Send us Fan Mail You can have a full calendar of friends, family, and appointments and still feel completely alone as a parent. Thatâs where this conversation lands: the kind of honest, practical talk that helps you breathe again and take the next step. Weâre joined by Vicky Christensen, a special education advocate and the author of Uniquely, Fully Enough. Vicky shares her familyâs neurodivergent parenting journey, including raising a son with an extremely rare chromosome disorder and a you...
Sep 1
29 min
Send us Fan Mail Your kidâs mindset is forming whether anyone teaches it or not, and thatâs what makes this conversation so important. Weâre joined by Renaye Thornborrow, founder of Adventures in Wisdom, whoâs on a mission to bring life coaching for kids into everyday family life, with practical mindset skills that build confidence, self-esteem, and resilience. Renaye shares how she discovered personal development early, then asked the question most of us eventually ask: why didnât anyone tea...
Aug 25
28 min
Send us Fan Mail If everything in your childâs world keeps getting easier, why do they seem more stressed, more isolated, and less confident? That question drives my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Strecker, head of school and author of *Emergence: How Modern Convenience is Dumbing Down Our Children and What Parents and Schools Can Do About It*. We get into the uncomfortable truth that growth usually comes from friction and practice, not from instant fixes, constant entertainment, or outsourci...
Aug 18
54 min
Send us Fan Mail A wheelchair, a notebook flipped over in a failing math class, and one contest win that changed everything. Thatâs the origin story Tracee Garner brings to our mic, and it opens into a bigger conversation about disability advocacy, mental health, and the kind of access that lets people actually live their lives. Tracee is a disability advocate in Northern Virginia and a published author with 22 books, and sheâs refreshingly honest about what it takes to keep creating while l...
Aug 11
29 min
Send us Fan Mail You can feel it the moment someone finally says, âOh, thatâs why.â Amy Jones joins us for a candid, funny, and deeply human talk about living most of her life without an ADHD diagnosis, getting labeled with everything but the real answer, and how that one missing piece rewrote her entire story. We sit with the grief of âwhat could have been,â but we spend even more time on what relief can look like when you stop treating yourself like the problem and start understanding how y...
Aug 4
54 min
Send us Fan Mail Theo spent years pushing away his autism diagnosis, and the cost was steep: mental health spirals, substance abuse, and the constant pressure to act ânormalâ in a world that rarely makes space for sensory needs. When he later works with autistic kids and recognizes himself in them, something shifts. We talk about what it means to accept autism as an identity and a nervous system reality, not a problem to be fixed, and why that acceptance can arrive late but still change every...
Jul 28
48 min
Send us Fan Mail The scariest part of caregiving is not the hard day, itâs the day youâre not there to explain what only you know. When a loved one is non-speaking, has epilepsy, needs sensory supports, or relies on a specific routine, the difference between âtheyâll figure it outâ and âtheyâll care for them wellâ comes down to details. Joel and Debbie Pearlman built DaniPlan after facing that exact reality with their daughter Dani and realizing that the traditional special needs binder is to...
Jul 21
26 min
Send us Fan Mail The hardest part of âhelpingâ a family after an autism diagnosis can be admitting that your old playbook no longer fits. Jennifer Kaufman knows that tension from both angles: she spent years as a principal at a school for children with autism through age 21, and sheâs also the grandmother of an autistic eight-year-old. When her grandson was diagnosed, expertise wasnât the missing piece. The missing piece was learning how to shift expectations, step back from the expert role, ...
Jul 14
34 min
Send us Fan Mail Your teenâs behavior makes more sense when you stop treating it like a moral failing and start treating it like communication. We sit down with Dr. Carla Cataria, an educator turned family support specialist, to talk about what actually helps teens thrive, especially neurodiverse kids who are too often stereotyped, mislabeled, or underestimated by the adults around them. We dig into the difference between teaching responsibility and teaching conditional worth. If kids ...
Jul 7
39 min
Send us Fan Mail A diagnosis can feel like it writes your childâs future in ink, but that story is usually wrong. We sit down with Sean Adelman, an orthopedic trauma surgeon and dad to a daughter with Down syndrome, to talk about what heâs learned outside the textbooks: people are not their worst day, and kids are not their labels. The big throughline is raising expectations, not as pressure, but as possibility. We get personal about how exposure changes fear into understanding. I share how ...
Jun 30
36 min
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