Emma introduces us to her son Henry, their family life together and explains how our postal lending library is ideal for them.
“Our son Henry likes lots of different things from gaming, editing and coding to swimming, cooking and farm shops. He also loves socialising. Supermarkets, bright lights, busy places, queues, being told what to do, demands, authoritative figures are all things Henry dislikes.
Henry is autistic and has ADHD, chronic fatigue and PDA. We learnt from a young age that traditional parenting would not work for our family and quickly adopted a flexible child led approach in all areas of Henry’s life.
Henry tried nursery and would scream for the duration. We took him out and knew that if he was to be enrolled at school he would be expelled as the classrooms would not work just as halls do not work or birthday parties etc. Knowing that all the things a lot of children love would not be accessible to Henry reinforces the belief that this is more than ‘naughty behaviour’. Henry struggles to regulate and I am his main form of regulation.
Henry was home educated from compulsory school age. His education is always interest led, he learnt to read quickly as he wanted to know what the signs said and how to navigate computers, games and cooking. Henry lacks fine motor skills and still cannot write more than basic words. But home education allowed us to progress with spelling and work via computers and scribes.
As you can imagine our family life looks extremely different to what we would have expected. Henry now has 1-1 tutors that work with him within his areas of interests. We recently applied for an EHCP and were awarded EOTAS (although nothing has been put in place). Henry’s younger brother also has an autistic presenting demand avoidance diagnosis, so often, if we are out, we all need to go so the children each have 1-1 support.
My eldest also took part in a University research study through Cerebra that showed sleep disorders and poor-quality sleep (Henry has never slept solidly and struggles to remain still in bed).
I use Cerebra’s postal lending library to read different books and the librarian helps me decide which books would be better suited for our family. We live in a remote area and with two neuro diverse children who are home educated, accessing a public library isn’t easy. Having access to the library books via post is ideal”.
