THE SJ CHILDS SHOW-Building a Community of Inclusion
🎙️ Welcome to The SJ Childs Show Podcast! 🎉 Join Sara Bradford—better known as SJ Childs—as she bridges understanding, connection, and advocacy for the neurodivergent community. With a growing global reach of over 100,000 followers and views across our platforms, The SJ Childs Show shines a light on autism, neurodiversity, lived experiences, empowering stories, expert insights, and practical resources for parents, educators, professionals, and neurodivergent individuals alike. Brought to you by The SJ Childs Global Network, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting autistic and neurodivergent individuals and their families worldwide, this podcast brings together powerful voices, meaningful conversations, and actionable ideas that help build a more informed and inclusive world. 🌐 Visit sjchilds.org to learn more about our mission, explore resources, and connect with our growing global community. 🎧 Listen on platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Goodpods, and more—or tune in Fridays at 8:30 AM EDT on the Helium Radio Network’s Life Improvement Radio, Channel 1. Together, we’re building understanding, creating connection, and making inclusion more than just a conversation. 🌟 ✨ Explore more resources at: https://sjchilds.org and https://streamable.live
Episodes
A child who cannot speak is still full of language, and sometimes it takes a story to make the rest of us finally listen. We’re joined by CJ Gryffin, a middle school special education teacher who works with students with severe disabilities, including many non-speaking and autistic kids, and she brings that lived classroom truth into her debut novel, The Color Of Silence.
We talk candidly about what &ld...
Your kid drops a line like “My teacher hates me” and you can feel your brain sprint toward fixing it, correcting it, shutting it down. We dig into why that instinct is so common for overwhelmed parents, and how it can accidentally create distance instead of comfort, even when you’re trying your hardest.
I sit down with parenting coach and author Mary Wilcox Smith to talk about the messy real...
“Stop hiding what they love” sounds almost too simple, but it can change everything. I’m joined by Sue Goluback and Staci Neustadt from Making Sense of Autism for a conversation that challenges the old autism playbook and replaces it with something more human: neuroaffirming, strength-based autism support that starts with the individual, not a standardized score. Sue shares what it was like to grow...
One small mistake in your estate plan can quietly put SSI and Medicaid at risk, and most families never find out until it’s too late. We wanted a practical, calm conversation that replaces fear with a roadmap, so we brought on Michael Ringle, founder of Special Needs Wealth Planning and author of Planning for Two Lifetimes, to walk through what special needs families actually need to plan for and why the rules...
What if the most powerful thing you give your child isn’t a lesson, a rule, or a reward, but a voice they carry for the rest of their life? Author Terry Bean joins us for a warm, honest conversation about how the words we speak to kids become the words they eventually speak to themselves and how that inner voice can build confidence, self-worth, and real resilience. Terry shares the heart behind her children&r...
If your child is autistic or neurodivergent, a police interaction can go sideways for reasons that have nothing to do with guilt. A shutdown, a meltdown, pacing, avoiding eye contact, or “odd” body language can be misread as deception or threat, and once that interpretation sets in, the consequences can escalate fast. We sit down with criminal defense attorney Saul Bienenfeld (licensed in New York and Fl...
Your four-year-old isn’t being “difficult” for fun and your teenager isn’t shutting you out just to be rude. We talk with Dr. Brandy Hawk, a clinical child psychologist specializing in childhood trauma, parent child relationships, and neurodiversity, to get practical, grounded guidance for the moments that make parenting feel overwhelming.
We start with the early years, where therapy l...
Teen years are intense, and it’s not just attitudes and hormones. Stress, anxiety, screen time, energy drinks, sleep problems, and constant online pressure can stack up fast, and a lot of families feel like they’re piecing together support with no clear roadmap. We wanted a conversation that feels honest and useful, so we invited Dara Wax, founder of Sam + Leo, to share how she built a clean, vegan teen ...
You can have a full calendar of friends, family, and appointments and still feel completely alone as a parent. That’s where this conversation lands: the kind of honest, practical talk that helps you breathe again and take the next step.
We’re joined by Vicky Christensen, a special education advocate and the author of Uniquely, Fully Enough. Vicky shares her family’s neurodivergent parenting ...
Your kid’s mindset is forming whether anyone teaches it or not, and that’s what makes this conversation so important. We’re joined by Renaye Thornborrow, founder of Adventures in Wisdom, who’s on a mission to bring life coaching for kids into everyday family life, with practical mindset skills that build confidence, self-esteem, and resilience. Renaye shares how she discovered personal develo...
If everything in your child’s world keeps getting easier, why do they seem more stressed, more isolated, and less confident? That question drives my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Strecker, head of school and author of *Emergence: How Modern Convenience is Dumbing Down Our Children and What Parents and Schools Can Do About It*. We get into the uncomfortable truth that growth usually comes from friction and pra...
A wheelchair, a notebook flipped over in a failing math class, and one contest win that changed everything. That’s the origin story Tracee Garner brings to our mic, and it opens into a bigger conversation about disability advocacy, mental health, and the kind of access that lets people actually live their lives.
Tracee is a disability advocate in Northern Virginia and a published author with 22 books, a...
You can feel it the moment someone finally says, “Oh, that’s why.” Amy Jones joins us for a candid, funny, and deeply human talk about living most of her life without an ADHD diagnosis, getting labeled with everything but the real answer, and how that one missing piece rewrote her entire story. We sit with the grief of “what could have been,” but we spend even more time on what relief c...
Theo spent years pushing away his autism diagnosis, and the cost was steep: mental health spirals, substance abuse, and the constant pressure to act “normal” in a world that rarely makes space for sensory needs. When he later works with autistic kids and recognizes himself in them, something shifts. We talk about what it means to accept autism as an identity and a nervous system reality, not a problem to...
The scariest part of caregiving is not the hard day, it’s the day you’re not there to explain what only you know. When a loved one is non-speaking, has epilepsy, needs sensory supports, or relies on a specific routine, the difference between “they’ll figure it out” and “they’ll care for them well” comes down to details. Joel and Debbie Pearlman built DaniPlan after fac...
The hardest part of “helping” a family after an autism diagnosis can be admitting that your old playbook no longer fits. Jennifer Kaufman knows that tension from both angles: she spent years as a principal at a school for children with autism through age 21, and she’s also the grandmother of an autistic eight-year-old. When her grandson was diagnosed, expertise wasn’t the missing piece. The m...
Your teen’s behavior makes more sense when you stop treating it like a moral failing and start treating it like communication. We sit down with Dr. Carla Cataria, an educator turned family support specialist, to talk about what actually helps teens thrive, especially neurodiverse kids who are too often stereotyped, mislabeled, or underestimated by the adults around them.
We dig into the difference...
A diagnosis can feel like it writes your child’s future in ink, but that story is usually wrong. We sit down with Sean Adelman, an orthopedic trauma surgeon and dad to a daughter with Down syndrome, to talk about what he’s learned outside the textbooks: people are not their worst day, and kids are not their labels. The big throughline is raising expectations, not as pressure, but as possibility.
W...
One sentence from a professional can steal your breath for years, and one unexpected win can finally give it back. We sit down with Dr. Norinne Russell, educator, advocate, and founder of Russell Coaching for Students, to talk about the part of parenting neurodiverse kids that rarely gets said out loud: the seasons when you never fully exhale, the loneliness behind the logistics, and the way “normal” exp...
Parenting gets loud when you’re stuck in the day to day. This conversation gets quiet in the best way and asks the bigger question: what do we want our kids to carry when our titles and paychecks are long forgotten? We’re joined by Nathaniel Turner, co-founder of the League of Extraordinary Parents, who opens with a powerful reminder that legacy is measured in character and relationships. That grounding ...
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