Autism Dadcast

The government says every household should be ready to look after itself for 72 hours. No power, no water, no shops. Easy enough, until you've got a non-verbal autistic child, a very short list of safe foods and an iPad that's about to die.
Gaz and Andy got back from holiday to a "be ready" plan that wasn't written with autistic families in mind, so they've written their own. Fill the bath the second the power goes, before anyone climbs in it. Download the shows now, not when the Wi-Fi's gone. Screenshot the AAC keyboard, print it and laminate...

Fifty episodes in, and last week we asked for one thing: a party that would put a proper plan for SEND families on the table. This week, one did.
Gaz and Andy start with the Oxford Half Marathon and the £1,360 you helped raise for Ambitious About Autism, including one anonymous £700 that took the pressure right off. Thank you, whoever you are.
Then a listener in our Discord sent in Restore Britain's new SEND policy, and we read it line by line. A lot of it is common sense. Help without needing a diagnosis first. Timely assessments. An en...

Some families are now facing a two-year minimum wait just to be assessed for autism. Around 295,000 people are on the waiting list in England. A private clinic can do it in weeks, if you can pay.
Gaz and Andy start with the "golden ticket" debate. The diagnosis opens the door to support, so what happens to the families who cannot afford to skip the queue? Andy remembers the first time he filled in the benefits form for Lydia, writing down her worst day when every instinct as a parent was to build her up. Andy asks how often...

Not the episode we planned to record.This week a three year old went missing from a playground in Suffolk and was found in a pond the next day. He was non-verbal, partially deaf and on the autism pathway. Thirteen hundred members of the public joined the search.This is not an investigation, and it is not a judgement on a devastated family. It is about a danger that thousands of families live with every single day and almost nobody is warned about: elopement.Elopement is when an autistic person leaves a safe space, a responsible adult or a...

Andy put a post up asking autism parents to name the one fear they have never said out loud. 858 people answered, and 103 of them said almost exactly the same thing.
So we sat down and read them. Not the tidy ones, the ones people only admit when nobody can see their name next to it. Mourning the child you thought you were getting. Envying families who can wake up and just go somewhere. Feeling like you are managing your child rather than enjoying them. Wondering, honestly, what your life would look like if this had gone differently.
...

Robbie Williams announced at 52 that he is autistic, and said he has "a little bit of autism". Within a day the community had split over the phrasing.Gaz and Andy use it as a way into the question that keeps coming back. If one word covers Robbie Williams, and the same word covers Lydia, who is five, non-verbal and working with Makaton cards, does it still tell anyone anything? And if it doesn't, would splitting autism into levels help, or would it quietly move support away from the families already fighting hardest to get it?Along the way, Lydia...

Andy put a video up asking one question: which phrase from a professional never left you? His own was a paediatrician who would not answer whether Lydia was autistic, and instead said "we just need to ensure she reaches her potential, whatever that looks like."

Around 685 parents answered. It is the only post we have ever done that got more comments than likes.
So we sorted the lot and read them back. The denial, the low expectations, the gatekeeping, the ones that were meant kindly and landed like a brick, and the small...

Across the world, parents of autistic children are being offered something that

sounds almost miraculous. Clinics promise better speech, better eye contact,

calmer behaviour, and in some cases claim to repair or reverse autism. The price

runs from £10,000 to £40,000, and often more than once.

Over the last few months we've been approached by clinic after clinic wanting to

come on the show and sell it to you. We said no. Instead we went and read the

studies.

This one is...

This week Gaz and Andy sit down with Jolanta Lasota, Chief Executive of Ambitious about Autism, at their college in Isleworth. 16 years leading the charity and mum to a 21-year-old autistic son, Jolanta has seen the whole picture, from the early years right through to adulthood and employment.

We talk about why purpose matters more than exams, the young man who is non-speaking and holds down two jobs, the boy who was allowed to come to school in his pyjamas, and naming the grief nobody warns you about. Jolanta describes raising an autistic child...

Paul Mullin has scored goals in front of millions and become a household name through Welcome to Wrexham. But this one is about the part of his life the cameras rarely catch: being dad to Albi, his autistic son.

Gaz and Andy sit down with Paul for an honest, Albi-centric conversation about the regression that stopped his little boy in his tracks, the guilt that kept him up at night, and why he wouldn't change a single thing about his son. Plus the moment Albi found a way to tell him 'you're my best friend' without saying...

One missed board and one wrong word at in the morning, and Thomas's whole morning falls apart.

This week Gaz and Andy unpack how much detail autistic kids track, why a single word can rewrite their day, and how much they understand even mid-meltdown.

Plus Lydia becomes swimmer of the week, the new-neighbour conversation every autism parent knows, and an honest, conflicted take on the under-16 social media ban and what it overlooks for autistic teens.Timestamps00:00 Charlie's shop opening and meeting Sophie the BTS superfan02:00 Lydia's swimming breakthrough: swimmer of the week03:40 Thomas's Monday...

Every parent of an autistic child has been told the same thing: just take the nappy off and sit them on the toilet. This week Gaz and Andy sit down with Charmaine, a learning disability nurse turned continence consultant with over 30 years of experience, and find out why that advice not only fails, it can make things worse.What starts as a chat about toilet training turns into something much bigger: gut health, the gut-brain connection, sleep, meltdowns, and the quiet toll this takes on a whole family. Charmaine explains why you have to start inside the body and...

You can know your child inside out and still be blindsided in the space of a week.

This one starts with Thomas opening the front door and wandering off down a hill in a quiet Shropshire village - the same week Lydia did almost exactly the same thing. From there it runs into the half-term chaos that brought biting back out of nowhere, the dread of summer toilet training and puberty creeping into view, and a proper kicking of the Department for Education for handing SEND to Gemma Collins after the white paper left families feeling gaslit.<...

You sit down with the paediatrician. You've got half an hour. You know the

first 20 minutes will be you trying to prove your child is different to every

other child in that waiting room - and you'll walk out no further forward.

Orrin Benford knows that feeling. After a year of being fobbed off across GPs,

neurologists and urologists for his daughter Indie, he stopped trying to

remember everything off the top of his head and built something that did it

for him. This...

Adam Parkinson came on this week. One of the Two Mr. Ps. Teaching assistant. Podcaster. Dad of two — a 10-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old autistic son called Max.

We talked about Max. We talked about the plane aisle moment his wife filmed without telling him, that went viral and started everything. We talked about siblings, and what it means to watch your daughter try not to look upset when her brother destroys her Barbie Dream House. We talked about online trolls, the dads' WhatsApp group, and the time a stranger told him celebrating his son's diagnosis was "li...

We ran the London Marathon. We didn't train. We finished it. And then we had a conversation we weren't expecting to have.

Halfway through writing this off as a marathon recap, we ended up admitting something neither of us had said out loud before. We talk a lot about wanting to be around as long as we can for our kids. But if we're honest, we're not always doing the things that would actually make that happen.

This one's got the funny stuff. The rhinos overtaking us. The fireman...

We put two sets of questions to the community. One for dads, one for mums. The dads sent seven. The mums sent seventeen. And most of the mums' questions were about how to get their partner on board.

This one hits different. We talk about what happens when you refuse to accept your child's diagnosis. Why dads get left behind. Why mums end up carrying everything. And the moment you have to stop making it about you and start making it about your kid.

We also answer the question nobody wants to think about: what...

What happens when you die and your child doesn't understand death? What if they just think you walked away?

That's where this conversation ended up. It started with a story about a mum who overheard a dad talking about his autistic son and accused him of saying his life was harder than hers. It turned into something neither Gaz nor Andy were prepared for. Pre-recorded death videos. Whether your child needs to see your body. The arithmetic of outliving someone who might never understand why you're not there anymore.

They also talk about why parents...

When your autistic child turns 18, you stop being their parent in the eyes of the law. You have to apply to the Court of Protection, pay £850, wait four months, and hope social services don't oppose it. If you don't, hospitals won't listen to you and you can't touch their bank account.

We didn't know this. Most parents of young autistic children don't. A petition hit the parliamentary website asking for it to be scrapped for families where a capacity assessment already confirms the child permanently lacks capacity. The government said no.

This week we also t...

If you've ever looked at your child mid-meltdown and thought "I can't do this anymore," this one's for you.In this episode, Gaz sits down with his wife Mish for a raw, unfiltered conversation about what life was really like from the moment Thomas was born. The traumatic birth. The baby who wouldn't latch, wouldn't calm, wouldn't make eye contact. The feeling of being nothing more than a feeding machine while every other mum seemed to have it figured out. The sleepless nights on a single bed downstairs. The marriage that quietly slid into housemate territory without either of...

The government's SEND White Paper promises a better system. But what happens when the independent expert on your complaints panel gets outvoted by governors? We asked the Minister directly.Gaz and Andy sat down with Georgia Gould, Minister for Schools, inside the Department for Education to put the questions SEND families are actually asking. The tribunal gap. The complaints panel. The undefined "complex needs" threshold. The workforce that doesn't exist yet.She answered all of it — and some of her answers might surprise you.Key moments:2:10 — The tribunal gap: what parents can and can't challenge4:06 — The complaints panel: can the SE...

Two SEND parents were inside the government meetings every week for months. Here's what they saw — and what they had to fight to change.

In this episode, Gaz and Andy sit down with Hayley and Aimee from SEND Sanctuary, who were part of the official SEND Improvement Group advising on the white paper. They break down what's actually in it, what nearly made it in that didn't, and why the bits that got quietly removed should worry every SEND family in England.

🔑 Key moments:

We talk through the latest SEND reform leaks and why the “EHCPs protected until 2030” line doesn’t feel like protection at all. We get into the DfE promo videos, the staged “mainstream SEND classroom” example, and why it looks like the narrative is being set before the white paper drops.

Key themes:

- EHCPs “protected until 2030” and what that implies after

- Mainstream capacity promises vs real-world needsThe stereotype kit: fidgets, coloured cards, tidy optics

- Safety Valve scheme and the financial incentive to reduce EHCPs

- 90% deficit write-off and the condit...

This episode isn’t about us.

It’s about you.

We asked families to share where they’ve been failed by the SEND system. What came back was overwhelming.

Draft EHCPs left open for months.
Support written into plans but never delivered.
Children kept “on roll” with no education.
Operational failures that destroyed trust.
Teenagers saying they’d rather be dead than go back to school.

These aren’t isolated stories.
The patterns are repeating across the country.

With SEND reform on the horizon, we’re asking a...

We’ve had SEND reform info leaked from a source being called credible, and it’s been picked up by The i Paper and the Financial Times.

If it’s real, it suggests a four tier non-statutory system before a child can even qualify for an EHCP, with the EHCP sitting above it all like some golden ticket. That matters because non-statutory support can’t be appealed, and it basically creates a fail-first pathway where kids have to struggle repeatedly before anyone is legally forced to help.

We’re not scarem...

We met with the Schools Minister this week. We sat with Georgia Gould on a panel for an hour and we asked the questions you sent in.

Georgia suggested coming on the podcast for a long form conversation. We didn't ask for it, she offered. That impressed us because politicians don't usually put themselves in uncomfortable positions like that.

Then we got a message from a parent who had to remortgage their house for £55,000 to get their child the placement they needed. Fifty five thousand pounds. We got another message last week about £30,000. This is wh...

First episode back after Christmas and we're catching up on everything. Andy talks about how lowering expectations made Christmas actually work this year. Gaz shares how Mish built Thomas a cardboard slide and put all his presents at the bottom so he could slide straight into them. Pot of Pringles was one of the presents and that was the win right there.

Lydia's eating fried eggs now. Full runny yolk. She's licking butter off toast and kissing TV screens when steaks appear. New foods are landing and nobody knows why but we're taking the wins.

...

He had the house. The job. The wife. Three kids. On paper, everything was fine.

But by the time his son Mason was three or four, he was falling apart. Barely sleeping. Drinking too much. Finding any excuse to stay out longer. Supermarket runs for things they didn't need. One more round at the pub. Anything to delay walking through the front door.He wasn't a bad dad. He just didn't know how to be one — not for a child like Mason. Non-verbal. ADHD. Severe sleep issues. Smashing up the house. And a system that kept saying no...

A mainstream school put their autistic son in a converted staff room and left him there for two years. They called it support.

Alan and his wife Alex fought for a specialist placement. Now Magnus is in a school with just 15 children total - five per key stage, one SEN teacher, and four teaching assistants. The transformation has been staggering. He's reading full books out loud for the first time in two years. He's responding to "now and next" language. He understands cause and effect in ways he never did before.

But getting here meant...

She spent her childhood in detention. Locked a teacher in a cupboard. Sat in corridors alone while everyone else learned. Missed the last six months of school because nobody wanted her there.She wasn't naughty. She was undiagnosed.Charlie was finally diagnosed autistic at 32 and ADHD three weeks before this conversation. By then, she'd already closed her business to become a full-time carer for her son AJ — non-verbal, tube-fed, PDA profile, sensory processing difficulties. A child the system repeatedly failed until she walked into school and said "help me or this kid's getting taken off me."Before his feeding tu...

Steven has no autistic children. No family connection. No commercial interest. He just watched a movie and couldn't look away.

In January, he was driving his van on the M1, listening to a documentary called The Spellers. It's about non-verbal autistic children who learned to communicate by pointing to letters on a board. 48 minutes in, he pulled over and cried.

The children in the film all said the same thing: "I'm in here."

Since then, he's read over 120 books written by non-speaking autistics and their parents. He's watched every video he could find...

Luke has four children. Three of them are autistic. His youngest, Oscar, is non-verbal with PICA — he'll eat anything, including sand and his own faeces.

For years, Luke and his wife managed. He gave up his job as an HGV driver because the phone calls from home couldn't wait two hours for him to get back from Hereford. His parents were their only support network — his dad had worked with disabled children his whole life.

Then his dad died unexpectedly. And his mum said the words no one wants to hear: "I can't do it on m...

At 10 years old, during lockdown, Charlotte watched a BBC series about autism. She saw herself in it. So she did what most adults wouldn't — she researched it, gathered the evidence, and presented it to her parents.They didn't believe her at first. She didn't fit the stereotype. She wasn't a boy obsessed with trains.She was put on the pathway. She waited 3 years. She went through half of secondary school undiagnosed, unsupported, and struggling.When the diagnosis finally came, it wasn't a surprise. She already knew. It was just clarity — recognition from the outside.But the years without support took...

On this episode, we're joined by Sean for our first ever live Christmas special recorded in front of our community.

We talk about what Christmas actually looks like with autistic kids — the pressure to make it magical, the year we realised they didn't care about presents, and why one parent picks up McDonald's on Christmas Eve to reheat the next day.

Sean shares the moment his girls stood up and delivered speaking parts in their school play after years of sitting in the corner with a tablet. We get into schools that actually meet kids wh...

This week we're talking about the stuff that keeps you up at night. Gaz shares the story of Thomas falling out of a window and the absolute terror of those few seconds. Andy talks about Lydia choking on a Remembrance Day pin and the chaos of trying to keep these kids safe when danger comes out of nowhere.

We get into the freezing weather, the battle to get hats and gloves on kids who hate anything on their heads, and why play barns are basically combat zones for autistic kids trying to navigate neurotypical chaos.

...

Gaz and Andy sit down for one of the most open chats they’ve ever had. It’s been a long few weeks, and with Christmas creeping up, the lads talk about the heavy stuff that comes when things finally go quiet — the late-night fears about the future, the weight of responsibility, and that nagging thought every SEND parent has but never says out loud: what happens when we’re gone?

They dive into what it really means to be “strong” as an autism dad — not in the gym sense (though that comes up), but mentally and emotionally. H...

It’s been a few weeks, but Gaz and Andy are back — catching up on life, work, and the chaos of raising autistic kids through the madness of Q4.

Andy shares a massive update on Lydia’s first term at her new specialist school — the highs, the progress, and the tough bit where safeguarding got real. From the shock of being asked about a bruise to understanding how vital those systems actually are, the lads unpack what every SEND parent eventually learns the hard way.

Then it’s on to a “SEND-friendly” soft play that went completel...

Gaz and Andy sit down with Jamie Jewitt, a dad of three navigating life in the public eye while raising his autistic daughter, Nora.

Jamie opens up about spotting the early signs, getting the diagnosis, and how it completely changed how he sees life, parenting, and success. He talks about the pressure of being in the public eye, dealing with trolls, the emotional rollercoaster of acceptance, and why he’s stopped worrying about milestones and started celebrating the little wins.

The lads dive deep into the raw stuff, guilt, fear, self-preservation, and those late-night “what if w...

This week we’ve got another dad on the mic — Daniel, a Shrewsbury local with two kids, one of whom is nonverbal and highly autistic. He takes us through their journey: spotting the signs early, navigating endless assessments, fighting councils for schooling, and the daily realities of sleep battles, food quirks, stims, and meltdowns.

We talk about the little wins that keep you going, why applying early for support is crucial, and how families juggle siblings, relationships, and money when the system drags its feet. Daniel shares brutally honest stories — from crayons, makeup, and deodor...

We’re back after a messy week. We headed to London for the Fight for Ordinary rally in Parliament Square, stood with hundreds of parents and carers, and heard a few politicians actually sound like they get it. Ed Davey included. Met loads of you too which was class.

Then we get into the headline everyone’s shouting about. Trump and RFK Jr linking Tylenol in pregnancy to autism. We unpack the claims, the weak evidence, the fallout for mums, and why the whole “cure autism” thing hits very differently across the spectrum.

We finish with you...