I know what you’re thinking… kids have to go to school. They need an education!
In my career as an OT, I met so many amazing kids who were failing at school. I heard myself say to parents so many times “your child has an incredible mind and a beautiful personality, we just had to get them through school with their self-esteem intact”.
Thankfully my views have shifted. Know better do better, right?
What if we took school out of the equation? What if there was a better way?
With my PDAer, the year before he was scheduled to start Kindy I knew that he wasn’t anywhere near ready to cope in that environment. I decided to enroll him just one day a week in a small family day care, with the most beautiful, supportive educator you could ever meet, in the attempt to try and start getting him ‘Kindy ready’.
Then once he was diagnosed as Autistic, we increased to 2 days and also added in Speech Therapy, OT and Child Psychology to do everything we could to prepare him for school. Life was busy. Well, busy is putting it lightly. It was stressful, chaotic and unsustainable.
We were pouring all our time and energy into going to therapies, pushing to keep going at daycare when it was clearly not working. In reality we were doing more harm than good. Instead of getting him ‘ready’ he was in a perpetual state of overwhelm, constantly in a fight/flight/fright stress response. This was our PDAer hitting burnout.
One day I said to myself, “What if we take Kindy off the table?’
All of a sudden there was no need for day care (I wasn’t working during the week, so we didn’t actually need the childcare), our therapy goals for OT and speech were no longer relevant. Our psychology sessions around managing separation anxiety were no longer needed. We just stopped. We stopped and trusted. And guess what started to happen. Our beautiful boy started to come back to us, what he needed was a low demand lifestyle. He continues to surprise us everyday.
I don’t know what the future holds, probably unschooling. I am confident that my PDAer will learn when he is ready. Just for now, we are doing what works best for us and forging our own path.
