parents, have never needed to know. Things like ‘fronted adverbials’ and the difference between homophones and homographs.

Which wouldn’t matter if the children were interested and curious, but this isn’t why they are learning those things. They’re learning them because someone has decided that this is the best way for young children to spend their time.

That these – fronted adverbials, for example - are the most important things.

Parents say that their children are stressed about school work before they’ve even turned seven. They say that children wake up at night worrying that they’ll be put in the Red Zone or taken off the Sun and put on the Rain Cloud.

They say that when they tell school that their child doesn’t want to come, school tells them that maybe home is just too nice. They suggest that rather than improving their experience of school, parents should focus on making their experience of home worse so school seems better in comparison.

Huh?

How does that make any sense?

We’re losing a generation of children. They’re learning that they don’t like to learn, at the stage of their lives when they should be bursting with curiosity and excitement. By the time they are nine, some of them are already saying that school is ‘just something to get through’.

Here’s my take. Education shouldn’t be about ‘information in’. The first priority should not be covering content or passing tests.

That is something which can happen later, but first?

We need to inspire children about learning.

When our young children think that they are stupid. When our six-year-olds learn that learning is irrelevant and difficult. When our eight-year-olds believe that they are bad because they can’t sit still and concentrate?

Those things last a lifetime.

This is the foundation of education. If we get it wrong now, we’ll be dealing with the consequences far into the future. Our children need change.

26/03/2025

What a time to be raising kids and teens eh? 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

14/03/2025

Watch to understand the reality of the many families raising autistic / neurodivergent / differently wired kids.

01/03/2025

PANS / PANDAS

If you have a child or young adult you know that experiences:

Obsessive compulsive (OCD) symptoms
Restriction of food or fluid intake
Tics
Irritability and aggression
Anxiety
ADHD symptoms
Sleep disturbances
Depression
Psychosis

And you are not getting answers from professionals, please consider PANS/PANDAs.

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Clinical Management of Pediatric Acute-Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome: Part I—Psychiatric and Behavioral Interventions

Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS) is defined by the foudroyant (lightning-like) onset of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) or eating restrictions and comorbid symptoms from at least two of seven categories: anxiety (particularly separation anxiety); emotional lability or depression; irritability, aggression, and/or severely oppositional behaviors; deterioration in school performance [related to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-like behaviors, memory deficits, and cognitive changes]; sensory or motor abnormalities; and somatic signs and symptoms, including sleep disturbances, enuresis, or urinary frequency (Swedo et al. 2012; Chang et al. 2015). Acute-onset cases that are triggered by Group A streptococcal infections may meet diagnostic criteria for both PANS and Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal infections (PANDAS) (Swedo et al. 1998). As these two syndromes display highly similar symptoms, these guidelines will treat them as a single entity: PANS/PANDAS.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5610394/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIvtn9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTn2u6GMa9M0yEAmwkW-39fN9bqheIckLbpMdefM10Kw7_2kFCaGiqBfCg_aem_AwnXf9NN-OoYtvp5-2o4UQ

Objective: This article outlines the consensus guidelines for symptomatic treatment for children with Pediatric Acute-Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS) and Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Syndrome Associated with Streptococcal Infection ...