Parenting Differently Raising Autistic Children

Lisa, please tell us a bit about yourself, your family and what inspired you to write Permission to Parent Differently.

Where to start? Okay, so I'm a mum to three grown-up autistic kids and I have a husband who's ADHD as well.

I have something called dyscalculia, which is to do with numbers really and being able to process numbers and maths.

So we're a very, what I call, neuro-spicy household, so lots of different neuro-types.

And so I started my career many years ago, working in schools, supporting children with special educational needs.

And I had my children very young.

So I came to my second career almost as speech language therapist a little bit later on and worked as part of an autism outreach team, working in schools with autistic children who were at risk of exclusion.

So it was quite a stressful kind of role.

And then I moved into the NHS as a speech language therapist there.

And kind of that's where my career kind of took a bit of a turn because I hit burnout and had to leave the NHS.

And then kind of Instagram appeared where I, and we were saying before, I was an accidental influencer that wasn't the plan at all.

I started sharing on Instagram for something to do really because I'd kind of left my career and felt a little bit, useless in a way started sharing my experiences and it kind of blew up and got really big the community around me and realized I was growing a business really um and so that's that's what I do now I have a community of parents um who I support um and I've recently written a book which still feels a bit surreal to say that yeah so I've done I've been on quite a journey to kind of get where I am now so yeah that's a very short version

It was a good version.

I have so many questions already.

The first question that I thought of when you were talking is getting into kind of autism and the SEN world initially.

Was that something that you always wanted to do or was that again and kind of accidental falling into that?

I would say, so I had my children very young.

So I had my first child when I was 18.

In fact, he was born on my 18th birthday.

So I was a baby myself, really.

And I think I didn't realise my kids were autistic till my youngest son was, my eldest son was 10, sorry.

10, okay.

So I think in a way I kind of got into that world probably realising that I was dealing with that at home but not necessarily knowing what it was.

Right.

And so I kind of naturally kind of gravitated to supporting children with additional needs.