THE SJ CHILDS SHOW-Building a Community of Inclusion

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 t...

Send us Fan Mail 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 (lic...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ther...

Send us Fan Mail 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 bu...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 per...

Send us Fan Mail 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 usual...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 re...

Send us Fan Mail 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 r...

Send us Fan Mail 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 facing that exa...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 i...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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,...

Send us Fan Mail 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 relati...

Send us Fan Mail 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 adjusting...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 disa...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Danie...

Send us Fan Mail 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 can...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 yo...