Parents’ Stories
- Am I a Rubbish Mum? – The Unexpected Value of Self-Criticism (3/14/2018) - When I finally became a mum, I thought life would become a slightly more realistic version of the Disney dream! I thought it would be very enjoyable; we would continuously feel loving towards each other, deeply enjoy being together and the birth of our first born would enlighten our lives entirely. I became the mum […]
- “The violence towards me from my child was constant” single mum of child with PDA (10/3/2017) - I always knew that James* was different. People would say ‘He is a boy’, ‘You are on your own’, ‘It’s your first child, he will be different once he sleeps, walks, talks, goes to school etc’. but he has been ‘different’ from the beginning. James (7) is very intense, demanding, controlling and uncompromising. He is […]
- “The biggest challenge is not being understood and being forced to fit in” Mum of three about life with OE’s (7/6/2017) - How and when did you first realise your children were different? With my oldest I knew from young that he was different. He wouldn’t join in the story time in school but instead would be lining up toys or talking to himself. He struggled a lot with potty training whilst I could see accidents coming […]
- “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) - 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 years old – that […]
- “PowerWood helped me appreciate our strong emotions, instead of being afraid of them” (4/1/2016) - 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 church, for instance – […]
- “Playdates always ended in meltdown” (2/26/2016) - 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 like changes in her […]
