How Sustenance came to be.

I have twin girls. I am not going to name them, show their faces, or tell you anything that is theirs to tell one day. I will call them Twin A and Twin B.

This is my side of what happened, not theirs. I am telling it because it is the reason Sustenance exists, and because the version of this story I needed to read did not exist when I was looking for it.

Twin A was never happy. Not at daycare, not at school. For years there was school refusal most mornings. Up to about age ten it was hard, but we managed it.

Then it stopped being manageable. School refusal every single morning. Outbursts at school. More and more meetings about her attendance.

Her school were good to us. We agreed she could arrive ten minutes late to miss the morning crowd, and leave five minutes early to miss it again at the end of the day. They put real, reasonable adjustments in place. None of it was for show.

And still it got worse.

The thing we could not see was demand avoidance.

Every adjustment we made added structure, and every bit of structure added pressure. The more we tightened things to help her, the more she felt she had to escape.

We were doing the exact opposite of what she needed, with the best intentions, for a long time. That is the part that is hard to write down.

We went back and forth about home education for two years. Honestly, it was not what we wanted. It was not the plan.

We thought we had to send her to school. The idea of educating her ourselves felt completely foreign, not something people like us did. So we kept trying to do the right thing by keeping her there, when the right thing was actually much simpler: listen to our own intuition, and find a way of educating her that suited who she was instead of asking her to suit school.

We could see the damage it was doing to her. But every source we turned to told us the same thing: keep going, do not take her out, she needs to be at school. So we kept going, even as the evidence in front of us said otherwise.

In the end we took her out because she was too burnt out to attend, not because we had finally decided. Looking back, I wish we had acted sooner. That is my one real regret.

About a year later, Twin B started showing the same signs. Burnout. School refusal. The same road we had already walked.

This time we recognised it. We talked it through properly and withdrew her before she reached the last straw the way her sister had. Sooner, not later. It made all the difference.

Both girls are on the home education register now.

Since we made the change, we have watched their self-esteem come back, and with it their willingness to learn. Not because we found the perfect curriculum. Because the pressure came off, and there was room to be a person again first.

I am neurodivergent myself. I know from the inside what school asked of a nervous system like mine, and what it cost.

So when I looked at my girls, I could see it sooner than I might have otherwise. It is part of why I was more open to home education than my husband was at the start. I was not imagining their experience. I remembered it.

Once we were out, I needed a way to hold on to what learning actually looked like on a good day, and to show it to anyone who asked. Everything I could find assumed a level of compliance that does not exist in my house.

So I built the thing I needed. Regulation before curriculum. Low demand, by design. Nothing the child has to earn.

That is Sustenance. It came out of this, not the other way round.