Episode 21 – The Australian School System & Our Sons Interview

Jane McFadden:

Hello and welcome to another episode of ADHD Mums. Today we have Tanya who has been a lawyer for 22 years before resigning in 2017 to take up the role of advocate and full-time care coordinator for her third son who struggles with ADHD and autism. She’s also completed her Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Honours in Psychology and Tanya is working as a research assistant at the moment looking at internet gaming disorder amongst adolescents which is a can of worms I’d love to open another time.

Tanya has just applied for a scholarship to begin her doctorate in the use of co-regulation to prevent and minimise meltdowns in the classroom. Tanya is particularly passionate about inclusive education and improving outcomes for children with ADHD and autism so welcome so much Tanya.

Tania Waring:

Thanks Jane. I can’t say how much I’ve enjoyed your podcast and the work that you’re doing to spread the word, spread knowledge and bring our community together so that we can speak up about our difficulties and the challenges of our kids and make a better world for them. Thank you for doing this.

Jane McFadden:

Oh that’s so kind of you.

In the spirit of honesty because you know we are ADHD Mums on this podcast, Tanya actually we had some problem solving in the beginning and she hadn’t actually put the connected up her headphones so we did have that and I wished I had recorded it because oh my god we had a good laugh to start with.

So we had a cracker start to be honest and then I pressed record because I was like well let’s make sure that we record but then of course once we press record we got totally off track. So we were supposed to be doing meltdowns, Tanya is an expert in meltdowns and we actually diverted completely to the Australian school system and Tanya is an incredible advocate for her son at the moment and what we discussed in the end was around having a boy and having a different representation of ADHD and autism to what we did with Jenny Cleary.

So we’ve actually gone down the track of schooling system from a totally different angle but I have promised that we will come back to meltdowns. So today we will do school systems but we will be getting Tanya back.

Tania Waring:

Thanks so much Jane. Yeah it’s been honestly we’re so grateful to have the chance to talk to you about these things.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah let’s get into it. What are you loving about the podcast and what would you like to see more of because I’m trying to get a bit more feedback.

Tania Waring:

Hearing people’s lived realities, I mean I like you, am in a community where there’s challenges for families drowning like with not being able to access the NDIS just because they can’t even begin. To kind of normalise I guess I’m thinking particularly of one friend who’s got two kids with ADHD and autism and it’s overwhelming sometimes and I think if you understand and hear that lots of people have quite similar stories it’s reassuring and also to always have hope from people who are a little bit ahead of you on the path and can see that things generally progress and move towards a more equilibrium place where everyone’s kind of doing what they need to do.

I think it’s really hard being in the trenches when they’re early five to ten years of age and things are starting to fall apart to know that although it is teenage years don’t get me wrong they are really fucking hard but I know from people ahead of me and also I feel like we’re a little bit closer to adulthood where whatever their path will be is what their path will be and it’s providing they’ve always got a loving family they’ll be okay.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah that’s a great perspective.

I think yeah there is kind of some different phases in there because initially when you hit school and developmentally they all start to move forward because it’s all fun and games when everybody is having they’re all kind of losing their mind they’re three four years old you might have a feeling that something’s not right but they’re developmentally not that much different.

But as you move forward the gap becomes bigger and it becomes more confronting that’s for sure and maybe that’s that five to ten years old that you’re referring to where you start to go okay… like for example vacation care yesterday someone called my daughter weird and it was actually her best friend who called her a weirdo and I was like I think we’re kind of getting into that place which is difficult.

Tania Waring:

Yeah and it is definitely the years when diagnoses are on the table, like it’s those early years of primary when the gap becomes more apparent and teachers are starting to want to talk to you. Those years I think are quite—I think they’re the hardest years for parents.

And I think there’s some relief in understanding that, to come to terms with that what you might have imagined your school experience would be with kids is not what your school experience with kids is. And there’s a grief that you need to go through with that. Then that’s often the therapy start as well when you’re sort of looking at what can you do to help your child cope with this schooling situation.

So that’s very time consuming and just getting your child through the school term becomes enormously time consuming for parents and kids with ADHD because they need more time, they need more parenting, they need more support. And that is also really challenging for parents.

I think just knowing that those years are really and truly the hardest years—and I don’t mean to diminish how hard teenage years are because it is really hard—but it’s different because you’re sort of a bit more experienced with it. And I think you also feel like, well we’re getting closer to adulthood. I just want to get through school, once we’re through school then hopefully he’ll find his place in the world.

It just feels—even though it is truly hard—immersing in a community where other parents are also finding it truly hard is helpful and encouraging. And I know from people ahead of me that this will pass and the next stage I think will be better. Yeah those stages, I think like hearing from those stages, can be really helpful.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah and it has made me feel a little bit better to know that my kids are harder than everybody else’s—or not everybody else’s but a lot of people’s—and developmentally they’re 30 percent behind most other brains their age.

So I have a seven, five and a four year old and I’m pretty exhausted from having kids those ages, yet I also need to be aware that I actually have kids that are younger than that developmentally. So my friends who have moved past and they’re through the toilet training, they can possibly sit at a café for a short period of time and have a coffee, I’m not going to be there for a long time.

And that’s—it is a bit of grief to realize that it’s not going to be ending when I thought it was, my expectations are not meeting reality at this point.

Tania Waring:

Yeah and I think it’s hard as a parent too to realize however exhausting and challenging this is for you, it’s harder for no one than the child. And you’ve just got to be that adult with endless patience and endless support.

And that doesn’t mean that—no one has got an endless supply of those things—but you’ve just got to keep aiming for that because their capacity is what it is and they really need a supportive parent who isn’t judging them like the rest of the world perhaps and is doing their best to scaffold their ability to meet expectation, or lowering expectation to meet their capacity, or a combination of both.

And they just—they need to sort of feel that you’re wrapping around them so that they can cope with what the world is throwing at them, particularly school. School is so hard.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah it really is, it really is.

I think the Australian school system needs a bit of an overhaul to be honest because you can’t blame the teachers, they’re so overworked, you can’t ask them to do any more. But then also the kids are struggling to keep up.

And one of my passion areas is around self-esteem in young girls because they get told to do better, try harder—yeah—and they actually can’t try any harder than what they are.

And what do you do if your best isn’t good enough? If your best isn’t good enough that’s going to kill your little soul.

Tania Waring:

Yeah absolutely it does. Look, I’ve got three boys and my son has been crushed by the school system where every day he just feels that he’s not enough.

And it’s not a lack of motivation, it’s not a lack of effort, it’s not a lack of resilience—my god he gets up every day and goes back into the arena. So it’s just simply that he doesn’t have the capacity to do the things expected of him.

And it really is about trying to get the system to accommodate where he’s at. And that’s hard because at 14 in grade 8 there’s all this talk about you’ve got to step up, you’ve got to step up. And like these days they’re doing university level content any time from grade 7 to grade 12, like it just—it’s all harder and harder and harder.

And it’s not that he doesn’t have the ability, it’s just that he can’t meet those expectations of sitting through hours after hour after hour of just lecture-style teaching. It’s not inclusive, there’s no attempt to kind of even acknowledge that 20% of the class have attentional issues. They’re just punished if they can’t sit there and listen.

…And at one point one of the teachers, because the content being so overloaded—the curriculum is just so massive—she was giving kids new content in a 15-minute lecture to listen to at home and then come to school with their questions.

And if you hadn’t listened to it—and guess what, 20% of the class had not listened to it and they were the kids with ADHD or whatever—they had to sit outside and listen to it outside, which is hard. So they’re excluded from the classroom and then they come into the classroom when they finish listening to it, the class has already moved on.

So they’ve been talking about the content for 20 minutes. So like just—it’s just sort of insult on insult because you’re bothered by being excluded from the classroom. The expectation that you would do new learning at home after a long day of school is crazy.

And when I challenged it, you know the response was, yeah well there’s kids at the other end who their parents want them doing more challenging work in the classroom. I’m like those kids will be fine in life, they already have all of the advantages. You know if they need more or harder work—which I honestly don’t know that that’s true—but even if that’s the case, you cannot design your lesson around extending the top 20% of kids in the classroom. That’s just so unfair to everybody else and unnecessary.

Jane McFadden:

School is really hard. I hear a lot of people talking about changing school and I did change my kid’s school this year, but I was wondering when you’re talking like that is that like any school do you think that’s true for? Or do you think that school—for that like if you change schools would that make any difference or you think that’s just how it is?

Tania Waring:

My youngest child has been to four schools and my experience with the four schools that we’ve been in, with the other two being in two different schools, and I think that experience is pretty typical. In the sense not necessarily specifically that example but the idea that: I don’t have time to teach those kids, I don’t have the resources to teach those kids, so I would rather punish them and exclude them from the classroom and get on with teaching the 60% of kids who are in the middle of the bell curve and get them going.

And if that means that that 20% of kids miss out, then that’s how it is. And I see that across the board. So they often in schools will segregate those kids into special classes. So whatever the learning issue is, they’ll put them all in one class and they might have a little bit of extra teacher aid time in that class but there really isn’t much regard given to how well learning is done. It’s just they’re out of the way of the other kids.

Now the problem—there’s lots of problems with that. It others those children and they all refer to themselves as the dum-dums because that’s how they feel and that’s how the other kids treat them. And to be honest that’s what the system is teaching them, that you’re not up to scratch so we’re going to put you over there and we’re just going to get on with things.

And unfortunately that teaches the other children that’s how we deal with kids who are different, adults who are different, when we grow up. So those who remain in the regular classroom, they will grow up to take on positions of authority and power and guess how they’re going to treat people who are different, who don’t meet their expectations? They’re going to push them over there and other them and punish them because that’s what they’ve observed their whole lives—that’s how the school system treats them.

They suspend, suspend, suspend, expel. That’s how the teachers, even with the nicest of teachers, but they’re like I don’t have time for them, they’re over there, I’ve got to get on with teaching these kids. So yeah and it’s problematic in so many ways.

And it is segregation, which is unlawful, but no one takes them on because who cares about this are the parents of those kids. But often the parents of those kids are so exhausted by just raising those kids, often with their own disability or trauma, so they don’t have the resources to take on schools. So it just goes on all the time.

And we have all this research that shows that doing that—putting them in separate classes, suspending them, suspending them, expelling them—we know that that puts them on a path to jail or some other unproductive life trajectory. But we don’t do anything about it because the people who care the most are also exhausted and there’s not many people who have the capacity and the resources to challenge this.

And lots of people think oh private schools, well they can do what they want. They actually cannot do what they want, they’re bound by the same anti-discrimination legislation as public schools. But no one wants to take them on and, quite understandably, no one wants to take them on because it’s exhausting. And also you don’t want to make your child the example because your child is a person who you’re trying—who’s fragile and vulnerable and traumatised by this system. So you don’t want to put them in a position where the limelight’s on them for all the wrong reasons.

And it’s just so problematic. It definitely needs attention and there’s lots of people doing their best to try and change this but it’s a slow process.

Jane McFadden:

It is a slow process but I hear so often—I get emails in and messages in about the school system failing our ADHD children right from the beginning.

As I said, I recently—my little boy’s in prep now, he is an antagonist, he is one of those kids who like to push other kids’ buttons to see what happens. I’m aware of it and I’m aware of—he likes to stir the pot, right?

And there’s a beautiful OT recently who’s actually promoting this particular school as a very inclusive school, that’s why I chose it, right? However what we’ve got is we’ve got parents flocking to a school that bridges that gap and—and again everyone has the right and it’s a great school—however, now in prep, because of that promotion by that OT that’s very well known, we have now at least 50/50 neurodiverse versus neurotypical, a lot of them are undiagnosed.

And what the result of that has been is my son who has done a lot of early intervention—and he’s no angel so I’m not talking from him being an angel—but I think he got punched, kicked, hit 12 times last week. And they’ve actually put a teacher’s aid around him so he doesn’t get basically beaten up at school.

And it’s been an interesting experience because the teacher has came out, the head of students came out to speak to me because they were very concerned about the punching of the penis and the balls that is going on at that school. They’re having a lot of problems.

School extremely proactive—come out, speak to me and said they’re going to be taking those boys and they’re going to be having to eat lunch in the head of students’ office, blah blah blah, right?

Now they’re probably not talking to the right person because my response was hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. So you’re going to take the disruptive boys, the ones that jump around and hit people, and you’re going to put them in a small room, give them lunch but they can’t move, then you’re going to put them back in the classroom? This doesn’t make sense to me.

So I’m there defending the disruptive boys because I’m also very aware that I have two boys that—that could be them at any moment. So I’m not like, my kids are not angels at all. So I ended up saying to him, well where is your teacher’s aid and set them up an obstacle course, take them out on the oval, all eight of them from that class, and put them on an obstacle course and run them out. Like I’m not an OT, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t put them in a small room.

And I did go home and say to my husband I’m not comfortable with that and I do have concerns—and this is a great school by the way—that as to how, what that is then going to do to the minds of those little boys and how they’re going to go with this new plan that is all there to protect my son but I’m not even on board with it. I’m like that doesn’t sound good.

Tania Waring:

That’s a disaster. And everything you’ve just described—that is the school system. So they’re flocking to your school because it’s a good school. In any other school they would just put all those kids in one classroom the whole way through. So the whole way through they’re having those problems.

So you’ve got this concentration of kids with diverse needs. Still there’s no magic or teacher. What we need to do is have a couple of those kids in every class so they can learn from how other kids behave, but also other kids can learn their struggles and how to respond to that.

And that’s actually my particular area of interest—how do we respond to kids when they’re melting down or preferably before that. And the idea is that we don’t put a whole bunch of these kids in one class because no one’s needs are going to be met then and it just becomes this disaster. It’s not helpful.

And locking them up—oh my god, you can’t punish this out of kids. You need to, as you’re alluding to, give them an outlet for their energy in a productive way. You’re trying to make their behaviours productive, not unproductive.

And also I say get all the kids out doing that obstacle course so that I think they’re not on their own doing this. Get everyone involved. They’re probably going to excel and do really well in that. Let them shine, doing well at something in front of their peers so their peers can value them for something that they do well instead of in the classroom seeing the unproductive behaviours that get them into trouble all the time, making them look less than.

Everyone’s good at something, so let these kids shine at things they’re good at so that other kids can value them. And then let those kids—give them an opportunity to learn from how other kids behave in a productive way, but also understanding that as Ross Greene says, they’re doing their best.

So if they’re not meeting expectation, you’ve got to think about what can you do about their environment, what can you do to scaffold them, what can you do to lower the expectations of them in that moment and be flexible. You’ve got to be flexible.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah but that’s what you’re describing is the system. But I mean, as a mother when you just love your kids so deeply and then you send them into a place—and I’m lucky my school’s okay for the moment—but I can see where this is going, right? Mine, I’m younger than yours. I’m sure we’re going to hit the same problems that you have got at some point. I’m very aware of that.

And I’m like this is looking to be a very draining 10 to 15 years ahead of me. It’s difficult to maintain hope because there’s not a lot of stories of the high schools really catering. I don’t see it and it’s terrifying.

Tania Waring:

High school’s hard, yeah. I’ll say that. Lots of things about the ADHD side of things, lots of parents talk around 12 to 14. Kids with ADHD—those with hyperactivity and the extreme inattentiveness—those things can settle because their brain is continuing to mature.

So their prefrontal cortex comes online more and more over time. As you say, it can be up to 30% delayed for their lifetime, it’s a lifelong disability, but it can improve.

What I’m seeing with my son in particular is his autistic features are becoming much more difficult in high school—that very rigid thinking, transitional problems, and the trauma of everything that’s gone wrong is really making school such a difficult, hostile place for him.

The social interaction is draining because he doesn’t—he wants to talk about what he wants to talk about and he finds it very hard to give and take. It makes no sense to him in a friendship. His good friends are autistic like he is, or they have some other disability, and they’re much more understanding of each other.

Yeah look, school is really tough but there are things that we can do to improve school and that’s what I’m really interested in. Because I think particularly in primary school we should not be suspending or expelling kids in primary school—that is insane—and that’s happening all the time.

As soon as you say school’s good you get all these kids going to it and then you have the problems that you’re describing. And so when people ask about our area, like in our ADHD/autism Facebook group, I’m almost reluctant to say we’ve had terrible experiences at each of the schools we’ve had because I think the problem then is if you say that, no one will send their kids there. And then you’ve got concentration of kids who are ADHD or autistic in particular schools, which then as you’ve just described with your school, it becomes problematic there. And that’s a form of segregation in itself.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah it’s a funny one because I thought—and I find it confusing because inclusion’s all changed now from what I understand. And you’d be much more across this than I am—that you aren’t able to exclude groups anymore. I didn’t think that was even legally allowed to happen, or is that…

Tania Waring:

It’s legally not allowed to happen but it does happen. Is that what you’re referring to?

Jane McFadden:

100%.

Tania Waring:

Yeah, so it is absolutely unlawful, it absolutely happens every day of the week. Kids are gatekept out of schools. They might accept your application for enrolment, but then once they learn of your child’s learning difficulties arising from ADHD or autism or whatever, suddenly they don’t have a spot for you. So that’s gatekeeping—that happens every day of the week.

And then if your child gets into a school, then if there’s any kind of externalising behaviour arising from frustration or difficulty in the classroom, then they don’t want that so they’ll just suspend, suspend, suspend. And then they’ll say, we can give you a formal suspension or you can keep him home for the next three, five days or whatever.

And then you’re put in the position of: do I want this on my child’s record? And I would encourage anyone who’s given that option, please say I want it on the record. Because they have to report those statistics so that is the only way that we will show the problems that our community are having with school.

So I would encourage—if you’re going to refuse to have my child at school for the next three days, I want it on the record. And then they’re offered, well you can either withdraw your enrolment today or your child will be expelled tomorrow. I say expel my child because I want it on the record.

It’s kids with disability, particularly ADHD and autism, who are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the statistics of kids who are suspended and expelled from school. And they’re the ones over and over and over again. It’s criminal.

Jane McFadden:

This is a really interesting conversation to be honest because obviously we’re not talking from a super professional opinion, we’re talking as two ADHD mums connecting.

But from what I can see there’s external—there’s obviously people or kids that have their symptoms externalised, and they are those kids that will punch walls, they can be quite disruptive to look at or in their actions. Then you have the children who are quite internal.

Now I have two internalisers, one of them’s a boy, and I have one externaliser. And I always had the opinion with my daughter who’s very internal—she was interesting, the school that we left, they put her in a high-needs classroom. So they put a small, sensitive female ADHD who cannot hear anything when there’s lots of sound around into that classroom, and she had a complete breakdown.

So I’ve always looked at it—and they said they were too busy, they can’t deal with her, they can’t deal with an internal breakdown, they didn’t care if there was a psychologist report to say that they deemed that classroom unsafe. They didn’t care and they told me that they were giving their resources to the externalisers.

So we need to keep people safe, we are putting all of our resources into the externalisers. But however, what you’re saying to me, which is blowing my mind, is—I thought they were helping those kids. What you’re saying to me is they’re like managing them out. Basically they’re performance managing them. I thought that they were pouring the resources to help them but now I’m like, mind blown, that that actually may not be what is happening.

Tania Waring:

There’s no unlimited resources, there’s no magical classroom, there’s no magical teachers. There are good teachers but it doesn’t matter how good you are, if you’ve got 15, 20 kids all of whom have some neurodiversity, additional needs, or needs that are more than neurotypical kids, you are not going to be able to meet their needs.

Because there is only one of you and even if you’ve got a teacher aide you cannot meet the complex needs of all these kids. So you’re just keeping everyone safe. The amount of learning that gets done in that classroom is minimal.

And often—certainly in the high school classrooms that we’ve seen—the number of kids suspended in that class at any time, so there’s this constant disruption of kids in and out of the classroom, rejoining after they’ve been on suspension for three days or five days.

Behaviour that results in suspension, always providing statement after statement after statement about all the things that go wrong. And because all they’re doing is gathering evidence to support their suspensions and then gathering evidence to support their expulsions.

And make no mistake about it, when you get the emails home sending out everything they’ve done—that’s the same as when an employee gets a letter saying this is the things that you’ve done wrong, this is what you told me that you would do, this is what you have not done. What that looks like, they’re managing you out in the same way.

My background is in law and I’ve written plenty of those letters. So when I see these emails come home, I go mate, this is our last warning. So they are setting themselves up, they are putting on in a paper trail of evidence to support their actions in relation to your child.

Now the other thing I’ll tell you is this. Because of the difficulties we’ve had, I’ve found myself on the school grounds at times supporting my child by waiting in the office because I didn’t want him to get into trouble and me not be available to help.

And so obviously an extreme situation had arisen there and I happened to be there when they had said to him—the teacher, sorry to be all over the place—the teacher aide had come down to me and said, oh he’s in the library, I’m just going to go and put my head in there.

And I said, why is he in the library? Oh because he’s there with a teacher aide doing this class instead of with the rest of the already segregated group that he was supposed to be with. And I said, why is he there on his own? Oh there’s other kids in the classroom. I said, but not from his class, so why is he—that’s, you’ve excluded him from the classroom.

And she said, oh well no, oh I mean no. I said he is going to get really upset about that because he is going to feel that he has been excluded from the classroom. Sure enough, he gets upset. And so he starts to leave the school grounds threatening to jump off the bridge because he’s so upset about this.

And she’s down there wagging her finger in his face saying I did not say that, I did not say that, don’t say that I didn’t say that. Wagging, arguing with him.

His behaviour plan, of which if you haven’t seen those yet mate I’ve got a few words to say about that too—his behaviour plan sets out very clearly: give him space, do not argue with him, his ability to reason is offline, he is operating from the brainstem, from the fight or flight or freeze. So you can’t argue with him, give him some space, reassure him, you will be okay, we will work it out.

Now she didn’t follow any of those things. And that got me. I thought, how often has my child been punished for not following your behaviour plan when you, the adult in the situation, has not done anything that you should have done? And I would bet it is more often than not.

And that’s okay because no one’s perfect, I’m not asking for them to always do the right thing by him. But don’t keep punishing my child and don’t keep refusing to own your role in the meltdown.

If kids are having a meltdown everybody has contributed to that in some way. So we can all—and particularly the adults—reflect on what could I have done differently? Not better, not worse, just differently to get a different outcome.

That’s when we’ll see things improve for kids, when adults think they’re doing their best, so what could I have done differently, what could I have changed about the environment, my response, my language, my actions, my body language, what could I have done a bit differently to get a different response from that child. It was an eye-opener.

So I think schools are letting our kids down enormously.

Tania Waring:

…And it’s a shame that they’re under so much pressure. I think there’s a resource problem—that’s the thing, there’s a resource problem.

Jane McFadden:

Because if I reflect on myself, like just say a standard weekend, right—and I always, I feel like I’m in a classroom at times even though I have only three—but I feel like I have an insight because I have two boys that fight constantly.

If I don’t supervise them, one of them will die. Like I’m like, I know that’s true. They have been near death before. You don’t keep your eye on them, they will do things that are very destructive.

Then I have my angelic daughter who wants me to set up art, she wants me to play Barbies with her. And oh my god, do I want to be with the disruptive boys that are throwing things at each other and like riding their bike into traffic? Do I want to be there? No I don’t. I’d love to be playing Barbies.

And sometimes when I see that things have gotten out of control, I can stop and reflect and think, if I had have got in here and done it this way… but sometimes I start drinking in the afternoon around four o’clock, right.

Do I reflect? No I don’t, because I’m so exhausted. And I think I can parent better when I’ve reflected, but I can’t reflect because I’m so fucking stressed out.

And I wonder with those teachers, I think if they had more resources they could probably reflect, I would hope, because most of the teachers have, but they’re just so overworked and exhausted that like—I just think they just operate on like reactive autopilots sometimes. Which I do as well because I get to the end of a weekend and I’m like, did I play Barbies with my daughter, did I do anything constructive, or did I just tell her to wait, wait, wait because I’m diverting a crisis.

And that’s like my insight sometimes to teaching where I’m like, well why didn’t somebody help my daughter? I’m like, well I actually didn’t do that either for two full days. And I’ve just wished the schools were structured different. I really do.

Tania Waring:

Oh I agree. And those are very, very important points. But it’s more than resources, it’s also the weighted curriculum.

So we have an unnecessarily weighted curriculum where kids are expected to read and write before they get to prep, which is totally ridiculous. Because almost all kids can read or write—I think it’s by age eight or something. But whether they start at the age of three or at the age of six makes no bloody difference. They can all do it by eight.

So why the hell are we making them write? And the expectation that they can come to school reading and writing is crazy.

And you can apply that all the way through to year 12. I’ve got a son in year 11 who’s been doing university-level maths since I think it was grade—definitely grade 10 and possibly at the end of grade 9. Why? Why are we teaching them university to get them ready? Why do they need to be ready for uni in grade 9 or 10 or 11 or 12? They don’t. They need to be ready for uni when they finish year 12.

So why are we doing this to them? And the fact that they’re doing that, neurotypical kids, what that means for kids who are neuroatypical is just magnified.

So it’s lots of things. It is resources, it is definitely—it would be better for everybody if we had two adults in every classroom. But it’s the expectation of the curriculum and what teachers are meant to produce. It is also parental obsession with excellence, that their kid has to be excellent at everything or something.

There’s a lot of time and energy taken up, like that example I told you earlier where the parents of those few kids who were excelling at maths wanted their kid to be given more work. It’s like why? Those parents need to take their foot off the pedal and just relax. Their kids have been given everything that they will need in life, they’re going to excel. They don’t need to do more and more and more and more and more.

In fact they would benefit from using their knowledge to help those kids who are not doing so well, because that will teach them all sorts of group skills. It will deepen their knowledge because they’re having to work out how to explain it to someone who doesn’t understand it as well.

It will deepen friendships across the classroom. It has all these wonderful implications for them as people. But what does it do to have them working at this accelerated pace in these early years? Honestly it’s crazy.

So there’s quite a few structural things that need to change about school, for sure. And we need to raise our voices about that.

But certainly I think what I’ve learned is that teachers don’t know how to respond to a child who is melting down or dysregulating in a classroom. And so that results in either that child being excluded or the teacher leaving. And so that’s a problem.

And I think that’s where I want to contribute, because I think if we can equip teachers to feel confident about kids’ varying levels of regulation and dysregulation and how to support them, I think we’ll have overall better outcomes for kids with ADHD and autism in the classroom. And all kids actually, because they will then be modelling how we respond to people in crisis, people who are dysregulated, in workplaces, in the street, in family situations.

It’s certainly everything I’ve learned through my research and experiences now, it makes me much better at my family relationships. I can see the importance of reassuring people. And I understand that if someone comes to you where there’s been a fracture in a relationship, it doesn’t take much to soften the other person.

And that’s the same with kids who are dysregulated. It doesn’t take much to soften them when they’re going into a dysregulated state and they’re becoming really tense and tight and their face is red and their fists are clenched.

It doesn’t take much if you just reassure them and offer those words: it’ll be okay mate, we’ll work this out, I know it’s frightening for you now but I’m going to validate your feelings, I’m going to reflect back what I see, I’m going to offer you support and reassurance.

And you see their little shoulders soften, you see their face soften, you see their hands soften. And you reflect that back and you just help them come out of that dysregulated state.

And that’s helped me with adults—you can use the same kind of skills and knowing with adults and it helps relationships generally.

So if we can help teachers co-regulate with children in classrooms, that models to the other children in the classroom how to co-regulate with other people, with their peers. So that when they grow up they’ve got that knowing and that knowledge and that experience so that in workplaces and other situations they can be better at relationships.

Jane McFadden:

Yeah it does make sense. If—let’s just say, because we did a few episodes ago, we had from Jenny Cleary a beautiful episode on her little 10-year-old girl who had ASD and ADHD. She was very internal and she was having some pretty serious suicide ideation and the school were not willing to do anything about it because she was internalising.

And they said that she was fine and that it was all in Jenny’s head. And I’m just paraphrasing, right, the episode is beautiful. Actually had a few people message me and said that they cried, I cried, it was a beautiful episode.

But you’re coming from a totally different perspective, which is why I’m finding this fascinating. So you sound like you have boys that have—or are on—performance management plans. If I was to find myself on those plans, what would some of the tips be? Because I have no idea and I’m open that I’m probably going to go that way at some point.

Tania Waring:

Oh I think it’s in your future with your wild one.

My thoughts on behaviour plans now is: I will not sign another behaviour plan about what my child will do in a dysregulated state. I will not. Because I can sign those contracts till the cows come home—he’s dysregulated and his ability to think and think clearly and make rational choices is completely gone. His prefrontal cortex is offline.

The only behaviour plan I will sign going forward is what the adults in the classroom will do with him and how they will respond to him. Now we have had long, long discussions about the deficiencies in my child, which I can’t stand because it’s coming from a really negative place instead of focusing on his strengths and abilities. So I try and talk about those things.

But I need the schools to understand that he doesn’t have a typical capacity to cope with social interactions—that’s really where he struggles and it drains his energy and his ability to manage.

As a parent too, there’s a process in kind of accepting that maybe he can’t actually get through a full school day because of this. And so we’ve had plenty of—I don’t think he’s attended many full school days since about grade five. So he’s currently in grade eight. It’s been a really tough few years.

But my learnings are: better to have shorter days but successful days than to push through and have things fall apart at the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the term. And to be really listening, because they’re of course not sitting down having detailed discussions about their capacity. You have to be aware of changes in their behaviour and aware of things that they might say which give you some clues.

My son desperately wants to go to school, desperately wants to be included in everything. But really he simply doesn’t have capacity. And that’s the god-awful truth of it—he just finds it really hard to navigate and manage social interactions.

So we know that now and he’s in a place now where that’s—he’s in a very small school at the moment, it’s an interim school to kind of build up his capacity. And what they’re very good at is working with us to unpack where his problems are and really focusing on the strengths.

And I’m making myself available, and a carer that we have courtesy of the NDIS, to pick him up 12:30 to 1 o’clock each day. And that’s as much as he can manage at the moment.

But I think if we’d done things differently maybe he would have had a bit more capacity. But we chose the wrong school for grade seven and that was just an utter disaster.

And there’s been other things—he was on stimulant medication for a long time and unfortunately that made him more aggressive. And once we took him off that in October last year he’s had—although it’s been unhelpful because he’s not on ADHD medication, he’s on other things, not very much anymore—and we’ve seen much improvement as a result of that.

He was more anxious, and because as I said those ADHD things do improve sort of 12 to 14, you do see improvement in their ability to focus in classrooms and whatnot. And because their brain’s maturing, the autistic things have become much more difficult for him in that time. So we’re still in the trenches so to speak.

But I’ve found behaviour plans to serve the purposes of the school in that they just simply become their evidence as to why your kid doesn’t deserve to be in the classroom. Because as reasonable as it might sound, they always do sound reasonable, but then when they’re in a meltdown they’re not reasoning and so they can’t be reasonable and they can’t make good choices because they’re not actually choosing anything. They’re reacting and they’re just exploding.

So yeah, I think behaviour plans are a bit unhelpful.

Jane McFadden:

I don’t want to make you relive negative events so feel free to skim over it, but I am curious—when you said you picked the wrong school for grade seven, would you mind expanding a little bit? Because I mean picking a school and sticking with a school is like an ADHD mum’s nightmare. Oh so I’d love to know what you picked and what happened there, I am a bit desperate to know.

Tania Waring:

We picked a school that sort of had a reputation for welcoming diverse kids. Now what I didn’t understand is—diverse kids that meet their mould. So no externalising behaviour, none. That’s just not tolerated at all.

In fact, he was humiliated and crushed on a daily basis by a teacher who would stand at the door and tell him to get away from the classroom, she wasn’t ready to see him yet. Who would march other kids out of the classroom saying, oh here we go, Matthew’s kicking off again, and leave him in the classroom by himself.

Just all sorts of things that were just—she was just punishing him just on a daily basis. And he just destroyed his self-esteem. So we didn’t really—he only lasted two terms there. But the damage that they did in those two terms was just—we’re still dealing with it. It led him to suicide. We’re still dealing with it.

And the next school got all this terrible paperwork from them and it was a state school. And I actually—I’m so sorry, they got a new principal who is very intolerant, like he’s going to stamp out behavioural problems, he’s going to crush the behavioural problems. And that doesn’t help.

So I would have said it was a nice little school and because of its catchment it kind of got all the kids that the other schools didn’t want, which was—it didn’t mind that because there were lots of kids with different things going on.

But unfortunately, like lots of state schools and regular schools and private schools, they’re set up to—I’ve never seen machinery like this school. Where incidents happen, they take a statement from 20 people all saying, describing the terrible things, what a meltdown looks like, and gathering their evidence to suspend.

And then they’d apply like a sentence grid. So if you swore or did this—like there’s all these things, you ticked all these boxes that meant you got three days, or that meant you got five days, or that meant you got two days. So it was literally applying a sentence grid to dysregulated behaviour, which was resulting from unmet needs.

And so that just led down a stormy path to more and more suspensions. But because it’s in the state system it meant that we could access this special little school that they try and help kids with quite severe problems. And so we’re in that place now.

But when you’re picking a school it’s really hard. Because what you’ve experienced with your little school now—as soon as people say oh this school’s good, then all the parents are just like great, we’re going to send our kid there. But then what was good about that school is it might have been balancing the needs of everyone in that classroom, where they had a normal distribution of needs.

Where you’ve got a few kids with lots of needs, most kids coping with not very much intervention, and then you know the accelerated kids. So that normal bell curve, they might have been dealing well with that normal bell curve, which is what we want all schools to do. And they could probably all do it.

But the problem we have is kids getting expelled and suspended and having to move through different schools and constantly looking for a school that’s going to be kinder to them. That’s the situation we’ve got now, where it’s really hard to find a supportive school.

And it depends. I think kids with externalising behaviours are the ones who struggle the most to find a supportive school. But kids with internalising behaviours are at grave risk of being overlooked and their needs being overlooked. And suicide is a real risk for both—kids who externalise and kids who internalise.

That just hopelessness, where you can’t go on because life’s so bloody hard, you just can’t keep doing it. And that’s where kids get to. That’s fucking sad. And I’m speaking from experience—it’s been a really tough couple of years.

Jane McFadden:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I really appreciate how open and honest you’re being. Picking a school and monitoring it—I mean I’m, what, like two kids… well I’m only, my oldest is in grade two and I’m feeling the pinch already.

So I can only imagine having three in, being 10–15 years in. I don’t know how—if you had the expectation you were going to work full-time and your partner was going to work full-time and you were going to put them in after school care—it’s like the grief that the life that you thought you were going to have isn’t there.

And you know, I’ve been talking a lot recently around therapies and I feel like there’s a lot of pressure around early intervention. And I agree and I believe in early intervention, but you also are physically the busiest, I think, with kids that young. And often genetically you have more than one that has some disability.

So I noticed the other day I went and found this incredible psychologist that actually had some openings, went through a 50-minute intake with her—which like I didn’t have time and emotional energy to do—to talk about all of the child’s deficits, did it, got to the end, got to the booking part and it all sounded beautiful, I was really excited. And she goes oh yes, so I don’t see siblings.

And I was like, oh what, what do you mean? And she’s like oh no, I can only see one at a time under the Australian Psychological Society ethics. And I was like, but what am I supposed to do? And she said to me—and check this one out—I would pick the one who needs the most help and we’ll just do that one.

And I was like really?

Tania Waring:

I would say it’s a waste of time sending a child to a psychologist until they’re older. The money is much better spent working with that psychologist so that you understand and you can unpack with her the problems that you’re facing. And then you are the one who is Johnny-on-the-spot. You are the one who can help them the most, but you need to understand more about what’s going on.

I’ve had a parent coach since 2017 and she has coached me on ADHD and autism and she has been someone for me to unpack scenarios with, to think about how, what can I do differently here. She is the one who’s changed my son’s life the most.

Sending him—we did send him to a psychologist from the age of four and he has been made to feel like he’s the problem since the age of four. So I do regret doing that now. On reflection I can see that that was burdensome for him, didn’t make any difference at all. It was only when I started getting that support in my parenting that that started to make a difference.

So psychology was more important for me. And I think it’s not that helpful for the kids until they get older. And like he’s 14 now and his OT is someone that he talks to, but he’s so traumatised at the moment that he won’t even. All she does with him at the moment is they have coffee—he doesn’t have coffee, he has a dirty big milkshake—but they just talk about stuff that’s not relevant.

And our team is satisfied that she is just holding that space for him, because he has talked to her previously about stuff. But at the moment he’s just got too much trauma. And that in time, by holding that space, the hope is that he will talk about things that are more important. And at the moment it’s very superficial.

So yeah, that’s kind of my thoughts. I think you need a child psychologist because you need someone who understands kids with ADHD. But it’s the parent who needs to understand that, because you are the one who, when they’re becoming distressed, you can employ those co-regulation strategies, you can help them soften and come out of that dysregulated state.

You can talk to, for instance, your daughter and reflect back to her: I know I haven’t had a lot of time for you this weekend because I’ve been really busy supporting your brothers and I just want you to know how much I wish I’d had more time with you and I’m going to try—like this is what we’re going to try and do, or what do you think we could do together that would fit in with our situation. Or just giving you some strategies to deal with each of your three children and their different needs.

I mean our third son’s brothers have really had to understand, and they can see, they can see how hard we’re trying. And it’s important that they see that, because it’s important they see how much we’re trying to support them. And whilst they do resent it at times, their understanding of that—and people always say oh how beautiful siblings of kids with disabilities are.

And I say, yeah well imagine if in a classroom, imagine how beautiful all those other kids would be if they saw how we responded with empathy and kindness and understanding to kids with disability. They’re beautiful kids because they see how we treat someone who’s really struggling.

Jane McFadden:

Oh that’s incredible advice, I really have to say. I couldn’t agree with you more.

We went ahead and cancelled that psychology appointment because I was like, well I’m not driving one around, I’m not picking one—that just seems awful to me. But we ended up going back to the registered psych who diagnosed me initially and who has helped us for years. And he does do exactly that.

So we go in, just my husband and I, and we talk about the kids really openly without them being there. And he comes up with strategies for us which has massively impacted us. That is money well spent. But that is time and energy from us that is difficult. So not everybody has time and energy. We are lucky that we have set ourselves up in that way.

We also have the emotional depth in my opinion. Not everybody—I mean if you are financially struggling, you’re both working full-time, I don’t know how you would do it, but that is a better case scenario.

And we have gone to that OT for social skills training. So they do like small groups. And I just rang them and I was like, look, if you can’t get in all three on one weekday, I’m not coming. Like, you’ve got to make that work. I’m happy to waitlist, but I’m not coming one kid at a time for three days of the week, not happening. So I’ll just wait.

And interesting, having three, they were like okay well this is what it’s going to cost. And it’s only an arm and a leg. But we just have the one appointment with other kids, which I’m hoping will not create that “there’s something wrong with them” vibe, because I totally agree with what you’re saying. No one wants to come and talk to some random lady by themselves, like it’s just—no one wants to do that.

Tania Waring:

Yeah absolutely, absolutely. And you’ve got to, you’ve got to do exactly that. You’ve got to be clever about your appointments because appointment fatigue is real—for you financially and for the kid.

Like we’ve had to just go, well we have to prioritise here. And you can’t sign him up for a thousand things because it’s all sort of hard work for him. And no one has more difficult discussions than these bloody kids, because they’re having difficult discussions about things that go badly at school, things that go badly at home.

No one has—kids with ADHD, they need to talk about something.

Jane McFadden:

Well look, thank you Tanya for coming. I so appreciate you and we will get you back for another episode.

Tania Waring:

Thank you so much Jane, this has been so much fun. Thank you, thank you, thank you for shining a light on these things and bringing us together. Thank you.