Reflections

For years I thought good parenting meant staying calm on the outside no matter what I was carrying underneath.

I got that from everywhere. Hold it together. Don't let them see you rattled. Be the steady one. And I tr...

I have never trusted the panic around screens.

Screens aren't harmless. But every child's relationship with gaming, YouTube, social media, streaming, chatting, scrolling, or online worlds is also not automatically un...

There was a long stretch of years where I believed I was failing my children because I couldn't get up.

I'd absorbed all the messaging about play. Get on the floor. Follow their lead. Be animated, be available, enter...

There was a season I couldn't shower alone. Couldn't use the bathroom alone. Couldn't go for a walk or make a cup of tea. I could barely do a single thing, honestly. My nervous system, and my children's nervous systems, ...

When my child had an accident, I used to read it as a step backwards, as a failure, as a sign that we were behind and that I'd missed something or needed to try harder to get them across some invisible line into independ...

When my child asks "how long?" five times in a row, they're not being annoying or trying to rage bait me. Their nervous system loses its grip on time the moment it feels under threat. The question is the brain trying ...

This piece was first published on Kristy's Substack. Shared here so it's easier to find.

"A child gives one word, and the adult wants a paragraph. A teenager shares one feeling, and the parent asks five questions. T...

Imagination isn't a problem. I really want to say that upfront because for so many PDA kids, imagination is how they stay connected to the world, not how they escape it. Role play, characters, other realities, these are ...

This is an image of me, deep in the trenches, around a decade ago.

My husband would message from work each day and ask how 'things' were.

Some days, I couldn't speak. I'd send pictures. This was one of those days, and ...

It never gets easier, nor am I ever better prepared for the moments my autistic children (and I) are exposed to another parent’s grief stricken story about their autistic child.

I was conditioned to believe that the fir...