The Child Wasn't the Only One Waiting for Answers

Sometimes a child’s journey through the SEND system quietly becomes a Parent’s journey too.

When a child enters the SEND system, the attention understandably turns towards them.

What are they finding difficult? What support do they need? What is happening at school? Which assessment, appointment or referral comes next?

The parent often becomes the person sitting beside them with the paperwork, dates, examples and questions. They are expected to remember everything, explain everything and keep pushing when the process slows down.

What is rarely noticed is what that journey may be bringing up for the parent too.

Over the years, I have worked alongside hundreds of families. Every child and every family is different, but there are moments that seem to repeat themselves.

One happened during a parents’ group that I have never forgotten.

A mother had been sitting quietly while other parents spoke about school meetings, appointments, waiting lists and the difficulty of getting professionals to understand what life was actually like at home.

She listened for a long time without saying very much. Then she began to cry.

Naturally, everyone became concerned. When she was ready to speak, she smiled through the tears and said, “I honestly thought I was the only one.”

They were tears of relief.

Nothing about her situation had changed on paper. The appointments, uncertainty and everyday pressures were still waiting for her. What had changed was the meaning she had attached to them.

Until that moment, she had taken her exhaustion and uncertainty as evidence that she was failing. Hearing other parents describe similar experiences helped her understand that she was not weak, incapable or getting everything wrong.

She was a parent trying to navigate something genuinely difficult.

No strategy or leaflet could have given her what she found in that room. She needed to hear another person describe the experience she had been carrying privately and realise, “It isn’t only me.”

Another conversation has stayed with me for a different reason.

A father once told me that while his son was going through an assessment, he kept recognising parts of himself in what was being discussed. They were things he had never questioned because they had always been part of his life.

Ways of thinking. Sensitivities. Difficulties he had learnt to work around without ever having language for them.

One day, he looked at me and said, “I think it’s my turn now.”

His son’s journey had made something in his own life visible.

That does not mean every parent will share their child’s neurodivergence or that a child’s assessment should automatically become an assessment of the whole family. It means that understanding one person can sometimes give another person language for experiences they have never been able to explain.

For some parents, that recognition is reassuring. For others, it may bring grief, anger or questions about what might have been different if somebody had noticed them sooner.

There is another parent I think about whenever this comes up. She is intelligent, compassionate, professionally capable and an excellent mother. Yet she regularly begins conversations by saying, “Sorry—it’s my ADHD.”

The apology often arrives before she has done anything requiring one.

It made me wonder what she believed she was preparing people for. Over time, it became clear that she was not apologising for one particular action. She had spent years receiving the message that the way her brain worked could be inconvenient, excessive or difficult for other people.

Eventually, the apology had become automatic.

That distinction matters.

Neurodivergence can bring genuine challenges and support needs. But not every difficulty a neurodivergent person carries begins inside them. Some of it comes from years of being misunderstood, corrected, dismissed or made to feel that their natural way of moving through the world creates a problem for everybody else.

There is a difference between needing support and being made to feel like you are the problem.

Some people are not trying to recover from who they are. They are trying to understand what years of other people’s responses taught them to believe about themselves.

A child’s SEND journey can bring all of this into the room. It can expose how isolated a parent has become, help them recognise something in themselves or reopen memories of their own childhood and the support they never received.

That is why supporting parents cannot only be about giving them more techniques to use with their children.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can offer is a space where they are not required to prove that they are coping. Somewhere they can speak honestly, listen to other families and make sense of what the journey is bringing up for them as well.

The child still deserves support that is centred on their individual needs. But the person sitting beside them may also be carrying unanswered questions, old experiences and years of wondering why certain parts of life have always felt harder than they seemed to for everybody else.

Perhaps alongside asking, “What does this child need?” we should also be asking, “What has the parent been carrying while trying to get them there?”

Because occasionally, the child is not the only person who has been waiting to understand what is happening.

They are simply the first person in the family to receive an answer.