About Danielle

Before I became a parent, I was confident, capable, and in control.
I was a teacher in French Immersion classrooms, well-versed in education theory and child development. I loved my work and was passionate about connection and creativity. I had a clear vision for what parenting and teaching would look like.

Then I actually became a parent.
And nothing — absolutely nothing — went according to plan.

My first child’s needs were different from what I had been taught to expect. My parenting tools didn’t work. Traditional strategies — the sticker charts, the behavior plans, the parenting books everyone swore by — didn’t just fall short. They made things worse. My child was shutting down, melting down, hurting — and I was being told that it was my fault.

Over and over again, I was blamed for not doing it “right” — or not doing it “consistently enough.” The message was clear: if I just stuck to the plan, if I was stricter, more neutral, less emotional — things would work.
But I was doing the best I could in the moment. And it was breaking us both.

Over time, we added a list of diagnoses that many of you will find familiar: PDA, Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, DCD (dyspraxia).
We chose home education, thinking it would give us more freedom and calm — and in some ways, it did. But the challenges didn’t disappear.

That’s when I realized: it wasn’t me.
And it definitely wasn’t my child.
It was the approach. The whole framework.
The idea that kids are problems to be solved — and that parents are technicians meant to apply the solution.

We didn’t need better behavior plans.
We needed safety.
We needed understanding.
We needed connection.

And we needed support that honored who we were — not advice that asked us to erase ourselves just to make the system work.

Eventually, I saw that this wasn’t about “fixing” my child.
It was about shifting my entire framework.

This was about co-regulation. Nervous system safety. Relationship-first parenting.
It was about unlearning the dominant parenting messages I had absorbed as a professional — and learning instead to trust my child, and trust myself.

That realization was the beginning of everything changing.

But the shift didn’t happen overnight. It came slowly — through lived experience, personal healing, and the incredible mentorship of thought leaders like Robyn Gobbel, Dr. Ross Greene, and Dr. Stuart Shanker. It also happened in community — with other parents walking the same confusing, beautiful, exhausting path.

And eventually, that transformation became the heart of my work.

Danielle Rodda