Parenting Through School — Getting Your Child Ready to Integrate With the Community is Part of Your Healing Journey too!

Difficulty integrating into school is normal in our family. All three of our children had different experiences, and none of them followed the timeline or the path that the school system expected. What we learned is that understanding our child is more useful than pushing them.

Where we live, school attendance is optional — in that we are allowed to homeschool. That said, if we don't send our kids to the local school, we limit their access to local friendships. It is also important to trust our kids to be able to handle being exposed to different ways of doing things.

Because I have always focused on being a better parent than my parents were capable of being, I struggled with many aspects of integrating my children into mainstream society (whether that's our extended family, extracurricular programs, or school). I can see that the school environment cannot hold space for our kids the way we can at home — but readiness for school is not about sending in a kid who already knows their letters, numbers, colours, manners, and how to use the bathroom (although these things help). It is more about sending in a kid who can handle the added challenge of being in a class of 26 kids with varying levels of need and understanding of what it means to respect other people's boundaries. And also, dealing with teachers who feel like their goal is to make sure their students get good grades, as opposed to holding space for the unfoldment and the development of their interests and curiosities.

The goal is not to duplicate home at school. It's to build an understanding of our child that we can hand to the school, so that our child is sufficiently held — within the bounds of what the school can do — so that they can enjoy one of the most enriching things there is in life: learning, understanding, connecting, developing, growing, and feeling safe.

Quick Navigation

→ Each child needed a different combination of tools

→ What Readiness For School Looks Like (Not Ready vs. Ready)

→ What School Asks of a Child

→ When Your Child Integrates, You Heal Too

→ How to Know If Your Child Is Ready

Each child needed a different combination of tools

Each child needed something different. Understanding which tool served each of them best helped us know when they were ready for school, and how to support them once they got there.

Eldest Child — Unique Psychology followed by RestoreChi

Unique Psychology helped us understand what was going on with him and why. We moved him from daycare — where staff saw him as flawed — to preschool, where staff saw him as needing help and support. This shift changed everything. He began to inspire his peers instead of being isolated. We also used Unique Psychology to explain his sensitivity to extended family members who didn't understand him. It continues to help us work with him to make sure he can succeed at the things that are important to him.

But there was a deeper layer: As my firstborn, he carried what I was carrying during pregnancy: everything I ate to soothe myself, a lifetime of medications in my body, the literal soil he grew in. This inheritance made it hard for him to sleep and was pushing him toward clinical depression.

RestoreChi addressed that physical layer. Once his sleep improved and his nervous system felt less stressed, we went back to Unique Psychology to help him rebuild healthy habits and motivation. He needed both tools, but in sequence.

The learning: sometimes understanding alone isn't enough. Sometimes the body needs support first before the psychological work can take root.

Middle Child — RestoreChi followed by Esogetic Medicine

No amount of understanding was going to help something that was caused by her prenatal stress (IVF conception). Her nervous system needed something more than words. Seeing Master Yan (the founder of RestoreChi) allowed him to see there was a lot of congestion between her eyes which was causing a lot of fear because she couldn't see. He was able to clear this congestion, but then we were left with the rest of the prenatal imprint to address slowly over time with Esogetic Medicine. She still uses the RestoreChi monthly tracks from time to time, but needs them less and less.

Youngest Child — Kirlian Photography and Esogetic Medicine

What we could see in her Kirlian photo allowed us to make the most important decision: to delay entry into public school until her photo showed she was ready. This tool gave us the clarity and the language to help others understand her behaviour came from not feeling physically safe — so we could get the support we needed. More on this below.

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What Readiness For School Looks Like

Not Ready

Our youngest presented with some of the typical signs for someone with autism spectrum disorder: she toe-walked, scanned every room for signs of danger, held deep grudges against certain people, had extreme separation anxiety, demanded the same limited comfort foods, could barely tolerate unpredictable people who didn't respect her limits, and when overwhelmed, would hit her head or scratch her face.

While this is just a sample of her Kirlian photos, and it is more the pattern of how her photo reacted to stress that tells the story:

Her closed toes were telling us that the moment she experienced what she perceived to be a threat, her body responded immediately with fight-or-flight activation, because her nervous system felt like survival was at stake.

Her heart would pound. She could only talk to me. She wanted to go to school to make friends, but her nervous system couldn't regulate the fast-paced, high-expectation environment, with so many cues of danger among unpredictable children and staff, who hadn't yet shown her that they could be sensitive to her needs.

Given how long it took us to get our older two back into public school after they left traumatized (our eldest doing fine in Junior Kindergarten but then struggling with Senior Kindergarten to Grade 2, pulled until Grade 5, then not fully integrated until Grade 9; and our middle lasting only 2 months in Junior Kindergarden, pulled until Grade 2, taking a couple years and therapy to figure out how to navigate social settings, still a work in progress). We wanted our youngest to have a good experience.

Ready

A balanced between just giving her more time to see that I could get to know her needs and that I could transfer this knowledge onto others, and applying Esogetic Medicine and watching her Kirlian Photo for readiness and also reaction to challenge, we were able to see her capacity expand, both in what she was able to do, and in her Kirlian photo:

When her photo looked like this, she became less aggressive, she could understand other people's perspectives more easily, her window of tolerance widened, and she was finally able to enter the classroom at her alternative school without me. Previously, she would wait outside while the other kids went in. She also started to look forward to spending time with people she had previously tried to avoid.

She entered public school in grade 1. It took a few months for the school to understand what we needed to help her integrate, but doing healing work on myself, so I attracted different relationships, helped a lot. She still has access to me as much as she needs, but she is choosing to be at school more and more and rarely calls me for support. Her goal at the end of Grade 1 was to be kinder to others and to let more people in. She still gets mad, I am sure there is more healing to be done to help her deal with her overwhelm. But she wants to make progress, she is not refusing things that are different or hard.

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What School Asks of a Child

School asks kids to separate from their primary attachment, regulate their nervous system in a group environment with limited support, follow instructions from people they do not yet trust, sit with discomfort when things are hard, and tolerate the unpredictability from their peers. For a child who does not yet have the resources, the resilience, and the inside felt safety, this is an enormous ask. For a child who has not yet been understood by the adults in their life, it can feel impossible.

The school system was designed before it became normal to notice that kids are different. Some children can still handle being told to go to school whether they like it or not. But it is worth pausing on how many children do not like school — when it is supposed to be an opportunity that children in under-resourced countries would risk everything to access.

Whether your child needs to stay home longer before they are ready, or whether they are ready but then have trouble getting up and going, there is always something we can do to understand why.

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When Your Child Integrates, You Heal Too

When you see your child able to be caught by their community, their school, make friends, this lets you believe in the good of humanity again. Often the parents of sensitive kids have not felt at home with others. This is part of why their kids have grown to be so sensitive. Many parents decide to keep their kids home because they think they can offer them a better life. But feeling like the rest of the world is so horrible that you can not participate is an incomplete Hero's Journey, which I talk about in Season 1 of my podcast Truth Evolves (available from the banner on the top of my website).

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How to Know If Your Child Is Ready

A Kirlian photo can show you exactly what your child's nervous system needs in order to feel safe enough to go to school. It shows whether they're ready now, what treatment would help them get ready, and what specific situations trigger dysregulation.

This matters because it gives you language. When you can point to a photo and show someone "this is what happens to my child's nervous system when you do X" — suddenly it's not about discipline or willpower or attitude. It's about a nervous system that needs support.

The goal isn't to keep your child home forever

The goal is to send them when their nervous system can actually handle it. Because sending an unprepared child into school hurts everyone — the teacher, the classmates, the child, the family. Waiting for readiness is an investment in their long-term success, not a way to hold them back.

When teachers and caregivers can see that treating your child a certain way results in dysregulation, they are often more willing to refrain from doing things that hurt your child. Others may see it as a need for them to take some time out, to work on themselves. If this happens, know that this is not about you. Keep doing what is right for your kid. Now that we can see that doing certain things has a negative impact on the health of a child and this is why they are acting out, many people are going to have to re-evaluate if this is what they want to continue to do. You are asking for awareness, kindness, and partnership. This work is about us all doing our best to understand what other people need, to work on ourselves, and to listen to others.