Advocacy Without Burnout: Trauma-Informed IEP Support for Families (with Karen Yingling)

Renae: Welcome to our special session with Karen Yingling for the TraumaWise Parenting Summit. As we talk about special education in her interview segment, Sustainable Advocacy Without Burnout.

Renae: Welcome back Karen. We are so glad to have you here again for the TraumaWise Parenting Summit. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks.

Karen: It's great to be here. I love what you're doing and building in this space. I'm honored to be a part of it.

Renae: Awesome. I'm, I'm so thrilled to, um, it and ask you to introduce yourself to people for those who haven't met you yet, because they were going to see very quickly why it is that you're here and how, how lucky and blessed we are to have you.

Karen: So I am a lot of wear, a lot of hats, but my two biggest ones are probably don't tell my husband if my parenting hat and my educational advocacy hat. I have seven children. My oldest is thirty five, my youngest is nine, so I have a lot of parenting. All of those kids came to me in some kind with some kind of complicated history. Um, and so I have that piece, but, but especially for two, three of my children, but two especially, um, who came to me with severe developmental needs, developmental disabilities. So I've been advocating, um, as a parent for fifteen years. Um, and I've been advocating professionally for other people's children in the special education world for seven or eight now.

Renae: Absolutely. That is, um, and, and in that, it's been really fun to, because I've known you for a while to see you in action and, and watch how you are so, um, thoughtfully bringing a trauma informed lens to what it is that you are doing. And I know that maybe sometimes people are like, why? Why would you think that talking about special education fits within TraumaWise? And I think it's been important for us to talk about that, um, how children and families are treated within the educational system. It can be both traumatizing and retraumatizing when children are othered, when they are, when they are communicating in a way that's not neurotypical. And so it, I, if I would love for you to maybe just even unpack a little bit of, um, how did you connect the trauma informed piece to the special needs piece for yourself?

Karen: It's a great, it's a, it's, it that is sort of the crux of so much of what I do. Even if a child doesn't have what would on the external surface look like a trauma history. Born into a loving family. Raised by a loving family, but has a diagnosis inherent in a diagnosis, an eligibility for special education. There is some trauma because kids don't. We don't identify kids because nothing is going on. We identify kids as needing special education services, whether it's an external, visible disability or an invisible disability. It is almost always because there's problems. Something is going on. That child is struggling, and within that struggle is trauma. So even the three or four year old who is just having meltdowns at school and the teens trying to figure out what's going on for this child has had trauma because of the way that the environment that he's been in and the reaction that he has had. Um, so there's no separating out a and, and a student with a trauma history absolutely has special education needs. Absolutely. Um, there's just there's no getting around it. California, for example, one of the few states that recognizes the eligibility category of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder as an eligibility for special education services. Now, as an educational advocate, I can take a kid's trauma history. And if their team is giving us a hard I can find an eligibility category. But I tell parents all the time, if your child is having trauma and they're telling you there's nothing wrong, go have an ADHD diagnosis. Go to your pediatrician, have them run the Vineland, get an ADHD diagnosis, and we'll work from there because you're the same thing. Uh, very often and very often those, those symptomatic ADHD, some level of autism are actually complex developmental trauma. That's not an eligibility category, but those are. So and I don't actually care as an educational advocate, I don't care what the eligibility is because the way the federal law is written, You are eligible for one thing. All of your needs must be met. So once we get the eligibility, we can then address the rest of it. Families by the time they get to kindergarten, which is where a lot of the of the real special education work begins have already been traumatized by the medical system, um, by their families because, you know, they bring, they bring little Billy to a family event and he's losing his mind and running around covering his ears and falling apart. And, you know, Billy's mom's mom is looking at her going, can't you control that child? You know, so there's all this trauma. So by the time families get to me, they have been traumatized. There's trauma in the diagnosis. When you are handed that little baby in the hospital and they say this is what's happening to them, they have a, you know, an average score of three. You know, so there's all that inherent. And when we. And it has impact as it really has impact for parents. By the time parents good to me, they are so tired of battling and they battled on every front. They battled their school system. They've battled their medical system. They've battled their families. Um, parents of, of children with special needs have the highest divorce rates of any other group. Yep. It's hard.

Renae: It's really hard.

Karen: Really hard. Um, it's really, really hard. Uh, yeah. So.

Renae: And so the, the, the piece of advocacy in that because, um, if you've already, you know, by the time your kiddos heading into kindergarten, first grade and you've already had six years of being in the battle, and there is a reason that deployment in the military is six months because we can handle a war front for about six months before he started to have some mental health crises. And yet, for when you're in this, this, um, not only are you defending your child, but you feel like you're defending yourself and your own guaranteeing your and, and then you're spending all this attention and time trying to decode and meet needs and be a detective and all of these things that your resources are low as well. And so when it even comes to the advocacy piece, before we talk about how to we advocate for our kids and teams, I would love to hear a little bit about how do we self-advocate.

Karen: Mhm. Um, yeah, let you know when I figure it out. Okay. I mean, it, it's taken me a really long time. It's taken me a really long time. Um, I think my husband and I have a joke, which is that I have this, you know, my list of priorities is my kids, my business, my friends, my travel, and then him. Right? Is this his joke? And he's like, before we had kids, I was number one. Like, I just, you know, I got and, and so we were talking about this recently and I said, you know, I said, it's, it's actually not the list. The list is me and then my kids and then my client, you know, and he goes, yeah, he goes, and, and the kids and I are having a hard time with that. And I went, yeah. Um, and I am older than most parents who have a nine year old. Um, and what it took was a combination of things for me to get there to go, wait a minute, this is not sustainable. Um, you know, certainly my cancer diagnosis was a big one because that sort of was in my face, couldn't really ignore that and needed to just from a very real perspective, in order to survive the chemo, the radiation, all of the surgery, all of that stuff needed to really like you. People are on your own. I am in a battle for my life right now. You people are on your own. Um, but I think it also is a level of a little bit of release and understanding that not everything is a level battle. Yeah. It's just not, um, you know, I, I, um, the educational advocate that will tell a parent, look, we're going to get you eighty five to ninety percent of the way there. You're going to be happy with that. Mhm. Because nothing's one hundred percent in this world. Should legally you be able. Yes. Yes you should one hundred percent. But what's the energy? What are you giving up to try to get that last incremental ten percent? Yeah. Is it worth it? I can't make that call. Um, if it is, I'm probably not your advocate because I'm gonna be looking at you as a whole human. Um, I have had parents who I had parents who homeschooled, and it was sucking the life out of her to homeschool this child. And he could not go to a public school. We were going to have to go to a non-public school. And she really struggled with that because she wasn't going to learn as much. And he had some pretty significant intellectual disabilities. There was a lot going on for him, and I was like, look at this point, you need those six hours every day, one hundred and eighty days a year. You need that time, you need the break. And, and it's a bigger picture. It's not just, is he going to ever learn his alphabet, it's what's sustainable for you and your family. Um, and that's a very real question. Um, that, that question you talk about sustainability, um, in terms of the environment. Well, let's bring that down to a micro environment. What's sustainable for your family? Mhm. How long can you do this? I was older when I started the parents I was. I was tired when I started this whole process. God bless you who are in your twenties because you have a lot more energy than I do. Um, but what's sustainable for your family? Um, when you have a child that has very, very high needs that you have other children, what's sustainable for all of your children? And it's not something we talk about because there is a culture that says you, you can if you don't, you leave any stone unturned in your child's education process. If you don't fight for everything and get every ounce, you're somehow harming that child. So you better make sure that you have tried every supplement, every therapy, every, every, everything. You have to exhaust that. Otherwise you're a bad mom. Mhm. And I am here to tell you that is not true. That is not what makes you a good mom or not that you've tried every therapy. But we buy into the culture conversation, even within the disability community. We might get that cultural opposition. Um, absolutely. And that's all.

Renae: I actually even remember, um, we had a, a personally mutually knew that we were excited to know up until the point that she said, oh, and this is how we cured our son from autism and which point we went, oh, we can't be in relationship.

Karen: Sorry. This is we are probably not your people. We're not we're not your people.

Renae: Because you just give it like you've, you've put this impossible standard of parenting out there that none of us can do because there is no cure. Right? But you have behavior modified. Great. But there.

Karen: And you've given them tools to to operate in a neurotypical world. Awesome. Yay, you!

Renae: And and for you to even utter those words, it becomes a competition because it's, it's impossible for anybody else to do that. And so I think there is a, there's a piece of that that comes with the, the, um, because you parented before social media and you parented after social media. Um, and so there's a comparison thing that happens there, um, in the, in the mom groups and the Instagram and the conversations. It's, it's, I know it existed before, but it's very different now.

Karen: It's really bad now. It's really bad. And I will tell you, it people are always like, they, they talk about that piece of social media. For some parents, social media is the only safe space they have.

Renae: Mhm.

Karen: They, their groups, their autism mom groups or things like that are the only safe space they have. It's a really double edged sword. Um, but it is, it's a very real trap that you can fall into is. Well, she tried this for her kid. I should try it for mine. And again, I've been doing this special needs parenting thing for. I've got a twenty two year old and a nineteen year old. I've done it for a really long time, and even now I can get sucked into it. Like, should I go and try that speech therapy for Katie? Okay. Hang on, take a step back. Maybe I should, maybe I should. Maybe it is something that will help her. Um, but I have to check my motives all the time. Do I really think it will help her, or will it make me feel better?

Renae: Which you're grateful for Karen's insight and wisdom to learn more about more of her sessions and some of the things that she brings to the community. Please check out the show notes for links to her information and for more information about both TraumaWise parenting and TraumaWise education.