Hope, Support & a Reality Check for Working Parents with Complex Kids
Every year, we hear from parents who are concerned that their child isn't realizing the potential of their gifts or getting the reality-based support they need for the academic and/or social-emotional areas where they struggle--all while trying to juggle work and other family obligations.
Many have given up on their careers altogether, shifting focus to educating their kids themselves, in many cases not because they always wanted to homeschool but because their kids’ strengths are under-challenged — or their challenges are under-supported. Some are losing their love of learning, others are in full-blown crisis.
I’ve been that Mom, so I know what that journey is. I’ve watched the light go out; I’ve held my child through boo-boos they don’t make bandaids for; I’ve sat with the loving, well-intentioned teachers struggling with the mismatch between the constraints they’ve been handed and the realities of my very unique children’s needs; I’ve given my every afternoon to coaching my children through how to independently manage complex medical profiles while staying engaged with curriculum and peers without the support of someone trained by their doctors in what those hidden conditions do or what my kids need to do to keep them at bay; and I’ve nursed my own back every day after school through the hours spent driving the minivan from therapy to therapy —and then hunched over my laptop in the gap between me and the steering wheel, desperate to get out one more email while brilliant therapists did all they could in a 40 minute session to put my exhausted child back together again.
If that's where you are today, I have three messages for you:
1) Support: it's not just you, this is hard.
2) Hope: it doesn't always have to be like this.
3) Reality: if it seems to you like there’s nothing to be done because school just wasn’t designed for your kid, you may be right—but that’s a problem with the traditional educational approaches, not with your kid.
The traditional educational model that we see in public schools but also in most private mainstream and special education environments follows a general blueprint that goes back to the Industrial Revolution. The general education piece of that puzzle understands intelligence and abilities as relatively uniform things—leading far too many gifted kids with uneven neuropsychological profiles to be denied the educational help they need on the scientifically (and legally) unsupportable basis that “they’re too smart for special ed,” or, as I was told, “we can see how bright he is, so if he wanted to read he could.”
Meanwhile, the special education piece of that puzzle presumes that children’s disabilities are immutable, so it focuses on removing the barriers those challenges pose by accommodating them: a strategy that limits children’s runway to independently chart their own course once they leave that bubble and head to the real world. This special education model starts with incredibly valuable and data-driven evaluations of our children, but fails to give teachers or in some cases even in-school therapists and administrators the training they need in neuropsychology and neurophysiology to connect the dots between children’s academic and especially social-emotional struggles and the data in those reports. All learning and social tasks require that we employ a mix of ‘splinter’ neurocognitive and neurophysio skills, so when some of those skills are in the stratosphere and others are somewhere between low and average, that gap itself drives dysfunction, frustration and mental health challenges as the child’s inability to predict which tasks will be easy or hard leads to anxiety, imposter syndrome and even school-based trauma. Accommodations filling the gap between an evenly low set of skills and the average water mark do nothing to address this formulaic imbalance, leading many of these kids to develop maladaptive coping mechanisms like task avoidance or even school refusal. Perhaps most damaging for our kids, under traditional models these manifestations of our children’s asynchronous skills (not to mention hidden regulatory difficulties like sensory processing or autonomic neurological dysregulation) are interpreted as “behavioral” problems to be managed by increasing the incentive for them to “do the right thing”—triggering shame and further trauma for kids who are desperately trying to do just that but don’t currently have the wiring they need to pull it off in the moment.
This is a systemic problem, and it demands a systemic solution. A solution grounded not in applying the same approach in a new setting with people who will “love them more” but in starting over with how we approach education as a whole, so we can bring it into alignment with the science of how kids learn, socialize and grow—not fighting that hard wiring but leveraging it to move kids forward.
Cajal Academy Co-Founders Cheryl Viirand, JD (left) and Heather Edwards, MS-OTR/L (right).
When I was ‘that Mom,’ I remember how big and intractable this problem seemed, and how hard it was to find two brain cells I could rub together to solve it while racing between my obligations as a corporate litigator and later, a social entrepreneur—and someone who still magically had to find a way to get done all the other things that go into being a parent and a spouse. Doctor's appointments, grocery stores…you know the drill.
The bad news is, if you’re feeling like the mismatch between “school” as we’ve all traditionally understood it and your child’s needs is too big for you to solve, you may well be right.
The good news is, there is amazing science out there that points the way for new educational approaches that start with addressing the fundamentals in our children’s profiles to remove the barriers in their way while giving them access to develop their strengths. This is a fundamental shift in how we understand the purpose and the opportunity of the precious K-12 years: it’s not to cram in more worksheets, it’s to remove the challenges that stand in the way of them feeding their own insatiable appetite for learning and foster the skills they’ll need to support their gifts today, in college and ultimately as the adults that they’ll become.
I hit that “this doesn’t work” wall a long time ago, but when I learned about what neuroscientists actually know today that they didn’t know when we were kids, I simply had to go for it. As Mom, I couldn’t turn away from a door that could transform my children’s futures. My older son’s journey as the first graduate from our program unequivocally proved to my husband and myself that that gamble was worth taking.
That was over six years ago now. In early 2019, that expert after-school team that used to wave to me as I cranked away in the minivan joined with me to develop a new blueprint for schools that starts with that science. Soon we were joined by internally-renowned neuropsychologist Steven Mattis, PhD, ABPP—because he just had to come see how our approach could possibly be making such dramatic changes for kids in such short periods of time. Since then, our team has pulled together connections in peer-reviewed literature that are well-respected but hadn’t previously been operationalized in a school and turned them into a research-backed methodology that’s proving successful at reducing or even removing learning and in some cases social-emotional and executive function challenges in the very bright population we serve.
This isn’t just a new protocol or approach, it’s a whole new educational model that we call, “Neuroplasticity Schools.” We think it’s the wave of the future—and also the promise for not just solving the acute academic and mental health crises gripping so many bright kids with asynchronous profiles today but preventing those crises for kids tomorrow. What’s more, because this model actually shifts the fundamentals of the child’s profile rather than just trying to make them more resilient in the face of those struggles, from an economic perspective this approach is actually more cost-effective than the traditional ways of doing things, and holds the potential to dramatically change your child’s future economic opportunities as well.
That’s a pretty powerful equation.
As “mom” to this venture, I’ve traded in that feeling that there was no hope for the feeling that this break-through is so much bigger than me, our small school and our mission-driven organization. It’s like I find myself holding a vial of penicillin in a world that desperately needs it, and I just can’t drop it. We could already see the potential way back in 2019, so we founded ourselves as a non-profit with a mission not only to run this school and develop these approaches, but to publish and disseminate them to further advance the field of education as a whole. We recently relocated into a beautiful, 20,000 square foot historic building in the center of South Norwalk so we could scale up our program to offer this transformational approach to more kids. Our new space is just a 10 minute walk from the train station at the intersection of the main line from NYC to New Haven and the branch line going out to Danbury, broadening access across the region as well.
Here is what this means for you, as you struggle to navigate this challenging journey for your own child.
Starting with that very concrete journey itself, perhaps we can help. If you feel like the current equation just isn’t working, I encourage you to reach out about a fall or immediate placement. Being small means that we are able to be nimble and transition your child in quickly; for your child, it also reduces the friction of a transition into the community. Many find our small and tight-knit cohort also helps them to understand and heal from social-emotional challenges, reducing social anxieties and leading some who started out with social skills challenges to go on to be recognized in community-based settings for their social leadership, owing to our powerful and exclusive social-emotional learning approach. For today, this powerful educational model and the neurodevelopmental and social transformations it drives is only available in our very small setting in South Norwalk, so it isn’t a choice between getting access to this approach in a large setting or in a small one, it’s a choice between getting access to this transformative approach or continuing with the status quo.
Second, turning to the bigger social picture, we need your help. These break-throughs didn’t come from a big research university or some huge grant, they came out of that minivan and the grit and determination of a small but expert team. To date we have always relied on tuition funding to continue not just our student programming but this exciting research and development work—yet in today’s political and economic environment, public funds and the children who rely on them are in the cross hairs. The good news is that because our school is the setting in which we do our development work, and our development work is what fuels the extraordinary results we see for the students in our school, each donation to our scholarship fund has a dual impact: it helps open the door to these transformational opportunities for another child, and in doing so it increases the size of our cohort—thus increasing the power and of our research findings to influence the field as a whole. All donations go straight to programming work; many of us volunteer or heavily subsidize our time at Cajal because we feel so strongly in both the potential and the importance of this work.
Whether as an applicant or as a supporter, we hope you’ll continue to follow our own journey and that you will find that it gives you hope, the support of knowing that you’re not alone, and expands your understanding of “reality” as it has my own. Please feel free to drop me a line to share your own journey, and let us know if you think we may be able to help.