Parents’ Stories
- “My son had been diagnosed with many things before” How PowerWood helped a family to find clarity (9/2/2016) - I first contacted PowerWood to try to make sense of my extremely complex son. He had always been unique, I think that is the phrase most people used to describe him! When he first started school at four, both his headmistress and his class teacher said they had never met a child like him before, […]
- “Everything seems to affect him so deeply and intensely” (7/31/2016) - A family describes the beginning of their PowerWood journey. I heard about PowerWood from a local mum. She sent out an email, summarising the concept of OverExcitabilities, and when I read it I thought, ‘that just really describes my son’. So I then went to one of Simone’s coffee mornings that she was doing in […]
- The Challenges of Raising Children who have been in Care (7/6/2016) - The adoption process opens you up to all kinds of training experiences, so I’m not unused to looking for help for parenting. The strategies PowerWood uses are in keeping with the sort of empathetic parenting that we had been introduced to through the post adoption support we’d received. In the toddler years everyone seems to […]
- “She is a mirror of me” – Understanding my child helped me to understand myself (6/2/2016) - My youngest child has been very intense from birth. She is different from the others, really hard to understand. People say she will grow out of it, but as she got older she started to express herself in really dramatic and over the top ways. I was looking for something that would explain this, and […]
- “PowerWood Helped My Daughter Get Over Her Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour” (5/1/2016) - Interview by Lucinda Leo* (children’s names have been changed). How did you come across PowerWood? I always knew that my daughters (now 7 and 9) were high-needs children. My youngest child in particular was very intense. I didn’t know how to stop her hitting her sister, and when she told me – at just four […]
- Top 3 Tips to Up your Energy and Resilience Level (4/1/2016) - Simone de Hoogh‘s Blog In PowerWood we always talk about our baseline. What do we mean by that? With ‘Baseline’ we mean our general energy level and the strength of our resilience. How strong our will-power is. Are we able to recharge on a regular basis? Do we take good care of ourselves? Emotional OE […]
- “PowerWood helped me appreciate our strong emotions, instead of being afraid of them” (4/1/2016) - Interview by Lucinda Leo* (Children’s names have been changed) Why did you first approach PowerWood? My six-year-old son has always been highly strung emotionally. He has a strong sense of justice so if he can’t understand the reason for a rule or why he’s told he can’t do something – take his football trophy to […]
- “Playdates always ended in meltdown” (2/26/2016) - Interview by Lucinda Leo* (Children’s names have been changed) Tell us about how OEs have affected your family All three of my children (now 10, 8 and 6) have OEs to varying degrees. Naturally, our steepest learning curve was with our firstborn. Right from the start I noticed that Laura was very sensitive and didn’t […]
- “Our son’s constant questioning leaves us feeling exhausted” (1/29/2016) - Interview by Lucinda Leo* (Children’s names have been changed) When did you first notice your son was different from other children? When he was about two-and-a-half, our son suddenly changed from being a calm, alert baby to being so full of energy and determination that he was just all over the place. If Daniel set […]
- “My 4 year old was so overwhelmed by her emotions she wanted to end her life” (12/7/2015) - Interview by Lucinda Leo* (Children’s names have been changed) When did you learn about OE? I first came across PowerWood when my daughter was very young. Simone was giving a workshop at the home-educators’ camp, HESFES,and I went along because I was interested in parenting and child development. It wasn’t until later that I began […]
