Yes, we believe you.

The main job of being a SEND parent seems to be one of simply getting people to believe you. The appointments. The appeals. The meetings. The evidence gathered against the day you might need it, just in case. The school meetings where you have to be the expert in the room, because nobody knows your child as well as you do, and nobody else has read the file as closely as you have. The effort involved in making people believe you and having to justify every request and every observation. All of it set against the backdrop of a child who is really struggling — which means you, the parent, are in a very dark and difficult place. This is the job nobody applied for. You didn’t train for it. Nobody pays you for it. And it’s yours anyway, holding everything together when the system doesn’t.

It falls on parents and caregivers — almost always mothers — because the system does not do the thing it claims to do. It does not identify need and meet it. It requires someone to notice the gap, document it, chase it, and fill it herself while she waits for someone qualified to arrive. That is not an accident of underfunding. It is a design choice, made by people who will never have to do the job themselves, to shift the cost of provision from the state onto the family and call the saving “efficiency.” It shows up in more than one shape, but it's the same failure wearing different clothes: endless rabbit holes that lead nowhere, needs escalating while help sits on a waiting list, and unbearable burdens landing on the parents left to carry it all.

As a family, we went down every rabbit hole there was. Sleep, first — we were handed a sleep hygiene leaflet, as though what we were living through was a bedtime routine problem and not a mental health crisis. When that didn’t touch it, chronic fatigue was suspected. We were delighted. Not because my son could have this condition, but that finally we had an answer that made sense. My son was relieved and so was I. An answer meant support and support meant treatment and treatment meant an end to this suffering. Assessed. Ruled out. Back to zero. Then CAMHS. Back to zero again. Every door that closed sent us back to the start, as if the exhausting work of the last six months had simply not happened. Nobody ever says “we don’t know.” They say “it isn’t this,” and hand you back an empty file and a waiting list for somewhere else to begin again.

And that's the kinder, more benign half of it. There's another scenario I've seen too many times to count over 35 years — the one where a child's need is identified clearly, and with some urgency, on paper, and the wait to act on it does more damage than the not-knowing ever did. A child assessed as needing urgent psychotherapy for trauma. Self-harm that escalates while the referral sits in a queue, sometimes as far as hospital treatment. A child still in school, still waiting, receiving no therapeutic support at all — in an area that markets a trauma pathway held up as a model of good practice, a pathway that exists on paper and nowhere else, for the children who actually need it, when it matters.

And then there are the parents I know whose fight for the right EHCP, the right placement, has left them with a clinical diagnosis of PTSD — not a figure of speech, an actual diagnosis, from the process of trying to get their own child help. And the following Monday, they show up. They parent. They care for that child, from inside the injury the system gave them for daring to reach out. ‘Managing’ can look a lot like ‘fine’. That’s the trap. From the outside, a family that’s coping looks like a family that never needed help. Nobody sees the case manager. They see a mother who seems to have it together, a child who’s “doing okay at the moment,” a file that keeps growing in a drawer nobody else opens. And because nobody sees her, nobody has to answer for the fact that she exists at all — that a five-year-old’s legal right to education depends on whether his mother can write a tribunal-grade letter.

This isn’t a gap in the system. It is the system. Every tier that fails to meet a child’s need on time — health, education, social care — is silently relying on someone at home to absorb what’s missing, for free, indefinitely, with no recognition that the work is happening at all.

The burden falls on the child first. When the child can’t carry it alone anymore — because no child should have to — it lands on whoever loves them enough to pick it up. Untrained. Unpaid. Indefinitely.

That's the job. It's time we called it one, and time we asked who benefits from it never being counted as one. But more than that, it's time we called time on this altogether. It's time we had an integrated approach — one system, not four disconnected ones a family has to bridge alone.

It's time we believed parents without making them jump through hoops to justify asking for support. It's time we removed that pressure and simply said: yes, we believe you. How can we help you?

Rebecca Briggs is a specialist teacher and parent coach with 35 years of experience working with neurodivergent children and their families. She is neurodivergent herself and the mother of two neurodivergent sons. She is the founder of Willow, an AI parenting companion for neurodivergent families, and is currently writing her second book on the systemic failures shaping neurodivergent childhood. The Willow Schools pilot launches September 2026. She spoke at the South West Paediatric Mental Health Network Conference in June 2026.

Willow, my AI parenting companion for neurodivergent families, is built on everything I’ve learned in 35 years of doing this work — because no parent should have to become an unpaid case manager just to be believed. Find out more at squarepegkids.com.

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