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Welcome to Embrace, a heartfelt podcast series led by Rachel Forbes, Executive Director of LDS - Learn. Develop. Succeed. Drawing on her rich experience in community building, social justice, and nonprofit leadership, Rachel takes you on an intimate journey through the life of Mason—a remarkable individual whose story of navigating dyslexia and ADHD offers powerful insights into the world of neurodivergence.
Through Mason’s story, from his early years in preschool to adulthood, we explore the first signs of learning differences, how they evolve over time, and the impact of a strong, supportive community. Alongside educators, neurodivergence experts, passionate parents, and allies, Embrace shatters stigmas, highlights the unique gifts of neurodivergent learners, and offers empowering strategies for building confidence and self-esteem.
Join us as we celebrate the power of educational and social-emotional supports that embrace each unique learner for who they are—and who they can become.
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Hi, I'm Rachel Forbes. I'm a passionate mother, an advocate, a partner, a friend, and an ally. I bring those identities and my experience in community building, social justice, and nonprofit leadership to my role as Executive Director at LDS, Learn, Develop, Succeed. Over the next few weeks, I will lead you through the story of a beautiful soul named Mason.
from preschool through to adulthood. We get to witness Mason's early years, exploring the first signs of potential learning differences like dyslexia and brain-based differences like ADHD. In this series, we will feature educators from LDS, experts on neurodivergence, as well as passionate parents and allies who make up the community that rallied around Mason. Along the way, we'll reveal the gifts
that unique learners offer. Shatter some stigmas about neurodivergence, explore ways to build confidence and self-esteem, and offer a path forward. A path paved by educational and social emotional supports that embrace each unique learner for just who they are and for who they can choose to be. This is Embrace.
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through a long and challenging journey. Mason has entered a stage where he's learning to embrace his learning differences, dyslexia and ADHD. Once stressors, there are sometimes now things he leans into and he's accomplished so much because he felt understood by educators that met him where he was at. And he had strong communities of support to hold him through transitions and tough times, whether that was family, peers, educators or others. Even in the best school systems and I
My kids went through an amazing school district, great teachers. It doesn't mean everything was wonderful, but it means overall we were really well supported and things still, major things still fell through the cracks and supports were not there that were needed. So we cannot expect our school districts to do what they obviously can't do. Sarah Jane Walker knows the system inside and out, not only because she's the senior manager, communications at LDS.
but because she's a mother to three teenagers and young adults, two of whom are neurodivergent. So as a parent, you have been working to get your kids or any one of your kids through the school system. So formalized or informal education even. And that can feel like getting through to certain points is like a bare minimum. How do you balance that feeling?
or desire to have your child thrive or excel or grow and develop with this like, okay, we've just got to meet this like next hurdle. I would say that you, because my eldest child had the most severe needs, we sort of got catapulted into this world of recognizing that the goal posts were gonna be different.
And if they were going to be different for my first child, they were going to be different for all my kids. And so we sort of got catapulted into that world. So understanding where their interests are, where their strengths are, and allowing those things to be nurtured. And at the same time, accepting and realizing that things are going to be challenging. And I say that it's actually a really, really challenging thing to do as an adult who, no matter what you say and want to believe you come to parenting with,
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You come with this expectation that your kids are going to somehow be the better yous, right? Like they're going to take all the best of you. And in many ways they do. I would say I'm not disabused of that. But in the early years when they're struggling and the teenage years when they're struggling and not always pleasant to be around, you sort of have to dig deep into your own reserves and to recognize that the goals look different for each child. And it's easy to get caught up in, well, when I was 16, this is what my friendship
group look like, this is what my social world looked like, this is what school looked like, these are the things I was able to do. And it's very difficult to take those scripts because there are scripts, right? There are life stories, they're deeply within us. And it's difficult to take those and put them aside in many ways and save those for your adult conversations and for different spaces and different times and focus on what is this child of mine who is struggling with this particular thing need right now and how do we go from this step to the next step?
A story to illustrate that focus on what is my child in front of me needing right now, is a recollection from Sarah Jane of when she had a child in grade eight who came home from high school a little overwhelmed because there was a course mix up and he needed to change a course. When asked what he was going to do about it, he was at a loss. Sarah Jane and her partner believe that their role was to coach self-advocacy skills for independence. So a key developmental piece of the puzzle
was for kids to advocate for themselves. But before advocacy and independence, we need to build the basic building blocks of skills and experience. He had to whiteboard how to make a phone call because they didn't have that skill yet. It was a huge chart, talking through all the possibilities and variables that could happen when they talk and advocate for themselves to the school. And so in grade eight, you look ahead and you go, wow, like, how are they going to get through high school? Like, these are these are huge challenges. And yet.
the phone call is made. And then the next conversation is just that little bit easier. And by the end of high school, I have a kid who's applying to college and universities and knows how to contact the accessibility office and advocating for their own needs. And so the good news, even though it's really tough, is they grow up and their brains do continue to develop. And so you can look back. So I think another key thing is, is when there's this big transitions like high school or when you're looking at
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making progress around really big goals is to remember and step back and go like they've actually learned some hard things already. Like we've all learned some hard things together and this is one more hard thing and we know that we'll make it through this and we will get through it and it might not be pretty, it might be pretty tough, but we'll get there. And I think as a parent, your role is to stay pretty calm in the midst of that and reassuring and recognize that when you don't have the tools, that it's time to figure out those tools together.
And it's okay not to have those tools because I don't know, I hadn't done that before. So we're learning as we go constantly, just like our kids are learning as they go. And we're there to coach and kind of offer that scaffolding and sometimes to push and sometimes to step back and to really walk alongside and figure out what we need in that moment. A phone call seems easy to some, but for some neurodivergent folk, it can take the wind out of you. So what's the science behind it?
What does the research tell us about the brains of folks that are neurodiverse? Dr. Candice Murray, a registered psychologist who's worked in the area of ADHD and learning differences for over 25 years now. She focuses her time on clinical work as well as advocacy for children, youth and adults with ADHD and with learning disabilities.
Children who have ADHD and learning differences tend to struggle more because going back to what we talking about earlier, one of the things we know is there's approximately a 30 % delay in brain maturation in children with ADHD. you know, chronologically they might be 10, but in terms of their development, brain development, they're more like a seven-year-old. And that has nothing to do with intelligence. That has to do with their ability to be independent.
an ability to do things on their own. So as children hit the teenage years and they go off to high school, you go from having one teacher, the same kids in every class, a certain way to allocate homework to four different teachers, different methods of assigning homework, different teaching styles, and parents tend to back off and think, okay, well, they're in high school, they should be independent now.
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And that's where we tend to see kids with ADHD and learning difference really, really struggle because their brains just aren't there yet. And then you get kind of mixed in with that. Very normal developmentally for teenagers is a resistance to getting help. So you have this classic kind of tug of war between teenagers wanting independence, but not quite being ready for it. Parents trying to let go, but then...
when they don't let go and when they realize their children need support, their teens will resist it. So it's kind of a classic parent-teen situation. It's just magnified when you have the brain differences that you have in children with ADHD and learning disabilities. So they do need more scaffolding and support for longer than parents might expect. And a lot of the work that I do is trying to have parents understand that.
that when you compare your child to other children the same age, you're really just going to frustrate yourself and that's going to have a rupture on your relationship with your child. You parent the child you have and we know that children who have ADHD and learning differences have different needs. They need more scaffolding, they need more support for longer than other children.
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I want to reiterate it's not about intelligence, but rather creating the infrastructure and the support that a child needs and building a strong relationship between parent and child. Dr. Gordon Neufeld, who writes, Hold on to Your Kids, one of the key learnings from that book is that yes, peer relationships are important, but parental relationships are more important, even through the teenage years. And it doesn't mean your kids aren't out there creating great peer relationships and they aren't important to them.
But your work as a parent in those teenage years is to dig in really deep and find out how to maintain and sustain and continue to feed those good relationships with your teens. And I think that's so important because it's not easy. It's easy to maintain a really close relationship with a two or three year old because you're with them physically all the time and they want to be with you and you're their world. And then you have these teenagers who look at you like you're from another planet and nothing you can say is right.
and you're just a problem, but at the same time, they desperately need you. And you have to be the mature adult who continues to create those spaces and of welcome because school, especially for kids, when you're a diverse and challenged and maybe not being successful and maybe feeling isolated socially at school, they feel deep shame about that because they know that that's not what they want. They want to be included. They want to make friends. They want to be doing well in school.
and they want to be successful. And so they carry that shame with them. And where do they put that? That's a really hard thing to process. As adults, that's hard to process. As teenagers, that's hard to process. So we need to continue to be a place of calm, a place of fun, a place of belonging, a place of acceptance, even when they show up with big spikes all over them. I don't, I metaphorically, could be physically as well.
But metaphorically, when they're really spiky and not very polite and not very fun to be with, we keep welcoming them and we keep creating opportunities for connection. And Candace couldn't agree more on the values of embracing our kids, even when they're no longer kids. I mean, I think there's two extremes. There's too much support, the so-called helicopter parenting. And then those kids go off either to university
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or into the workforce and then they have no supports and they tend to fall pretty hard. Or the sort of overly laissez-faire parents who are sort of like, no, he or she is 18 years old now, they don't need my help at all anymore. And so the teenagers struggle through high school and don't even get a chance to sort of graduate with their peers. So the main thing I think I tell parents is it's important to stay supporting
these teens longer, especially with executive functioning, know, helping them wake up in the morning, thinking about different kinds of alarm clocks to use with your teenager to get them out of bed, either taking away their phones or encouraging them to turn off their phones or leave their phones away at night. This is a big problem for all kids, but especially for kids with ADHD and learning differences. And so doing those kinds of things for longer than you might expect is really important. But then getting to a point where you're going to have to let
them have these gentle setbacks. Some parents have a really hard time with that, have a really hard time with letting their kids fail. Of course, we all know what he wants that, but those soft falls for kids who have ADHD and learning differences. Right, this theme of fear of failure.
and allowing failure and learning from failure and what is failure keeps coming up and I think it's a really interesting and important one to normalize the idea of failing and I think a lot of people who have learning differences, whether they know it or not, there's been a whole potentially traumatic experience of schooling and failing at school and creates
this fear of that happening again or what will happen next time I fail. Do you have any tips for families or even for teens themselves about how do we support each other in failing? I think it's critical for parents and teachers and adults in a child's life to normalize that mistakes are how we learn. It's the best way to learn. And then when mistakes happen, rather than getting angry, upset,
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arguing with your your teen especially listen and problem solve and be that sounding board for them because we know that kids who learn how to problem solve have more success later on in life. So a parent's job when a child makes a mistake is to help them figure out how to move forward and learn from that mistake.
And that is how we grow. That's a normal part of growing. And we see it little kids. They fall down, they fall down, and that's how they learn to walk. It's the same kind of idea throughout your life. Every time we fall down, it's a chance for us to learn how to pick ourselves up. Where it can go sideways is when parents get frustrated and get angry, and then you have that development of shame. So we know that kids with ADHD and learning disabilities, but particularly ADHD,
They get much more negative feedback than neurotypical children. And this is why I see consistently in the people that I work with, in the teens I work with, in the adults I work with, a deep sense of shame. Not that I made a mistake, but that there's something wrong with me. And that's a pretty big difference, right? That there's something fundamentally broken with me. And that's why we see comorbidity rates of anxiety, depression.
and substance use in this population because from an early age, either get the message or interpret failure as unbroken. And that is, I think, a critical focus that we need to work on. Candace's work in supporting neurodivergent people in this journey is so important because it's not just about amplifying the vulnerability of this population, but open up discussions around moving in more support.
in the later years than we might normally expect. Teens are always going through a challenging time, and then stacking all of the other pressures and vulnerabilities that come with being neurodivergent is incredibly hard. They're left in a tough spot as they consider their next steps into adulthood, whether pursuing post-secondary education or trying to get into the workforce. But sometimes, it's the simple things too.
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We're like, the math will come along. The English will come along, et cetera. The reading will come along. We'll get those supports. But can my child live a fully actualized life? Like, will they get married? Will they be able to have a partner? Will they want to have like, what will their adult life look like? And that one can feel really heavy and it can feel like, where do you have safe places to talk about that? How do you help them navigate into finding peer relationships that aren't highly performative? We don't want performative peer relationships.
However, that's where a lot of our kids with social communication challenges will start. Because that requires, that's not something we do, and it's not something we just train or teach our kids to do, I use quotation marks there. That's something that requires a whole community of people that are open to them and accepting, and we don't have any control over that.
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In the next episode, we talk about the importance of advocating for inclusive education. From children to adults, learning differences are severely overlooked within our communities and schools. We cover how building more inclusive educational policies could be the key to changing the entire system. Well, the word fail or failing or failure has a very negative connotation, but it's actually
the door to learning something new. So when you fail, you learn that that wasn't the best way to do the thing. never had that and just somebody could just here take my hand. Who knows where I'd be? Embrace is an everything podcast production, an award winning team focused on engaging storytelling that connects with its audience in a meaningful.
and memorable way. Our showrunner is Ruthu Jagannath and our audio engineer and sound mixer is Scott Whitaker. And if you like the show, please rate and follow it. It helps us reach more listeners like you. Until next time, embrace your kids.
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Another Everything Podcasts production.
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