Episode 51
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe our society discriminates against children? Together with gentle parenting expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith, we unpack this concept of childism and explore the urgent need for empathy, respect, and understanding in raising our children.
We also talk all about the importance of changing the political as well as our personal behaviours if we want to elevate to change our parenting for the better. Sarah talks us through how neoliberalism is affecting parenting and the government's alarming tendency to prioritise the creation of efficient employees over children's welfare. We also talk about the importance of recognising children's legal rights, the outdated education system in England, and how to break harmful generational parenting cycles.
Last but not least, Sarah shares her son's journey with ADHD the challenges encountered, the societal pressures faced, and the transformative power of empathy, structure, and an apology.
Click her for a link to Sarah's Ockwell Smith's book: Because I Said So!
www.sendparenting.com
Episode 51
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe our society discriminates against children? Together with gentle parenting expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith, we unpack this concept of childism and explore the urgent need for empathy, respect, and understanding in raising our children.
We also talk all about the importance of changing the political as well as our personal behaviours if we want to elevate to change our parenting for the better. Sarah talks us through how neoliberalism is affecting parenting and the government's alarming tendency to prioritise the creation of efficient employees over children's welfare. We also talk about the importance of recognising children's legal rights, the outdated education system in England, and how to break harmful generational parenting cycles.
Last but not least, Sarah shares her son's journey with ADHD the challenges encountered, the societal pressures faced, and the transformative power of empathy, structure, and an apology.
Click her for a link to Sarah's Ockwell Smith's book: Because I Said So!
www.sendparenting.com
Welcome to the Send Parenting Podcast. I'm your neurodiverse host, dr Olivia Kessel, and, more importantly, I'm mother to my wonderfully neurodivergent daughter, alexandra, who really inspired this podcast. As a veteran in navigating the world of neurodiversity in a UK education system, I've uncovered a wealth of misinformation Alongside many answers and solutions that were never talked to me in medical school or in any of the parenting handbooks. Each week on this podcast, I will be bringing the experts to your ears to empower you on your parenting crusade. In today's episode, we will be speaking with Sarah Aqwel Smith, who is a well-known parenting expert and popular child care author who writes about the psychology and science of parenting. She specializes and has often been credited in founding gentle parenting and childism, which is the unconscious discrimination of children in society. She has authored 14 parenting books, which have been translated into 30 languages and have sold over half a million copies. Her new book, because I Said so, is definitely worth a read. Please join me for my discussion with Sarah.
Dr Olivia Kessel:So welcome, sarah, to the Send Parenting Podcast. It's a real pleasure to have you today to discuss your book because I said so. Now, I didn't actually read it. I listened to it on Audible because I'm dyslexic and it's easier for me to actually absorb that way, but it really resonated with me and I think it will really resonate with a lot of our listeners that I have on the Send Parenting Podcast, because we have differently wired children and a lot of the parenting books out there and a lot of the advice out there the more discipline, authoritarian kind of advice it doesn't work with your wonderfully wired children. In fact, it can completely backfire is what I have found and thank you for yesterday sharing with me, actually, that you have a wonderfully wired child as well who has ADHD. So thank you, and so you are definitely understand where I'm coming from and my listeners so welcome, thank you.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah, so my somebody ADHD is 20 now, so we've lived it for quite a long time. Not quite a lot in that time.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, I've definitely found it life changing to myself as well, and that's why your book was really interesting, because a lot of the things you bring up were things I've had to kind of discard in my own brain from my own upbringing. And I hadn't really thought about the label childism before reading your book, and so I guess I wanted to start off with can you explain what childism is and how you would describe it.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah, it's not my label. I haven't invented the term.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Sorry.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I just want to take the honour from somebody else, but in 1975, there were two medical doctors was it Gail Allen and Chester Pierce? And they wrote an article talking about the discrimination of children by society. So it's often unconscious, because what we tend to do is just repeat cycles of what was done to us when we were children. It's quite rare that I think we will take a breath and stop and think is this right? Is this the correct thing to do? In 2012, there was oh, my goodness, I forgot the lady's name Elizabeth Young-Brawl wrote a book called Childism in 2012. She was an academic and sadly, she died very shortly after writing it and it kind of was around in 1975 and then disappeared for 30 years and came back in 2012 and then disappeared. And I just thought I didn't realise.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Since 2011, I've been writing books about gentle parenting, which is basically treating children with respect and empathy and kindness, treating children as if they are the human beings that they actually are and not some sort of second class citizen. But what I didn't realise 13 books later is actually everything I've written has been about childism, so it's been whether I've been talking about how we sleep, train children, how we discipline children, how children are treated at school, how we feed children. Every element of a child's life is effectively controlled by an adult and it's discriminatory in some way. What we think is for the best, because that's how we were treated, is very often not. And our society as a whole is just.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:It's set up for adults. If you think the last time you went to a public toilet and the fact that everything's the wrong size, why don't we have like every toilet, have a little toilet and a little sink for children to wash their hands? And it's not just there, it's everywhere. We are absolutely set up for adults and we value adulthood and we discriminate children and see them as adults in training and not people today who have rights and they do. A lot of the books talks about their legal rights. So really, yeah, it's like any other ism. It's a discrimination of part of society, but it has affected everybody because we've all been children. So, yeah, it's a pretty big idea.
Dr Olivia Kessel:No, absolutely, and you've encapsulated it very well there to explain it. And it's interesting because you mentioned there for a lot of us it's our common beliefs, and you go through in the book kind of some of the common beliefs that I can honestly say were part of my DNA or the way I thought about things and that we're preparing them for adulthood. I thought it would be interesting to kind of touch upon some of them. The first one I can think of is children misbehave because they want attention, so therefore we should ignore them because we're feeding into what they want. Okay, I believe that.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Common advice is if they're naughty, they're just doing it for attention. Don't give them attention and they'll stop doing it, which is the most ludicrous statement. If a child needs it, it doesn't work. It might work temporarily, but then, further down the line, you're going to have even trickier behaviour to deal with, or actually the worst moment could happen is the child actually stops coming to you with their problems and then they become a teenager who struggles alone because they know that they can't share their difficulties with you, which I'm a mum of teenagers and young adults and it was my eldest said to me last year.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I don't think he realises how massive what he says was, but it's stuck with me ever since. And he said well, my friends don't talk to their mums like I talk to you. I don't understand why they can't ask their parents for help and why they don't talk about difficult things. And he was genuinely confused and he said you know, my friends all say it's weird that I have this relationship with him, that I talk to you this much, because his friends have all kind of branched away and they know that they can't trust their parents. So, yeah, it's, I don't know. I mean so much of the advice I talk in the book that we give discipline wise dates back a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago. We don't realise when we think that we're practicing modern day parenting. We think we're doing something new and evidence based and modern and we're just rehashing what people were saying a hundred and fifty years ago, when children were disliked even more than they are now in society.
Dr Olivia Kessel:And it is you say it doesn't also those and those experts were usually white middle class men who you know really didn't have anything to do with raising the children medical doctors, so not psychiatrists, not psychologists.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:What didn't work in education, didn't work in childcare, ask Şimdi MSR doctor knows best because he is old and male and white.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, and you know he sees his kids, to put you know, in the evening. I mean, I even remember my upbringing. You know my father would come home from work and we'd be in bed, you know. And that was yeah. And I believe it was even more so back in when these experts were giving us advice and it's. But it's hard because it is ingrained in us as a parent when we have our children. It oftentimes is ingrained in us in society and school ingrains it in us as well that children are supposed to obey adults, kind of you know blankets. And if they don't obey the adults, we're not preparing them properly for adult life.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah, that's just. You know the world. How would you?
Dr Olivia Kessel:blow that common belief out of the out of the water.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I think we have to look at what obedience is. So, as a parent, it is actually, yes, it's easier to have children who obey you. But is that the goal in raising children? We just want to make it easier for us, or do we want to make it easier for them and help them to grow and they already are, but grow even to even more wonderful sort of well formed humans who have great relationships and have good mental health? So I think, why would? Why would they obey you know, I always, when I used to run workshops with parents, I used to ask them what do you struggle with the most with your child?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And there was always defiance and stubbornness and lack of obedience, and I would write them on the wall and then we would say so imagine now your child is 18, 20 or whatever, and they want to break social boundaries or rules or, you know, they want to shatter ceilings of sexism and wages at work, or they are faced with peer pressure to do drugs.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:What you would really want is you would want them to say no, to be stubborn and stick with their goals, even though everything in society is saying no. You can't do that. So what you're telling me is, as they get older. You really don't want them to be obedient. You want them to be their own person and, to you know, have ambition and to have grit and to have resilience and have a voice, so that they can say to somebody no, I don't like that, I'm not going to do that. But while they're little, we want them to be obedient. We want them to stop being stubborn and defiant. And there's this real paradox with, as parents, what we really want from our children because life is so exhaustingly hard and there is no support for parents, which is also an element of childism is we want these easy, compliant children.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:But even we realise that that's not what we want from them as they grow. And I think that's you know. I got married in 2000 and I refused to say I would obey my husband and there was a big thing at the time all over the newspapers like, no, why shouldn't obey? But we still expect children to obey and it's. It just makes no sense when we have to look at our long term goals for who we want our children to become. But also, why should they obey adults?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:You know, adults are quite often very rude, very disrespectful, ask things that are completely inappropriate and not age appropriate for children. Why should they obey? Why should there be this blind obedience and respect for adults when adults are very disrespectful to children?
Dr Olivia Kessel:No, I, you know, I hear you and then you know what I do, you know, want to temper what you've just said there also with you're also not a proponent of having a laissez-faire parenting either. You are which I think resonated with me because it's you know the boundaries and actually you know putting those in place with children is important. So it's not a just hands off, you can do whatever you want, run feral child that you're saying. You're saying, do it in a different way, and could you extrapolate on that a bit?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I mean, the most important thing for me is, well, and any parent is safety. So keeping your children safe, keeping other people safe, keeping animals, objects and everything else safe. So, and safety would sort of cover everything from toddlers running into the road to teenagers using the internet without sort of any monitoring. But so safety is really important, but obviously it has to be the number one goal of any parent. But then also, discipline is really important and I talk about.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:When I talk about discipline, I talk about the Latin disciplina, so to teach, to learn, to guide and talk about. You know, if you think when you were back at school, if you had teachers that you learned really well from that, you really focused on what they were saying, you would produce great work, you would be respectful. They were never the teachers who yelled or who threw things at you or constantly put you into tension. They were always the teachers who were really inspiring, who were fair, who would listen to you and yes, they would say no and they would have boundaries, but ultimately it's because they were great role models. So for me, that's what discipline is. It's about who we are, which is really hard when we think of childhoodism, because we were all treated badly, without even realizing it's children. So the most difficult thing is to we have to see those beliefs that we have with us and then we have to consciously try to do something different, which is really hard.
Dr Olivia Kessel:No, I know, and I love, I love. I'm going to quote a bit of your book here where you said you know, discipline when a child hits a child, we call it aggression. When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility. When a child hits when an adult, sorry, hits an adult, we call it assault. When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline. And I was really you know, that kind of clarifies it. And then also the fact that and I didn't even realize that we're still allowed to hit our children in England, that it's still accepted, which is was shocking to me, you know.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I can't hit you, I can't hit my dog, I can't hit my husband. I can't hit anybody apart from my child. Actually, I can only hit one of my children now because I've only got one under 18. If I hit my older children, that would be illegal, but if I hit my 16 year old, I could use the legal defense of reasonable punishment and as long as I didn't leave lasting marks or it wasn't over the top, then that would be perfectly fine. It's insane isn't it?
Dr Olivia Kessel:I mean I had, yeah, I. It is insane, you know, because I think to the points that you said before. I think you know the system is, or the laws, obviously outdated within, especially particularly England. You know both.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:England is much more problematic than Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or Ireland.
Dr Olivia Kessel:And it's interesting because you know, when you look, when you look at the education system. And I had a have had another guest, dr Chris Bagley. I don't know if he's a educational psychologist, but he you know, he was talking and he works a lot in the youth justice system and he said you know, olivia, we have kids that are disciplined in school for a behavior that is because of an underlying cause, whether that be a send need, whether that be a poverty need and they are put into a strict behavior policy which leads to detentions, which leads to exclusions, and he goes we basically call it the pipeline to prison because of the discipline methods.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah, if you look at the statistics of children with ADHD and adults with ADHD in prison, it's something like 40% of the prison population have ADHD and I could see that with my child. You know the fight that I went through to try and get a diagnosis. It took 10 years and then when you did have a diagnosis, it actually didn't change anything at school. It was just constant detentions, isolations, threats of exclusion, constant shaming. And I used to go into these meetings and say what you're doing isn't working, because if it was working, you wouldn't have these same children in detentions or isolations every day, would you? So you know, why could you not look at something else and why would you not see that what you're expecting of the child they can't do because of their condition? And if you were, if you had a sports day and you had a child in a wheelchair and they couldn't take part in the running race, you wouldn't put them in isolation or detention. But effectively, this is what you're doing. These children have a disability, a learning disability, and you are punishing them for their disability and the amount of them that are completely failed by the schools, who end up leaving with no qualifications or leaving before GCSEs with their self-esteem like rock bottom because, as my son used to say to me, I want to do better. It's not that I don't want to. I know how to do better, so I just can't do better. So, yeah, absolutely. And what do these kids who are completely failed by our schooling system do when they can't get a job? Because they've got no qualifications and very often there are.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:You know, there's loads in the book about this, but very often there are other sort of variables there, like growing up in poverty, growing up with domestic violence or something like that. And these kids have no chance. You could almost label them from the age of five or six. You can say I know where that child's gonna go, which is just tragic. Which is and I volunteer at Citizens Advice, which is a charity that gives lots of information about some all sorts of different issues to the general public. And I see these people when they are in their early 20s and they have a baby with their partner and they can't find work or they can't hold a job down, they don't have the qualifications they need and you know, it's not necessarily a pipeline to prison, but it's definitely a pipeline to more poverty and you can literally go into an infant or junior school and say I know where that child's gonna end up, which is so heartbreaking.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:You know, I listened to an interview with Rishi Sunak not Norishi Sunak, the other guy, Jacob Rees Mogg this morning and he was asked about this, exactly this you know, where is the mental health support? Where is the extra funding for SEND? That the issue is not constantly changing the curriculum. The issue is looking at why these kids are falling in and stopping them from happening, and he just changed the subject. You doesn't even see that it's an issue. The answer is to reform our qualifications at school, and it's not. The answer is to try and catch these kids from really early on and support them so that they can do something different.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, it goes back to. It is very similar in medicine preventative care versus dealing with the aftermath of what you've done to these individuals. And it's interesting because if you look at Scotland, where they've changed their behavior policies and they've changed how they do things, and then you look at the data in terms of detentions and exclusions, you actually do see a result, you know.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Same when. If you look at the data from England from a sure start when we had a really fully functioning sure start and how much amazing data was coming out of that. But you know the funding for that has been changed. We've lost a third of centres. The trouble is that the result is long term. It means the investment today to see something in 10 or 20 years and politicians don't want that because the general elections next year and they want results next year. They want like quick sound bites, quick and easy results.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, and they're both claiming they're gonna, you know, revitalize education. I'm curious to see how they're gonna do that, but with you know.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And this is, you know, childism isn't just what we do with children in the home. Actually, that's quite a small part of it. It's a political issue, it's a society issue, it's a governmental issue, because our government is deeply childish. They don't seem to care about children more than them making sure they do master late teens so that they are good employees. They don't really seem to care about their mental health. Maybe that actually their route isn't academic, maybe it's more the arts, maybe it's more holistic. It's just, you know, it's like a conveyor belt of training the good employees of tomorrow, and that none of that is in the best needs of children.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Absolutely, and you know you talk about neoliberalism, which is another interesting concept which some of my listeners may or may not be aware of. So, and I think that feeds into what we're talking about with the government, Can you explain neoliberalism for us?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah. So it's like a sort of a political approach or a theory, the idea being that there's a free market economy, so without sort of too many barriers. So basically, the rich people and the big companies can make lots and lots of money and there's not really anything getting in their way to keep making more and more money. The government ideally would like to have low taxes, but also what they would like to do, obviously low tax so people can make more money, but they also want to put less into the benefit system. So it's very much a focus on rich people getting richer and poor people staying poor without the proper investment and funding into that. So an example last year was when we had, or we still have, the energy crisis. So instead the government announced all family, all households, were going to get 60 pounds a month on their energy bill. But instead of giving the families the 60 pounds a month, which would have helped and they could choose you know, maybe did we buy food with that or something they gave it all to the really super rich energy companies, because what they want is for the industry, for the companies, to keep making more money.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And it's when you think about neoliberalism and how it's applied to childcare and education. It is, you know, very recently, was it six months ago? The government announced changes in childcare plans and funding and a lot of parents are like, yes, hooray, we're going to get free childcare. It's not free. It doesn't cover you know as many hours as we need. But what they? When they were talking about it, they said it's to stop people being economically inactive. And what they actually mean by economically inactive is raising children. So they don't want people to raise children because it doesn't help the economy. They want them all back at work. And in order to do this, what they're going to do is semi-fund some childcare. But to do that they have to lower the quality of childcare. So they have to increase the number of children allowed per caregiver, so they up in the childcare ratio and the funding amount that they need for like a childcare setting to run is around about eight pounds per hour per child, and the government are going to get it from the floor. So it's chronically underfunded.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:But then what's going to happen is, you will find, neglect. Well, actually, what you'll find is the whole system will start to break down because more and more parents are going to want to take part of their free childcare. Of course, why would you not? But the settings cannot stay open. So at the moment, the funding they receive is not enough. What they do is top up that funding by parents paying privately to for those extra hours or extra bits and bobs. But they won't be able to do that. So what's going to happen is there's going to be a chronic shortage of money and they're just going to collapse because they cannot provide the care that is needed for £4 an hour.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And if you look at section in the book about, if you look at the wages of childcare professionals who are very educated, very experienced, a level or degree level education, and they're being paid 18 or 20,000 pounds a year for arguably one of the most important jobs in the world, but you know they need to be paid a lot more. So there's a massive retention and recruitment issue in early years, whether it's childcare, and also with teachers, again hugely underpaid, hugely overworked. Not enough money put into the education system, because that's neoliberalism. They don't invest in things like that. They don't see the value of people, they just see data, metrics, profits, and it's really really highly damaging.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And who it damages the most?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Of the children, whether it's, you know, direct impact of maybe having that childcare ratio, or whether it's because their parents are so exhausted, trying to not be economically inactive, that they're trying to work all the time so that they can pay for a refill with the head of food on the table, but they're so shattered that they end up yelling at the child, doing cry-based sleep training or harsh discipline, because the world is so tough.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:It's always the children who suffer, like in the book there was. I discussed children living in poverty, which is bad enough in itself and very unfortunately, very, very common. But when a child grows up in poverty, we know from research that their parents are more likely to use harsh discipline methods on them. It's always the children who suffer the most, which is what we have to do. You know I wasn't a very political person before I started working for Citizen's Advice or for the last few years, but I've begun to realise I can write as many books about gentle parenting you know I could write a hundred more and I could do workshops and talk to parents and do media interviews but ultimately what needs to change is politics, because you can be the gentlest person in the world and it's still hard to do that when you are living in a society that doesn't value you or your children.
Dr Olivia Kessel:I mean, and it feels like a boulder, and it's also, you know, how does a parent and you discuss this in the book as well because there's almost two stages to this. There's one, what you can do as an individual with your parenting, and how you can take your experiences, how you've been indoctrinated through school and through life, and move that around to do things differently, like the you know, classic case of if you beat your kids, then if you were beaten, you beat, type analogy. How do you change that? And then there's the higher level which you're discussing now, which is then how do you, how do we, how do we vote with those sentiments to change how, how our society is structured? So if we started with the individual, you know, how do how do parents change, you know?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:So it has to always start, I think, with seeing it and realizing okay, maybe I do have flaws. Maybe you know, as a mom I talk about. My default setting when I'm stressed and angry with my children is to yell at them. I don't hit them but I yell because my mom was a yeller and so was her mom, and I know I have to work really, really hard. But I know when I'm really stressed, really full up to here, and there's a lot going on, I know I have a very short fuse and I will scream at my children.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:So the first step is to recognize that, to realize where it's come from, to realize very often some of the things not necessarily now they're older, but when they were little my children did that triggered me is because I know I would have got in trouble and been yelled at if I'd done the same thing. And then you find yourself in the position of you've like regressed to be in six years old and you're now disciplined your children how your parents would have disciplined you. And we have to start with the awareness of that. And it's none of this is about blaming our parents or our grandparents, because arguably they went through even worse than we did. You know, we're all victims of childism, so it's about empathizing. It's not about ignoring abuse or toxic behavior. It's about just seeing the childism that was present when you grew up and that was present when your parents grew up and before them.
Dr Olivia Kessel:There's also that element of how your parenting because you're really going to be asking these questions to yourself as your parenting and I know you know was shouting or losing your cool. You feel terrible. You feel such guilt as a parent and it almost exonerates you to a bit to be like well, that's what. It was much harder when I was a child. You know what I mean. So you've almost got to be like look at yourself, really look at yourself in a not so pretty light. You know, because you're doing it right now right.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:It's almost like self therapy, basically. And you know, for me, the biggest, the most important realization I had was you can fix things. I don't think it's ever too late to start being kinder to your child and also to yourself, because you know, a lot of that is about how we treat ourselves, but also understanding if I do yell and if I do lose it or if I had hit them or if I shamed them or something else, I actually can apologize to them and I can say I'm so sorry, that wasn't about you, that was about me and I shouldn't have done that. It doesn't mean that what you do was okay. You know we'll leave that to the side for the moment, but my reaction was wrong and you did not deserve that.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And I think if we were raised like that by our parents, things would be very different because you know, I grew up as many, many, many adults do, kind of thinking I was somehow responsible for my parents' feelings, so I had to be good, because otherwise they'd be angry and that would be my fault, and of course it was never my fault. In the same way, it's not my children's fault if I'm angry. So it's about taking ownership for our own emotions and apologising to children when we get things wrong and I think I genuinely can't remember being apologised to by my parents or an adult when I was a child. But there is such power in rupture and repair and apologising. I call it holler and heal with your children when you slip up. So for me I think it's just an awareness of it and a little bit of sort of introspection, but then making things right when you do, because you will slip up. You know I'm supposedly an expert and I mess up all the time.
Dr Olivia Kessel:But it's also. It's a beautiful way to show your child, because modelling is how your children really learn. Like the saying do as I say, not as I do, is no longer applicable. Kids are little sponges and if you're able to show them, look, all of us lose it, sometimes inappropriately, and I'm going to show you how I calm down and then own it and move on. I mean, that's so, that's gold dust, because you're, that's what they're really going to pick up on, not what you've said to them A lot of people think I'm sort of trying to say that you need to be this sort of perfect, uber calm Zen parent.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:It's impossible, it's absolutely impossible. And I think it's actually more important that we do make mistakes, because it's only when we make a mistake that we can model how to fix it.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, no, I completely agree, and it's also to your point, you know, when you know that you're up to here finding ways to to release some of that, you know is or is not as more.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yes, that's what I would say. I would you know, I've learned to say no to a lot of things because I need that space.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, so that you can. You know, I always say self-care is child care, because if you, if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of them.
Dr Olivia Kessel:And it's you know, because yeah that's a lot to look at your childhood, to bring it up, to pick it apart, to realize that, actually, because we all look back fondly and say, oh, I had a great childhood, I love the childhood. You know, um, that's what we do, is it's part of our human brain that that's how we function, how we go forward in life. So it's picking at scabs to a degree and then letting them heal and and creating a new path with our children. And I think you know, and I'd love to get your incidences I know you don't talk specifically about neurodiversity in this book, but for me, probably if I'd had a neurotypical child, my parenting journey would have been very similar to the parenting journey that I had with my parents.
Dr Olivia Kessel:But I that may or may not be true, but my daughter, it just doesn't work. You know, I mean you put her on the naughty step. She's going to scream the whole house down and you know you try and put her in her own bed to sleep. Forget about it. You know it is going to take on a whole new. You know it just doesn't work. You know none of it, none of it worked, um, and I think that that's a gift From my daughter to me because I I think this wrote a self discovery that she's forced me on has been really, really good. Um, what are you, you know, with your children? You had a mix. It sounds like you have four kids. Um, how has your journey with your children influenced your, your, your parenting and and your advice that you give?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:So, yeah, I mean, my journey was really with my first born. So I've been through a lot of trauma and stuff in my life and when I had my first born I just lost both of my parents and it was a very traumatic time and I basically Just did not listen to my instincts at all when he was born. So I followed the advice at the time, which was very much sleep, train, don't make bad habits, um, don't allow him to control you, ignore the bad behavior, punish when, like, put them in time out, give them a sticker chart and it all felt very, very wrong. But I think I was going through a lot of stuff and had to work that out in my head first and then to be able to learn to trust myself, to say I actually think this feels wrong, because it is wrong, not because there's something wrong with me, but it took me a good I mean, I've written about my story in the book but it took me a good two or three years to realize this isn't working and this feels very, very wrong because this advice is horrendous. But when you're a new mum and you're incredibly vulnerable and you get given all of this advice from every single source and 90% of it is telling you to ignore what your instincts are telling you and you get advice from experts, or you know doctors, or From either from your parents or grandparents who are still experts because they've raised children into adulthood, and stuff like that I think, yeah, we have. Ironically, for what I do as a living, I think we would be a lot better if we had no parenting advice whatsoever and we just Learned to do what felt right. So that's really for me where things started.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And then I felt a bit like a sort of a social pariah when I went to A baby group and I wasn't, you know, my baby didn't do what theirs did and my toddlers didn't do what theirs did. So I kind of Increasingly, I guess you know sort of pulled back from all of the mainstream parenting stuff at the time and ended up kind of starting my own thing. So it corresponded very much with my first birth was horrendous. So I retrained as an antenatal teacher and a doula and sort of learned to empower others through that way, and then it sort of was a natural continuation into Childcare and parenting. But my child with ADHD is my second one and I think I was maybe already on that page by then. You know the there is a reason for this. It's not him being deliberately naughty, yeah, so I think it wasn't. That wasn't what opened my eyes, but it maybe solidified what I felt.
Dr Olivia Kessel:And maybe made you more able to identify it. I don't know. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you know um you actually probably were able to manage it better because you didn't have those kind of constraints of a.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I would not say I managed it well, because I was a mum.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I had four kids under four. I was absolutely exhausted and again, you know, this is what would come out, is how I was raised. When he did something and I still, you know, he wasn't diagnosed. I think he was 14, and I knew that he had ADHD when he was four or five, but nobody would believe me, nobody at the school, no, senko's. The school got an educational psychologist in who observed him and said, yeah, he's just immature, and that was that because we'd had the ed psych in, they refused to talk to me about it anymore for another five years.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And then he went to secondary school and I had like two or three years of constant backwards and forwards with the Senko and again just saying to me, he actually said to me we actually think you're the problem. We, we found out you've written a book called Gentle Discipline and we think the problem is that you don't discipline him enough. And that was. And I went and I did genuinely believe maybe everything in my career has been wrong, maybe I've caused this. But then we went to the GP and I just said, look, please refer us. And then we met this amazing pediatrician who, within about 20 minutes, was like, absolutely, I can see exactly what you're saying. You know we will get him some help now.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah, and then it was such a long struggle and to get to that point I was, as you say, you know, full up with stress. I had nothing more to give. I had no respite because we don't have any family. You know, my all of the grandparents died before the children were born. So it was a really big, long, hard struggle with no help and like, yeah, there were many times that I was horrendous to him and I would, you know, shut him up in his room or yell at him or punish him and stuff, even though I knew it was the one thing to do, because nothing I was doing was working, and I knew that he had ADHD but every professional was telling me that he didn't have and that you needed to have more discipline.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Yeah, we've had talks now he's 20, but you know, I'm just saying I'm so sorry, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to do the best for you but it was so hard. And he's know he's really lovely and he's like forgiven me, which I think is the but. Again, it's that apologizing and saying I'm really sorry I didn't do better for you, that.
Dr Olivia Kessel:I think, is the most important thing I'm very powerful for both of you, and you know it's. It's. It's so sad to hear and it's not uncommon, and even though your son is 20, I still hear parents coming to me who you know. Oh well, before we can get this diagnosis, you need to go to a parenting class, because we really, we really think your parenting has caused this, you know, and I said I actually run parenting classes.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Does that not count? So you know, could we just say I've been to my own one because the one they were trying to send me on the triple P is very un ADHD friendly. It's all full of carrots and sticks which just don't work. And I was explaining I know the course you want to send me on. This is why it's problematic. I run them myself and they were still trying to get me to go on one.
Dr Olivia Kessel:You know, and it it's. It's how we're born. Do you know what I mean? It runs in families. It's genetic. It is not. It's. It's not a case of is it nature or nurture. It's nature, you know, and it's it's scientifically proven. But I love that also. In your book too. You say you can have all the facts at your disposal. But you know people don't want to listen.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:No, I just you know the through school the amount of times I quoted sort of legal stuff at them and disability at some rights of the child and I printed out reams on sort of research because I do think a lot of people think ADHD is just naughty children and a label as an excuse. And unfortunately I met a lot of school staff, including heads of years, deputy heads, who I think they still didn't believe that it was a thing. It was just an excuse.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Which is so sad because when you put the right structures in place, my daughter's just been recently diagnosed with ADHD and you know when you put the str I've just seen her flourish now that I know what's going on and I know what to do. And you know she's on medication. Some parents go that way, some parents don't, but it's like a lightspeen switched on in her and she's you know she is doing so much better and also it gives you empathy, like I know that sounds terrible, but I understand her better because I've had that diagnosis and it's it's. It's not easy for parents to get that diagnosis nowadays. I mean, I had to go privately. It sounds like you had to just keep keep bashing that door down.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And I didn't even I mean we couldn't have afforded it to go privately at that point, but I didn't even think about it because everybody kept telling me there's nothing wrong with him. So I thought, well, I can go and spend a thousand pounds and they'll still tell me there's nothing wrong with him. But actually he will have. When he was younger he took medication and it was life changing. So he took it from sort of 14 to 17. And he said you know he didn't like the side effects of it. But he said you know I can, you know I feel different. You know things of calm down a bit and I can think clearly.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, that's what my daughter says to. She goes mommy, you know, normally I would, I would hear the fountain over there, I would see that there and I would do this there, and I couldn't concentrate on doing my art. And I'm like she's like now I can. I said, wow, that's, that's really great that you're able to explain that to me, first of all. And then you know, as I've researched it as well, what's interesting is their brain then learns how to kind of regulate themselves with the medication and then, as you say, 18 onwards, most kids don't need the medication anymore. So it's, it's, it's, it's phenomenal, you know. Thank you so much for sharing with us your personal stories and also your book. I would highly recommend everyone reading it and I will put it on my website and also a link in the podcast platform. But I always ask at my end of my shows what are three top tips? If parents could just have three top tips that they could take away with them after listening to this podcast.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:Okay, so I'm probably going to repeat what I said. The first one is it's going to be trust your instincts. You know, I think there is too much information around us, and that can be a good thing, but it can also make a second guess ourselves. So if somebody says to me, how would I know my child has especially a traditional needs neurodivergence, my most common response is trust your guts. I think we know more than anything else. My second would be should you mention self care?
Sarah Ockwell Smith:I talk about self kindness because I think the idea of self care can put too much pressure on parents, because it can make us feel like it's something else we have to do and it's like if it doesn't work, then we're to blame because we've not done it enough.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:So, rather than thinking it's something else I have to add in and it's something else that I have to do, well at, I just talk about being kind to yourself, which means allowing mistakes and, just, you know, checking in with when I talk about gentle parenting, being kind to children, and it has to start with being kind to ourselves first, and then the last one would be again coming back to it's never too late to be kinder, and it's also never too late to apologize. And when you have about day, week, month, year, sound like the friends being too that it's never too late. You know people say to me well, when is it too late? You know my child is 10. Is it too late to look at this child as an in-jentle parenting stuff? And I just think, well, no, I'm 47. If somebody decided to be kinder to me now, I would love that it's never, ever too late to fix things or to start.
Dr Olivia Kessel:It's such a good point because you know, with my daughter, like, and I would you know, when she wouldn't go to bed I'd be, you know, I would just lose it. And now I don't, I'm just quiet, I sit with her, with it, and afterwards, when she calms down and she comes back to it, she goes. Mommy, that was really good and I'm like.
Dr Olivia Kessel:I was like wow, all the times that I've been really bad, but yay, I've got it and she's 12, you know, and this was probably when she was 11. But yeah, it's never too late. I think that's a wonderful. It's never too late for anything in life. You know, even as you said, with your child who's 20 now, going and apologizing and saying you know, I could have done better, but this is what I was working with. So you know that that's healing in itself as well.
Sarah Ockwell Smith:And similarly, if your parents are still here, I think it's never too late to try to improve that relationship with a bit of understanding.
Dr Olivia Kessel:Yeah, absolutely Well. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Sarah, thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening Send parenting try. In my quest to make our podcast more visible to other parents, I would like you to please leave a review. Most of you are listening on Apple podcasts and I've had some listeners ask me well, how do I leave a review? So I've looked into it and it isn't actually intuitive. I had to Google it. Basically, what you do is you search for the Send Parenting podcast, do not click on an episode, but when you click on the show, scroll all the way down and then there will be a section for ratings and reviews and you can click and make a rating and a review. So hopefully this will remove all barriers and you'll be able to rate and review the show so that we can make it available to more listeners who hopefully are getting the same benefit that you are listening to the podcast. Thanks in advance for your support and wishing you and your family a gentle week ahead.