See the transcript for the trailer below
Nikki: Welcome to Otherwise. Otherwise is a podcast for globally mobile families with additional needs and our support communities worldwide. We share the stories, successes, and learnings of the families that have travelled this path before us, with us, and for those that will come after us. I’m Nikki Moffitt, I left Australia 19 years ago with a baby, a husband, and a 20-foot container to spend three years in Hong Kong.
We’ve since lived in five more countries and had another baby. We’ve learned a lot of acronyms, chilled out in many waiting rooms, and I’ve never met a school principal whose office I couldn’t cry in.
Join me as I chat to families who have learned by creating their own unique solutions to the very different, yet similar challenges that we face in our globally mobile life.
Sarah: In kindergarten or first grade, the teachers would say things like, oh, she’s so high spirited, or she can’t sit still. Or, you know, she has some impulse control issues and, you know, if anyone had ever said, we think she has ADHD at that time, my husband and I would have been doing a lot of research and figuring out how we could support her. But instead we were, going down other avenues, because of the words that they used.
Jon: We brought in a behavior therapist from the U S or two weeks, two times a year to come work with our kids.
Nikki: We really are all in it together, and together we’ll pose questions to those in the community that can offer support, educators, therapists, and organizations that can help us along the way.
In general, what do you think are the biggest issues facing families who have children with additional learning needs?
April: I think the first one is the lack of consistency. So, what is provided at one school versus another is never consistent. In schools we have IB curriculum, British curriculum, we have American curriculum and that’s standardized. There are standards, to make sure that they’re done pretty consistently from school to school. And I think we need the same thing for SEN services.
Nikki: And we’ll have a little bit of fun while we’re doing it.
And last question, how long do you think you’d survive?
Sarah: The zombie apocalypse? Oh, a long time, I grew up in New England, I’m prepared all the time, basements and canned food and my kids like martial arts, so we’d do okay.
Those babies I mentioned earlier now they’re 19 and 15. And it hasn’t always been easy and we don’t have all the answers, but the more you know, the more you can support, and we can all help our children, who are always showing us, another kind of wise.