SEND HUGS

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Special Educational Needs and Disabilities - Help, Understanding, Guidance and Support
A coaching service and parenting community aimed at providing help, understanding, guidance and support to parents of neurodivergent children.

11/05/2026

My post today is very different from those a lot of people will be writing today, and I fully appreciate how lucky I am to be saying that.

My son is in Year 6, and he has been struggling... I was going to say since he started school, but actually, it goes back way further than that. He's very bright, very funny, and very charming. He has an enormous vocabulary, loves spouting esoteric facts and delights in long words. He also has significant delays in some areas and finds writing extremely difficult.

I spent several years banging my head against a brick wall, pointing out the mismatch between his cognitive ability, as demonstrated by his vocabulary, the subjects of his special interests and the oral answers he gave when topics were being discussed, and what he was able to produce in writing.

His current school are brilliant with him, and while no school is perfect, he has come a long way since he has been there. He no longer masks as heavily and has been able to show more of his quirky personality - and of the things he finds difficult.

For his SATs, the school applied for access arrangements for him, and he has been given a scribe and 25% extra time. He told me that this morning, he wrote some of his answers, and the LSA who was sitting with him wrote the rest. He says he worked hard and thinks he did well.

He wasn't stressed at all about going into school this morning, and when he came out this afternoon, he ran up to me, shouting, "Mummy, SATs are FUN!".

The school has put no pressure on him at all - in fact, when I said to him this morning, "After this week, you're never going to have to do a practice SATs paper again," he said, "I don't think I HAVE done any practice SATs papers!" (He has - regularly since at least September, but I think they just called them quizzes or something!)

I'd rather children weren't constantly examined the way they are - as I regularly say, a pig never grew by being measured. But if they do have to take SATs, the approach that's been taken, the calmness of the teachers, the way they've been presented to him and the reasonable adjustments that have been made all combine to make this as painless a process as possible.

09/05/2026

In the ADOS-2 (autism diagnostic observation schedule), one of the things the person being assessed is asked to do is talk about friendships and answer the question, “What is a friend?”

Many neurodivergent people have trouble understanding others’ intentions and can end up being too trusting, being taken advantage of or being bullied and manipulated by people whom they mistake to be friends.

I remember an incident where one of my children came home in a state of great excitement, having asked to play with some other children, who refused and carried on whispering.

That evening, my child said to me, with shining eyes and breathless excitement, “They said they were making a surprise for me, so I had to go away or I would ruin the surprise. Mummy, it must be a really good surprise, because it’s taking them a really long time.”

Obviously, there was no surprise.

The neurodivergent child’s intentions can be misunderstood as well. For instance, generosity and thoughtfulness can be interpreted as an attempt to “buy” friendship and rejected.

Autistic people can miss or misinterpret social cues and are often accused of lacking empathy.

People talk a lot less about how neurotypical people fail to understand or empathise with the intentions of autistic people.

This is known as the double empathy problem - communication can break down not because of a one-sided deficit in the autistic person, but because there are differences on both sides in communication styles and experiences.

My answer to the question, “What is a friend?” is long and multifaceted, but here’s a small part of my answer.

The most precious friends make you a better person when you’re with them, because they reflect and intensify the best that’s in you.

I said goodbye to such a friend yesterday. I’m so thankful for the 25 years of friendship. Nobody is truly gone if they live on in people’s hearts.

06/05/2026

Today is a sad day.

A very, very sad day.

I can't remember how long before I moved here I bought my favourite shirt, but I moved here in 2006.

Today I realised that this shirt no longer has any buttons. Or much material.

The trouble is, it's impossible to buy a replacement for a shirt that's over 20 years old. There is no new shirt, and no material, that feels as comfortable as a shirt that's had exactly that amount of wear.

Thank goodness I bought several at the time, so that I still have two left (though not in this colour).

In completely unrelated musings, I wonder how I came to be the mother of two autistic children...

05/05/2026

This is my demonstration of the Coke bottle effect and how reasonable adjustments can help to reduce the build-up of pressure throughout the school day and prevent that explosion that we so often see as parents at the end of the day.

None of these adjustments are time-consuming or expensive, but they can make a massive difference to the ability of a child to get through the school day.

04/05/2026

Phew, there's nothing like living by the seat of your pants!

This weekend, I drove 400 miles, took my children to visit friends in Peterborough, took my daughter and her friend to Chessington for the day, organised a birthday party, did my usual weekend jobs, drove to Biggleswade to drop my daughter's friend off with her mother in a random Sainsbury's car park halfway between our house and hers...

Oh, and I also realised three days ago that the IPSEA online SEND law training course I paid for some time ago and hadn't quite got round to finishing was due to expire today, and I was only halfway through it. I emailed IPSEA to see what time today the course would expire, but never got a reply, so I thought I'd better finish it as early in the day as possible.

So I pulled an all nighter, nodded off over it a couple of times, but I'm very happy to say that I still managed to maintain my record in the assessments!

Level 3 here we come - ummm, soon. That one doesn't expire until December, so there isn't the same urgency. Yet.

02/05/2026

As a parent, you tend to grab your rest where you can.

The list of places I've had a quick power nap to keep me going now includes this place - standing propped up against a fence at Chessington World of Adventures, while waiting for my daughter and her friend to reach the front of the queue for Dragon's Fury.

30/04/2026

“I’m scared of lunch.”

I was struggling to get him to school again, and had all sorts of theories about what might be going on - but this was one thing I hadn’t thought of.

There’s a new rule at school. I presume there was too much food being wasted, and maybe some children were so eager to get out to play that they weren’t eating their lunch.

So now, before they can go outside, the children have to show that they’ve eaten “enough” of their lunch. I don’t know who decides, or on what basis, but he has to show his lunchbox to a member of staff.

There was one day when he hadn’t eaten enough and lost his playtime. And now he’s scared of it happening again. He’d rather I didn’t give him any lunch at all. On Tuesday, he hid his lunchbox and pretended I hadn’t.

I didn’t know about the rule change. For some children, I’m sure it’s a sensible one. But not for my son.

I can usually tell what sort of day he’s had by looking at his lunchbox.

If he’s had a good day, it contains a few crumbs.

If he had trouble going into school in the morning, there’s been a change in routine, or something has upset him, he has eaten less. There are days when it comes home untouched.

In order to eat his lunch, he has to be well regulated. And the best way for him to regulate himself at school is to be outside and have the chance to run around, dig his fingers in the dirt, or play with his friends.

The new rule means that at the times he most needs to go outside, he’s under the greatest threat of not being allowed to. And the only way he can unlock that permission to go out is by doing something that he is less able to do the more dysregulated he is.

I emailed the school and I think it’s OK now - except that he’s still scared of it happening again.

But these unintended consequences crop up nationally as well.

I wonder how many people this government will unintentionally harm with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which received Royal Assent yesterday.

27/04/2026

My children are off school today. Both are exhausted and drained their social batteries completely over the weekend.

I felt uneasy writing the absence emails, knowing that although neither child is fit for school today, the attendance guidelines would not take overwhelm following a busy weekend as a valid reason for missing school. Many schools would say I shouldn’t have put them in a position to get so exhausted when I knew they had to be in school today.

What the guidance doesn’t take into account (at least, not explicitly enough) is that neurodivergent children tend to have social batteries that drain more easily. My son, in particular, gets so exhausted from day to day interactions at school that he seldom leaves home at the weekend.

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. The run-up involved a lot of planning and increasing anxiety. She’s celebrating with her friends next weekend - as it’s a bank holiday, we planned it deliberately so she would have Monday to recover.

She wanted us to have a family breakfast together yesterday, so we all sat round the table, watched her open presents and had cake for breakfast (pink cheese, as requested).

She also wanted to go out for lunch to one of her favourite restaurants. Miraculously, my son agreed to come, so we were able to have our first family meal out in months.

Two of our favourite people came for lunch with us. I was at their wedding on Friday, so this was a double celebration.

The six of us had lunch together, and both children engaged with the newlyweds. We were together for a couple of hours.

When we got home, my daughter was done and disappeared to her room. My son wanted time with just me, so we went for a walk together and played in the woods.

For many people, this would be a normal Sunday.

For my children, it pushed them past the limit of what they could manage and still function the next day.

So does the government want us to withdraw from family life and ignore special occasions altogether?

At one time, we pretty much did exactly that, until my daughter complained that all she ever did was school and her life had no meaning.

If only the government understood what’s truly important.

25/04/2026

Before presenting me with her twelve volume wish list, my daughter announced that she would be happy if she got nothing but cheese for her birthday (spoiler alert - no, she wouldn't!).

Her cousin has sent her some very nice cheese from Amsterdam, and she declared it the best cheese ever - and is now unable to eat it, because then it would be gone.

PDA - the gift that keeps on giving...

23/04/2026

Imagine being the parent of an 8-year-old who is so dysregulated that they regularly punch, kick and bite you, smash furniture and bash chunks out of the plaster in the walls.

They scream so loudly that you're convinced the neighbours are going to call social services, or possibly the police - and you even feel slightly concerned when they don't.

Your child threatens to jump into the road in front of passing cars if you try to get them to walk anywhere, and when you're driving, they try to open the door of the moving car and jump out.

There comes a point where they're clawing at you, sobbing as they tell you that if you really loved them, you'd end their life for them, because it's not worth living.

And that's not the lowest point.

The lowest point as a parent comes when you confide in the child's school and ask for advice, and they say that the child has no problems at school and so this must be a parenting issue.

And when you contact CAMHS, and the people who are supposed to know what to do to help you say, "Well, your child has a diagnosis of autism, and that's a lifelong condition, so we can't do anything to help." And then they sign you off, without ever actually seeing your child.

And that's when you feel that you're truly alone.

If anything like this is your life now, I want you to know this.

You're not alone - other parents are going through this too, and many have been through it and come out the other side.

Your child is not the problem, and neither is your parenting.

You are the best advocate your child will ever have, and however exhausted you are and however hard you find it, nobody has a better opportunity than you do to help your child find their way out of that despair, because there's nobody they trust as much as you, and nobody who loves them as much as you do.

That’s a terrifying proposition when you're going through it. You should still ask for all the help you can get, both for your child and yourself. Don't even think about trying to handle all that alone.

But as parents, we find strength we never knew we had, and there are many other parents who have walked this path and are here to help you find your way.

22/04/2026

We have a birthday coming up in the house this weekend.

The plans have been made, remade, pored over, agonised about, discussed in great detail at 2:00 in the morning…

The wish list has been created in several volumes, the cake has been requested, and every minute has been mapped out.

My brain keeps sliding off it, forgetting how close it is, because the planning has been at fever pitch for months.

The main celebration will be the weekend after the birthday, and the weekend after that is another big two day event for her - one which now clashes with a funeral and a wedding for me.

If anyone wants me over the next few days, I’ll be trying to work out how to make a cake that looks like a big wedge of pink cheese…

(Photo is of a more straightforward effort from a previous year.)

Address

Chesham

Telephone

07930842137

Website

http://www.sendhugs.co.uk/

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