I keep a mental list of every piece of advice I was given in those years - some well-meaning, some genuinely bizarre, all of it delivered like it was gospel. And mostly from the people trained to help. For a long time I thought the problem was me. That I just hadn’t found the right sticker chart, the right consequence, the right amount of firmness. I hadn’t. But that’s not because I was missing a trick. It’s because almost none of that advice was built for what was actually happening in her body. The thing that changed everything wasn’t on any list anyone handed me. I had to go looking for it myself, and it had nothing to do with rewards or discipline - it was about calming the alarm her body was stuck in, before anything else stood a chance of working. She missed over 100 days of school in one school year alone. I didn’t know, in the middle of it, whether we’d ever get past it. She’s at university now. Her first choice. If you’re still in the wading-through-advice stage …...