The author and her daughter, Maya.

The morning I decided not to send my 14-year-old daughter back to school, she was vomiting from anxiety. Again.

It wasn’t a dramatic moment. There was no big speech. I just looked at her, pale and shaking on the bathroom floor after another round of girl-group bullying during the holidays, and thought: We’re done with this.

My daughter has dyslexia, dyscalculia and inattentive ADHD. Still, on paper, she wasn’t “failing”. She was getting by.

But the cost of getting by had become brutal. Daily nausea. Crying every morning. Crippling fatigue. Anxiety that had her frozen in her seat, running on adrenaline just to survive each day, then collapsing at home where it felt safe to fall apart.

Her nervous system was in complete burnout. And she hadn’t even hit 9th grade.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you: the school system didn’t identify any of this. Not one teacher flagged it. Not one report card expressed concern. I had to follow my gut, take her to specialists, chase diagnoses, and fight for answers while she smiled and masked her way through every school day.

The dyslexia diagnosis came first. Through the Allison Lawson Centre for Dyslexia in Australia, we worked to retrain her eye-to-brain messaging – addressing how one dominant eye and one weaker eye process visual information differently. By strengthening the weaker eye’s ability to relay information to the brain, Maya’s dyslexia symptoms dissolved after nine or 10 treatment sessions.

Then she was diagnosed with dyscalculia, a learning disability that affects the understanding of numbers and mathematical concepts. This one is harder to crack – her numbers still don’t stack up.

Then came the ADHD diagnosis through a paediatrician, armed with letters from my daughter’s teacher and her psychologist. She was prescribed Concerta, which turned out to be life-changing. She was also prescribed anxiety medication, because her body was keeping the score of years spent trying to fit into a system that wasn’t built for her brain.

But the biggest improvement didn’t come from the medication. It came when I made the decision to pull her out of school.

Mother and daughter on a visit to........

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