The Latest from ExEd Publishing

This one is written directly to you, the parent who is watching a relationship with your child be dismantled, and who feels powerless to stop it. If that is not your situation, I hope it never is. If it is, I want you to know before anything else that you are not imagining it, you are not alone in it, and it is one of the most particular and least understood forms of grief a person can carry. There is a specific anguish in being erased from your own child’s life while you are

In Japan there is an old practice called kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery. When a bowl shatters, the pieces are not hidden or discarded. They are joined back together with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, so that the cracks are not disguised but illuminated. The repair becomes the most beautiful part of the object. The bowl is worth more, and means more, for having been broken and mended in the light. I cannot think of a more useful idea to carry into the second

I hear the same sentence from parents more than almost any other. I did not know I was allowed to do this. They are talking about pulling their child, the one with the IEP, the one the school kept failing, out of school and teaching them at home. And underneath the sentence is a fear that they will be doing something wrong, something risky, maybe even something that gets them into trouble. So let me say it plainly. In every state in this country, you are allowed to homeschool

There is a quiet cruelty in the idea that by a certain age your life is supposed to be finished being built. That the choices are made, the shape is set, and what remains is simply to live inside the house you have already constructed. I believed a version of that story for a long time, right up until my own life declined to cooperate with it. I rebuilt mine in my fifties. Not by choice, at first, and not all at once. A life I thought was permanent came apart, and I found mys

Few terms in the world of family conflict are used as loosely, or argued over as fiercely, as parental alienation. It gets thrown around in custody battles as a weapon, dismissed by some as a myth, and treated by others as an explanation for every difficult relationship between a child and a parent. None of that serves the children at the center of it. So I want to try to say, as carefully and honestly as I can, what parental alienation actually is, and just as importantly, w

The first IEP meeting is often the loneliest room a parent has ever sat in. You are outnumbered by professionals who use acronyms like a second language, you have a folder you are not sure how to use, and the child at the center of it all is the one person not there to speak. I have sat at that table hundreds of times, on the school’s side and later on the parent’s. I want to tell you what I wish someone had told every parent before they walked in. First, you are a full membe

People sometimes ask why the lotus. Why name a book series, and half an imprint, after one particular flower. The honest answer is that the lotus knows something I spent most of my life learning the hard way, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I sat down to write. The lotus does not grow in clear water. It grows in mud. It roots itself in the murk at the bottom of a pond, in exactly the kind of place we are taught to be ashamed of, and it uses that muck as food. The

If you have found your way here, chances are you are in the middle of something. A hard season. A question you did not expect to be asking. A decision you are not sure you are ready to make. That is who I write for, and that is who this house was built to serve. So before anything else: welcome. I am genuinely glad you are here.