The Weighted Blanket

Have you ever been told your child is stubborn , strong-willed , or defiant ? So was mine. In this episode of The Weighted Blanket , I share our family's journey into understanding the PDA Profile (Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) —what it really is, why traditional parenting advice often makes things worse, and the small changes that completely transformed the way we support our son. I'm not a PDA s...

I want to tell you about my birthday. My youngest had just been given a recorder. My middle son wanted one too and wasn't okay about that. My eldest wanted to play battleships. I was cooking dinner, doing the cake, welcoming family — and being hit and pushed by a child who had been completely overwhelmed since that morning. And in the middle of all of it I was trying to hold my own nervous system...

When my son was two years old, I gave him a book about dinosaurs — one of those Usborne lift-the-flap books with really obscure species in it. By the time he was two and three months old, he knew every single one. During COVID, he'd run full pelt down the road on our daily walks. Roaring. Not making noise — roaring. Because he wasn't a two-year-old on a walk. He was a dinosaur. At age five he was...

I was 36 years old when someone finally told me my brain was different. Not broken. Not difficult. Not strange — even though strange was the word I'd quietly carried about myself for as long as I could remember. Just different. And I cried. Not because I was sad. Because I'd spent 36 years working twice as hard as everyone around me just to appear like I was keeping up. And it turned out there had...

I lost fourteen kilograms in six months. Not because I was trying to. Because my body was the only part of me willing to say something was wrong. I was being called Superwoman. And every single time someone said it, I felt the weight of it land. Because that's what compliments do when you're performing. They raise the floor. They tell you that this — this exhausted, crumbling, hollow version of ke...

If you have ADHD and you've ever been called too sensitive, too emotional, too much — this episode is for you. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. RSD. It's one of the most common and least talked about parts of ADHD — and for around 30% of people with ADHD, it's the most impairing symptom of all. Not the focus issues. Not the time blindness. The emotional pain. I've just come back from seeing Alex Par...

I was thirty-six years old when someone finally told me my brain was different. Not broken. Just different. In this first episode I want to tell you who I am and why I built The Weighted Blanket — not the polished version, the real one. Because if we're going to build something honest together, it has to start here. I talk about my ADHD diagnosis at 36, what thirty-six years without knowing actual...

Welcome to The Weighted Blanket. 🤍 This is a podcast and community for neurodivergent people and the families who love them. I'm Claire — a mum of three, diagnosed with ADHD at 36, navigating autism, AuDHD, sensory processing disorder and a PDA profile across my family. I built this because I couldn't find a space that felt warm enough to be honest in — and honest enough to actually help. Here we...