Engage
Engage here, on purpose.
Dear fellow parent,
I’m so glad you’re here again. Whether you’re showing up today with steady energy or running on empty after a busy Easter—or somewhere in between—I’m grateful you’re reading.
Last time, we talked about Leaning In—not in the productivity-driven sense of doing more, but in the soft, powerful way of noticing and trusting your strengths.
Today, we turn to the second pillar of Lead Together:
E is for Engage.
Engage in presence. Engage with purpose.
So often, parenting a child with developmental differences can feel like you’re being pulled in a dozen directions at once—appointments, assessments, programmes, school meetings or phone calls. The outside world gets noisy. It’s hard to know where to look, what to trust, or how to feel grounded.
But what if engagement wasn’t about doing more?
What if it was about choosing to be here, on purpose?
Engaging in presence means gently turning down the volume of the outside world long enough to hear what’s true for you and your child and family. It’s the act of noticing—noticing who your child is becoming, what lights them up, what soothes them, what they’re trying to tell you without words. It’s staying connected, even when things feel uncertain or imperfect.
Engaging in purpose means figuring out with your family what matters most, not what’s expected by others. It’s naming your values and letting them guide the way you show up with others. It might look like choosing rest over rushing, connection over comparison, joy over judgement.
And it might also look like this:
Giving yourself permission to pause before reacting.
Choosing to ask What has my child taught me that no professional or report ever could?
Remembering that presence doesn’t have to be perfect—it just needs to be real.
This kind of engagement is slow. And always, it’s brave.
Because it is a soft rebellion that resists what some parts of society tells us we should be fixing, proving, or performing.
If you’d like a gentle place to start, try this:
Pause. For just a breath.
Notice. Something about your child that makes you smile.
Ask. What does being with them, not doing for them, look like today?
This kind of presence can be quietly transformational.
Because when we engage with our children as they are—not who the world expects—they feel it. And so do we.
A Glimpse Ahead
Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to explore the rest of the L-E-A-D pillars:
Adapt with creativity and resilience
Discover new insights about ourselves and others
Each of these is an invitation to honour yours and your child and family’s, wholeness—exactly as they are.
And before you close this email, I invite you to take one breath for yourself and one for your child who invites you to slow down and be with them.
Let that be enough for today.