Life Tree Wellbeing

21/09/2025

Two upcoming opportunities for parents and carers to attend a FREE workshop on supporting children's early reading and writing skills. The first is this coming Friday! Registrations essential for catering purposes. Please register at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/literacy_workshop_registration
Please share with families of children aged 4-7 or with beginning literacy skills. All welcome!

19/09/2025

Hey! Dads Den is on tomorrow! Would love to see any dads who are free! We’ll have pizza and chats, talking about PDA profiles and approaches to help.

11/09/2025

07/09/2025

This will be fantastic! Totally worth attending!

We are thrilled to partner with Dr Michelle Bennett of to offer a free workshop for parents and carers on supporting early reading and writing skills. Register now at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/literacy_workshop_registration

08/08/2025

This is so important that we protect our kids even when seeking help!

03/08/2025

‘Therapies are wonderful when they're supportive, helpful, practical and necessary. A person being autistic is not an instant qualifier for therapies.
Therapy is based on need, not eradication.’

LOVE THIS!

I’ve been raising, loving and supporting my own autistic children (four of them: 27, 20, 14 and 11) for 27 years this year. We’re a completely autistic family, with additional forms of divergence thrown in for good measure.

Can I tell you my number one regret? Being convinced that therapies and interventions were more important than their childhood.

Yes, accessing therapies that support us and our children are beneficial, but how do we know what’s what when we’re new to parenting autistic kids?

I know what it’s like to feel so stuck between the longing to be present with, to love and enjoy my autistic children - to play with wild abandon and love their wonderful ways; and to live with the pain in my tummy that I am never doing enough.

But what is enough? If we took every single approach, piece of advice, therapy..one lifetime wouldn’t be enough to implement them.

And better yet..how do we measure enough?

The pressure we can feel around therapies being more important than having an actual childhood is very real, and I’m sorry so many of us do not access safe and actually helpful supports without trauma and distress first.

I learnt this: a person being autistic is not an instant qualifier for therapies. Therapies can be wonderful! BUT, believing or assuming a person requires them simply because they’re autistic is ableist. It presumes there is something about the person that requires support or even fixing because of their neurobiology as opposed to assessing based on required supports in alignment with quality of life.

A sense of urgency is often placed on families in terms of the ‘window of opportunity’ in accessing supports, which of course becomes too much for the parent left to navigate such challenging decisions alone so we can end up just trying anything and everything all at once.

And we burn out. All of us. Family burnout.

The information most predominantly available is often suspended in doom and gloom OR the autistic space is saturated with high masking white experiences of being autistic.

If I could go back, I’d connect with families of non speaking autistic children (like my now teen), who were implementing and practicising a range of communication supports such as AAC and spelling. I’d find peer mentorship and support with families who, while they were real about the pressure, constraints and stresses.. were not invested in curing or eradicating autism.

Autism doesn’t exist - not in the abstract; autistic people do. I don’t take my autism off at the end of the day like a coat, nor do my children.
We don’t want to eradicate our children.

I looked for evidence based therapies for my children and I came unstuck. I’m serious.

My non speaking beauty ended up with significant trauma as a result in the first years of her life. I was disconnected from my intuition and was convinced I couldn’t possibly know what was good or right for my child because they are autistic and I needed to be a professional to know anything.

I am autistic. And I still believed that.

I am their Mama. I trust my intuition today, and I enjoy my children.

Therapies are wonderful when they’re supportive, helpful, practical and necessary. A person being autistic is not an instant qualifier for therapies. Therapy is based on need, not eradication.

We’re not curing or eradicating our autistic children, we’re supporting them. And if we want to change them so much that they are as little as the version of themselves we currently see, then we are not seeing who they are. We are pathologising them.

Enjoy your children. I promise you it’s okay to.

We’re so often encouraged to be projecting so far into the future, we miss who our children are here and now, today.

And for those that will say therapies must be prioritised because we parents will not be around forever and our children must be prepared…okay..yes, but we also don’t want to be spending the time we do have with our children recovering them from trauma they experience in the first years of their lives.

Be among people who work toward making it work. Be among people who see their autistic children as human - whole and complete people with a right to quality of life, choice and agency.

You have the right and the freedom to love and enjoy both your children, and being a parent in the moments where it is possible.

“Every moment is an opportunity for therapy” - rubbish. Therapy is in place to support living. If we never make time for the living, what’s the point?

KF x

24/07/2025

This!

I have a yes-no child who will always say yes but never get around to it, and a no-yes child, who will always lead with a no and do it anyway…we both won when I realised not to thanks their no as a no, and not argue back/push the point to require them to do the thing!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16BtcG5Jhq/?mibextid=wwXIfr

My youngest says "No" and all it's variations in response to almost every request I make of them.

And I don't flinch.

This is an accommodation. It is a means of balancing what feels off kilter for a PDAer when a demand is present for them, and an opportunity for me to allow a replenishment of perceived autonomy.

Sometimes, it's even a flipping of the bird. Yup.

There were years where I would have punished that. I would have reacted, and made it personal that my child said No to everything I asked of them, no matter the outcome or the series of events that came after. I was 'trained' as a parent by society to expect a certain level of 'respect' and that included not telling me NO when I asked my children to do something.

Yikes.

Here's the thing: my child says No, takes some time, and..
. does exactly as I request of them (sometimes with their own additional bits and bobs).

Saying No = balancing, equalising, levelling, equity seeking.

Taking time = being with stillness while allowing their nervous system time to adjust while also taking back energetically, their agency their sensitive neurology perceives is lost.

It isn't personal. It's how we do things as PDAers.

The reason they're able to get things done, is because they know I can manage my own responses, reactions, triggers, feelings and thoughts about how they go about managing themselves and understand this is them doing the best they can to manage demands.

I don't always get it perfect. I'm human. I can be impatient, over it, not up for this today. But that same knowing they have of me - that I am committed to repair when things go pear shaped, is what sustains us. Relationship. They know I have their back.

There are times they can't. They can't do the things. And I see it, hear it and accept it.

It has taken years of repair to be the parent of a PDAer who can shower, eat well, contribute to a healthy and wholesome lifestyle at home (as opposed to calling it doing chores), and try new things.

Relational wounds started at home with my conditioning as a parent, a PDAer myself and my child's time in the educational system. I'm also a teacher, so I'm passionate about education - but more passionate about childhood development and wellbeing. Anti oppressive wellbeing for the family.

Would my child flip the bird at me in public? Or say No to me in public? Only if they knew they were in private and safe company, but typically, no.

Other ways accommodations (equalising, levelling, balancing) show up in our household:

- throwing toilet rolls on the floor to be able to use the toilet
- using more shampoo than necessary to be able to shower
- complaining about every single experience even when we love it

None of it is ideal, but it isn't the end of the world either.

It's real and true and we're far better off working with the reality of how things actually are, as opposed to how we want things to be.

Some of us have crawled back from years of burnout, with no other choice than to strip back and strip back and strip back with our babies. We've been there, you know? On the receiving end of well intentioned advice, shamed and blamed, in all the programs and reading the books, etc etc etc. You know how it goes.

Many of us disengage from what are often even considered progressive in their approach with PDAers, because they still pigeon hole, use frameworks, are prescriptive based on pathology..and this goes against what I need as a PDAer.

To be free, to have the level of autonomy I need, is to be seen and accepted as me. Not another PDAer.

Just as me.

I encourage us all to consider the 'behaviours' we're told are unacceptable, or confrontational, or even abusive in our children as forms of balancing in a person that requires equity outside of sociopolitical hierarchies.

We might all be surprised and open up to learning from our children just how rigid our conditioning is.

KF

23/07/2025

FYI, the research is finally catching up…!

https://neurosciencenews.com/autism-masking-cognition-29493/?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwLtox9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHgbcPPITySALo32LTHLuV4NDdhCbRJPfcW2UDJLxdf9IIAdHq1ZgWXKB15Ut_aem_3GfrlJ9cncaaqp-cp-7eIg

Some autistic teens mask their traits to “pass” as non-autistic in social settings, but a new study reveals the hidden cognitive toll.