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
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 ...
Your kid says they want to start a business, become a YouTuber, or make money from gaming and you’re left thinking, “Great… but how?” We sit down with Jessie Dennerline, founder of KidPitchBiz, to talk about what kids actually need before they ever “launch” anything: a simple way to think through ideas, practice public speaking, learn how money works, and get comfortable adjustin...
The worst part of an autism diagnosis is not the word itself. It is the silence that can follow when you do not know where to go, what to trust, or who will truly understand your day to day life. We talk with Karen Simmons about that exact moment and the long road after it, from early parenting chaos to building reliable autism resources that help families feel less alone.
We get into why “future teller...
You can have the right intentions and still feel like your brain will not cooperate and that is exactly where ADHD and executive dysfunction love to hijack school, work, and daily life. We sit down with Zoe Lewis, founder of New Bloom ADHD Coaching, to talk about what actually helps young adults and college students when assignments pile up, deadlines sneak up, and motivation disappears the moment something feels bo...
The scariest autism parenting moments often start quietly: sleep disappears, words fade, new behaviors show up, and you keep telling yourself it must be a phase. We talk with Paul Voss, a father of eight, about what it felt like to watch those changes unfold in his youngest daughter and then face a profound autism diagnosis that “turned our life upside down.” What follows is a candid, grounded conversati...
Most people say they support accessibility, but very few can explain what it actually means or why it keeps breaking down in real life. We’re joined by Daniel Hodges, a nonprofit leader and advocate with a law degree who was born blind, to get specific about where the barriers really come from and what “equity” looks like when you strip out bias and bad design.
We talk about Daniel’s c...
A meltdown in the grocery store. A fight over screens that spirals into yelling. A kid who seems “fine” at school and falls apart at home. When you’re parenting a neurodiverse child, a strong-willed child, or a deeply sensitive child, it can feel like the usual advice was written for a different universe. We wanted something more honest and more useful, so we sat down with Melissa Schulz, a parenti...
A rare diagnosis can sit quietly in the background for years, until one day a scan makes it real. That’s what happened for Will Ruddell, who joins us to share his life with Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF2), a rare genetic disorder linked to slow-growing tumors in the brain, spine, and along nerves. Will grew up watching his father deal with serious medical issues, then found out at 26 that he also had NF2 after ...
The parenting moves that look “right” on paper can fall apart in real life, especially when you’re raising a neurodivergent child with ADHD, autism, learning differences, anxiety, or executive functioning challenges. I sit down with clinical psychologist Dr. Anna Levy Warren to talk about the moment many families hit after testing and diagnoses: you finally have the report, but you still don’...
If your child can talk for days but freezes the moment a pencil hits paper, the problem might not be “motivation” or “attention.” It might be handwriting. We sit down with educator and curriculum designer Holly Britton, founder of Squiggle Squad, to unpack why handwriting instruction is a core building block for literacy, written expression, and confident learning, especially in the early ele...
The fastest way to lose your kid is to keep talking when what they need is to be understood. That’s why I loved this conversation with Dr. Beth Long, a licensed professional counselor and ABA therapist in Montgomery, Alabama, who brings both clinical clarity and real-parent humility to the hardest parts of family life.
We get into what children actually want from parents at different ages: younger kids ...
“The struggle is real, the label is not.” That line sets the tone for a deep, candid conversation with Roman Wyden, founder of the ADHD Is Over movement, as we challenge the way modern culture talks about ADHD, behavior, and so-called “disorders.” We don’t deny the pain families feel. We zoom in on what helps: naming the real struggle, reducing stress, and building environments where ki...
A life-changing diagnosis can make even the strongest person feel like they’re “too much” for the people they love. That single thought is what pushed Eric Wyatt to create Burden The Bear, a plush bear with a simple purpose: remind patients and families that the illness is the burden, not the person. Eric joins us from Philadelphia to share the real story behind the brand, starting with his mom&rsq...
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