Welcome to the Autism, ADHD podcast. I am so happy that you join me today. I want to take a moment and ask for your help. Please take just a second and give the podcast a five-star review. This will help me continue the podcast and keep bringing you helpful

information. Thanks so much again for taking the time to give that five-star review. Now let's get

started. Welcome, Dr. Maureen O'Shaughnessy. I'm so excited you're here today.

Holly, it is so great to be here. Thank you.

So I'm going to introduce you to everyone.

Maureen is on a mission to connect the dots between education, belonging, and youth empowerment as the founder of the human-centered microschool, lead prep, author of creating

microschools for colorful mismatched kids, host of the Education Evolution podcast, and co-founder

of the Ed Active Collective. She is disrupting the outdated education system. I feel like I need

a drum roll after that. That's so, so amazing.

We often find ourselves teachers, parents, therapists in this sort of strange situation where we have

this typical school environment and this typical school curriculum.

Yet we have, like you said, these mismatched kids, like it's not built for them.

So we're kind of stuck in this strange place where we've got everything set up in a certain way,

but then our children and our students and our clients,

what do we do? How do we support them in these environments that maybe not built for the way they are?

That is such a tough question. And I raised my daughters overseas and brought them back to the U.S. for high school.

So they'd have lots of options in their native language. And we tried six or seven different models between

my two girls. So I couldn't make it work for them. And I'm a school principal school head.

So I ended up saying, forget it. I'm starting my own school to help other kids that were like

my daughters. So I couldn't quite make it

work, but there are like three main things parents can do. One is really know and honor who your kid is.

When we say, no, no, no, sweetie, you have to be a square peg because this is a square hole. Come on.

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