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08/04/2026

Four years ago, I felt like a prisoner in my own home.

My PDA child was slowly recovering from burnout and needed me there for coregulation at all times, day and night.

Leaving home alone was impossible. Even getting to the supermarket was a rare treat. My social life was restricted to Zoom calls and social media, and I turned down most invitations.

On the rare occasions when I really needed to leave home, either for work or for my sanity, there was always a meltdown before I left the house.

My child would scream in panic, cling onto me and beg me not to go. My way to the door would be blocked, the keys would be hidden, I’d be chased barefoot down the road…

When I got home, the dysregulation would be even worse, and however late it was, my child was always waiting up for me.

It just wasn’t worth putting us all through it unless it was necessary.

My physical bruises soon faded, but the mental ones took longer, and some of our walls and furniture still bear the scars of that period.

It went on for months, stretching into years, and felt as though it would never end.

If you’re in that period now, I feel your pain. I know what you’re going through, how trapped you feel some days, and how you feel judged by other people.

But I can also tell you this: it can get better.

Over time, I learnt radical acceptance. I stopped fighting for the sort of life I imagined everyone else was having, and started to live the life my family needed. I learnt to look for what was really happening behind the “behaviour”, and I started to understand the anxiety that drove it.

And gradually, in tiny incremental steps, my child began to learn to manage without me.

I began to be able to do my shopping, go out for the occasional evening, and eventually even have a night away from home.

I was called home early less often and the dysregulated behaviour on my return began to be less intense, as coregulation gradually began to give way to self-regulation.

I can now have “me time” at the supermarket every Sunday, and I’m just back from two relaxing nights away while the children stayed home with my husband.

We’re not all the way there, but that’s what progress looks like.

07/04/2026

Have you ever broken the law?

Paid cash in hand for a job and got a discount because VAT was being evaded?

Lied about your age to buy alcohol?

Used illegal drugs?

Knowingly broken the speed limit?

Why?

Because you thought the law was stupid, because you thought your actions were victimless, or because you thought nobody would find out?

Or did you not do it because you thought it was wrong, or because you were scared of the consequences if you were found out?

Around where I live, there’s an almost permanent smell of w**d in the air. It’s still an illegal drug, but the police don’t enforce the law, so it’s widely ignored.

Boy racers use the road through town as a racetrack, and nobody ever pulls them over. The police station in town closed a few years ago.

Let’s trace this back to how we parent.

Some children are more naturally compliant than others, but even the Perfect Peters of the world have their moments.

You can deal with those moments by threatening consequences. A child may learn to fear the consequences, perhaps remembering a time when the threat was followed through.

Or they might have cottoned on that these are empty threats. If fear is their only reason to comply, they may ignore the threats and carry on regardless.

Others may be motivated to comply by the anticipation of a reward. If no reward is offered, there’s no reason to comply.

But as they grow older and understand more, they need to develop their own moral compass, so that when they encounter new situations, they’ll instinctively choose the “right” path.

One thing I have always told my children is that the most important thing is to be kind. I let them see the natural consequences of their actions and explain to them how their actions make other people feel.

People describe my children as kind, polite, generous, good friends. That doesn’t come from fear of consequences or desire for reward - it’s internally driven.

Distress responses are something else, and can’t be resolved with either punishment or reward. But I believe the ultimate aim of parenting is to encourage children to have the intrinsic motivation to do the right thing even when you could get away with doing wrong.

06/04/2026

Even after I shared that post yesterday, we ended up having a problem - and the problem was me.

We had a quiet day planned, nothing special. I asked the children if they wanted to have an egg hunt and they did, so the eggs were duly hidden, hunted and found.

But… at the last minute, I couldn’t let go of the fact that Easter’s a special day. I wanted to mark it by having a special meal. Both children had voluntarily sat at the table eating Easter eggs and chatting after the egg hunt, so I thought we’d all sit together to eat in the evening.

I spent the entire afternoon preparing three completely different meals to cater to all tastes, and I managed to have everything hot and ready to eat at the same time.

When I called everyone to the table, there was no response - not even from my husband. And I was disappointed, and showed my disappointment in no uncertain terms.

After one child had picked up some food and eaten it in their fingers, standing near the table, and the other had persuaded me to serve their meal in their bedroom as usual, my daughter summed up the problem succinctly.

“Why did you try to force us to sit at the table today? You claim to understand that I can’t eat at the table, and then you do something like this. You’re the problem, not me!”

She can do it, when she has to - at my parents’ house, for instance, on our rare visits. But it takes a significant amount of effort and masking, and it exhausts her.

I’ve created a home in which my children generally feel safe to be themselves. They don’t feel the need to mask and people please. They know how to behave outside the house, and they either conform or stay at home, depending on how well they feel able to mask on a particular day.

But home is their sanctuary. And they are not happy to have conventional social norms forced on them in their sanctuary.

I get it. I’m capable of putting on a full face of makeup, a posh frock and a pair of ruinously uncomfortable high heels that give me blisters (though I do it as seldom as I can get away with). But I wouldn’t do all that for an evening at home with the family.

It seems I still have work to do on my expectations.

05/04/2026

“We are not our children, and our children are not us. We are living different lives, in different bodies with different wants and needs. Our children aren’t necessarily missing out because they’re not spending holidays the way we did.”

It took me a long time to understand this, and even longer to accept it. I felt terrible guilt about holidays spent chilling out at home instead of ‘making memories’ on days out, picnics and visits to friends and family.

It was when I realised that many of those memories would be of dysregulation and trauma rather than fun and excitement that I was finally able to let go.

There’s lots of love, happiness and laughter in our house. Our life doesn’t need to look like my childhood dreams to achieve that.

If you, or your family are really struggling right now over the Easter break, I want to share that this is very common for PDAers.

This is when as a PDAer myself, I know that my nervous system is doing exactly what it's designed to do.

My PDA children and I are highly attuned to people, places, and things. I don't miss a single thing. Everything goes in and is processed from a threat perspective.

Energy is my first language before spoken words. We feel into people, we sense shifts in atmosphere and intention that others may not even register. So when holidays come around, it's not just chocolate eggs and time off.

It's a shift in the energy of every person around us. It's routine dissolving and a threat to organic flow. It's the unspoken expectation to enjoy, to be grateful, to participate.

Sometimes it's more people in our space, which means our access to safety is compromised. It's dynamics changing, and our nervous system locks onto every single one of those changes.

I woke up up so tired I could barely function, and I knew why. The changes. My nervous system works in cohesion with my body to create what it believes is safety - be tired, withdraw from perceived threat. I have had to take things very slowly and very gently today.

And here's what's really important to understand: dysregulation isn't just about negative experiences. Dysregulation is anything that shifts us outside of our baseline.
Excitement is dysregulating. Joy is dysregulating. The threat response doesn't discern between excitement and fear. It just responds to escalation in the nervous system.

So if our PDA children are melting down, shutting down, or clinging harder than usual right now, that's not them being difficult. That is panic. That is a nervous system overwhelmed by the sheer volume of change, expectation, and sensory input that holidays bring. This is non volitional.

And if you're a PDA adult barely holding it together this weekend, I see you. We're not broken or weak or needing to build capacity or be more resilient 🤮.
We're highly attuned and that takes an incredible amount of energy to carry.

Here are a few gentle, practical things that help in our family and in my own life:

- In our home, I drop the expectations. If meals happen in the bedroom, that's okay. If meals are the same as every other day, there's a real wisdom in that. Predictability and familiarity are great friends to the nervous system.

- If my children are on a screen all day, that's okay. The screen isn't the problem. It may be the only thing that feels safe, predictable, and non-demanding right now.

- I lean into parallel presence instead of conversation. Just being in the same space without requiring engagement.
A drive with music on. Sitting nearby on my own device. Connection without demand.

This morning we started the day in the same way we start every day - a pot of tea, a game of Uno and Connect Four with some PDA jousting around who will kick whose arse first. This is one of our many anchors across the day to check in and coregulate.

- This is less common now that my children are older, but where my children are escalated, I try to match their energy rather than force calm. That doesn't mean escalating with them. It means meeting them where they are. A strong, steady voice that says "this IS a lot, yes..your big feelings are so smart and protective" will land more than a whisper telling them to calm down.

And if and when they're in shutdown or meltdown, I've learned that making space for that process is more helpful than offering solutions. Additional input in that moment is more for the nervous system to process, which can heighten the threat response.

- As a PDA adult, I meet myself with radical acceptance and not resistance. The more I judge and criticise myself for struggling, the more my threat response escalates.

- I externalise what's weighing on me. I write it down, put it in a note on my phone, close it, and walk away, have a chat out loud with myself or message friends. Getting it out of my head and somewhere else creates just enough psychological distance from the pressure.

- I give myself permission to withdraw. Cancel plans. Keep communication minimal. It’s self preservation.

- I weigh up the cost vs benefit - are we really happy and enjoying the way we're spending our time over the holiday season? What is our true experience of this? Who are we pleasing? What is the cost and is it truly worth going to the local event, family BBQ, etc? We are not our children, and our children are not us. We are living different lives, in different bodies with different wants and needs. Our children aren't necessarily missing out because they're not spending holidays the way we did.

- In the grand scheme of things, all that is life, how important is this?

And if the only thing I can do today is rest, then I rest. Deep rest. That is enough.

While I understand plenty of onlookers might judge us and be all about building capacity and modelling, etc..those same people aren’t bringing their energy around my children - I am. What I carry shows up in my parenting and so I feel a responsibility to be as compassionate and gentle with myself as I am with my children and to say "No thank you" to unsolicited advice, no matter how well intentioned.

I hope you’re able to be gentle with yourselves, with your children and with each other.

KF

04/04/2026

When I was in Year 8, a teacher wrote on one of my essays, "You should never use the words 'always' or 'never', because there's always an exception."

I never worked out whether she appreciated the self-refuting nature of what she said, but it certainly made it stick in my mind.

I sometimes think of this rule when I see parenting advice on social media.

It usually goes like this:

"If you do X, your child will do Y."

Someone in the comments section says, "I did X, and my child didn't do Y."

A debate then ensues, in which the louder camp insists that if the child didn't do Y, the parent must have done X wrong, or not done it consistently enough, or not tried hard enough, or should have started doing it at an earlier age.

This camp simply doesn't accept that children can be different, and that different children may respond in different ways to the same stimuli.

In fact, the same child can react in different ways to the same stimuli, depending on when they last ate or slept, their state of health, the weather, what they're wearing, what mood the parent is in, and dozens of other internal and external factors.

Anyone who claims to have a solution that always works is either deluded or raising a robot.

What we need to look at is the direction of travel. Yes, we've had a bad day - it might even have been an exceptionally bad day.

But have we had fewer bad days than we were having last month, or last year?

Have we been able to identify the trigger, where last year the outbursts seemed to come out of the blue?

Did we manage to defuse the situation sooner than we would have done a year ago?

Did the child display more self-awareness about what had happened and why?

If things feel worse than they did this time last year, why might that be? Reflecting on what else has changed in the child's life and on their developmental stage may give answers that either point towards a new approach or reassure us that some of what we're seeing is a normal part of growing up and testing boundaries.

We can't always have good days - nobody does. But having a bad day doesn't make you a bad parent.

03/04/2026

Last night was not a good night.

It started with a child not wanting to get ready for bed.

The meltdown came in two parts. It was his sister who eventually persuaded him to stop throwing things, lashing out and screaming. He got into his pyjamas, climbed into bed next to me and put his white noise on.

And then he couldn’t get to sleep, and part two began.

His eyes were sore from crying, and his nose was running. Nothing I tried could soothe the physical discomfort. The sensory experience of crying was so uncomfortable that it dysregulated him further and made him cry more.

And then he kept remembering that his sister had very kindly tidied his room for him, and he cried because it looked different and he wanted his messy room back.

It took well over an hour to talk him down. He was panicking over the change in routine, the fact that the holidays are nearly half over, the fact that his bedroom had changed, and the horrible sensory experience of crying.

I tried to distract him, but he was too uncomfortable and could think about nothing but his sore eyes, runny nose and unnaturally tidy bedroom.

So I did what any sane mother would do with a distraught 11-year-old at 1:00 in the morning, and gave him a little lecture about neurolinguistic programming.

Specifically, the thing I find useful about NLP is the reframing. The unconscious mind can only process a negative in terms of the positive statement that’s being negated - so when I say, “Don’t think about an elephant”, an image of an elephant will pop into your mind before you consciously try to suppress it.

So a positive statement like “keep calm” is more effective than “don’t panic”, which introduces the idea of panic to the subconscious brain as a possible reaction to a situation.

And saying, “Stop crying” or “Don’t think about how uncomfortable your nose is” can have the opposite effect to that which is intended.

It actually worked. He found the concept interesting, and came up with a few examples himself of negative statements we could reframe.

And somewhere along the line, he was thinking so hard about reframing that he stopped crying, forgot about his discomfort and finally drifted off to sleep.

02/04/2026

This just came up in my Facebook memories - I wrote it in response to someone who said, “Aren’t we all a little bit autistic?”

I agree that some traits are very common, just as there are several common symptoms between the common cold and the delta variant of Covid.

When autism is described as a spectrum, it’s not a linear continuum going from “only a little bit autistic” to “severely autistic”, but like a rainbow where each of the colours may be more or less off kilter - it’s a matter of both the breadth and depth of traits, and an autistic person will be affected to a greater or lesser degree in each of several areas. Think of it as more like a graphic equaliser than a volume k**b.

This means two autistic people can present in completely different ways, although all will share certain key characteristics.

Similarly, clinical anxiety is different from the natural feelings of anxiety most of us get before an exam, an interview or a big presentation at work.

As an example, my daughter and I went to the market this morning at her request and were browsing through the fruit and veg when all of a sudden she reached her comfort limit and started to shake and hyperventilate and said, “I can’t be here any longer - we need to just pay and go.”

She would have gone into full panic mode if I had forced her to stay longer.

Other weekends, she won’t even be able to get as far as going out of the back door, or sometimes even of poking her head out from under the duvet, even though she loves the idea of going shopping in town.

01/04/2026

It's been a fairly brutal few weeks - when you're self-employed, you can't just drop everything when things aren't going your way, and I've been playing catch-up since my son's little ride in the ambulance last month.

The juggling has been insane at times, but it's knowing that I'm making a real difference that keeps me going and makes it all worthwhile.

And this lovely gift and the kind words in the card have put a huge smile on my face this evening. Those cheerful sunflowers will brighten up my desk for a long time to come.

01/04/2026

Day 3 of the school holidays.

I'm sitting at my computer trying to work while my son stands in front of the table, keeping up a running commentary as he plays Russian roulette with a Nerf gun.

I've interrupted my work for three pillow fights, two wrestling matches and a Nerf war since morning.

My son has stopped talking for approximately ten seconds since he woke up this morning.

But the relief of two weeks of not having to deal with schools - priceless.

31/03/2026

Way back in the 1900s (as my children say), I had the opportunity to apply for a scholarship to study in China.

Most of my class applied, and our teacher wrote our references. He was asked to rank us in case we couldn't all be offered a scholarship. I was top of the class, and he said if only one person could go, it should be me.

The interview day came and went, and letters arrived for each of us.

I was the only person who didn't get the scholarship. I'll never forget that feeling of injustice.

The teacher contacted the organisation and asked what had gone wrong.

They replied that of all the candidates, I was the one they were convinced would make it to China whether they gave me a scholarship or not.

They were right - I ended up having a few very happy years there.

I'm looking at another form of rationing now.

When 10 children need help and you can only help 4 of them, what do you do?

You either harden your heart, accept you can only do what you can do and pick 4 children to help, or you buckle under the pressure of trying to make 4 children's time and funding stretch to cover all 10.

When resources are scarce, somehow you have to work out how to ration them.

Do you ignore the child who's going to smash up your classroom if their needs aren't met?

The one who somehow managed to make it to secondary school before anyone noticed they can't read?

The one whose parents don't have the literacy skills themselves to be able to fight for their child?

The one whose parents couldn't care less?

The one who's on a fast track to prison or worse if you don't help them now?

Or do you identify the parents who won't take no for an answer, who will fight tooth and nail for their child, who will spend every penny they have and then borrow more, take their child out of school and do what the state couldn't do for them - and silently wish them luck as you deal with the other 4?

Some parents who fight for EHCPs wouldn't need to if SEND support was properly funded and schools could support every child who needed it.

Sadly, the one thing that's guaranteed about the proposed new system is that support will still be rationed in a very untransparent way.

30/03/2026

This is a subject which is very close to my heart after walking with a few friends and loved ones as they navigated this incredibly difficult path. This petition only has a few weeks left to run - please consider signing and/or sharing it to see if we can get it to a level where the government has to respond.

PLEASE SIGN 👉https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/747226 -

When a child is seriously ill, the focus is on saving their life, as it should be. But parents are left traumatised, exhausted and alone because there is NO mental health support for the parents during treatment. And even worse, none offered if the worst happens and their child dies.

That isn’t acceptable.

👉 If we reach 100,000 signatures, it triggers a Parliamentary debate. Please take 30 seconds to sign, it genuinely can help drive change.

PLEASE SHARE, SIGN AND SPREAD THE WORD 🧡

30/03/2026

On school days, I wake my daughter at 7:30.

And then again at 7:50.

My husband wakes her at 8:10.

I wake her again around 8:40 and 8:50.

And so it goes on.

So on the first day of the school holidays (the day after the clocks went forward, so it should still feel as though it's an hour earlier), when I have a ton of work to do and need a bit of uninterrupted thinking time, how come she's been calling me every 10 minutes since 8:00?

I've read the same sentence 15 times in the last two hours. Let me answer my own question while my frustration simmers down to a level where I can actually concentrate on my work again.

It's because when she doesn't have school the next day, she's more able to sleep at night.

Because when she isn't anxious about the coming day, her mind and body aren't trying to shut down in the morning.

Because she's looking for connection.

Because her friends are on holiday too, and they've been on the phone since shortly after dawn cracked.

Because when she's happy, she doesn't want to waste the day.

I need to remind myself of this, and not treat the interruptions as an intrusion. Yes, it's frustrating that I can only ever concentrate on my work overnight. Yes, I'm exhausted from too many overnight working sessions lately.

But honestly? I'd rather be interrupted by a happy child than left alone by a depressed one.