From surviving to planning: moving beyond crisis mode in SEND life
Scott Mackey
· 2 min read
Plenty of SEND families live permanently in survival mode, handling only what is immediately in front of them. The shift to also planning is hard, and it does not require having everything figured out.
We lived in survival mode for years. I had the professional knowledge and I still spent a long time reacting, because the next appointment always outranked the next decade.
Why it sticks
The demands are relentless and the long term questions are painful, and when you are running on four hours of sleep, a phone call you did not want and a meeting on Thursday that somebody else arranged, a decision about a trust with no deadline attached to it will always lose. Exhaustion picks the urgent. Every time.
Things do not calm down
Families tell themselves they will get to the bigger picture when things settle. Things do not settle. They change shape.
What never gets its turn
The trust. The chosen people. The protection. The plan for when you are no longer here. None of it is ever today’s most urgent item, which is precisely why it never happens.
Handling crises brilliantly is not a plan
A family can manage every immediate emergency well and still leave its child’s future to chance. The urgent gets done. The important gets deferred.
You do not need it all figured out
This is the bit I would most like you to take away. Planning is not one enormous act of solving everything. It is a first conversation, a first meeting, a first decision about a will.
Calm decisions beat crisis decisions
Arrangements made deliberately, with time and advice, are better than arrangements forced at the worst possible moment. Or not made at all, which is the more common outcome. Crisis is a terrible place to choose from.
Make some room
You will not stop dealing with the immediate, because SEND life does not permit that. Carving out a small amount of space for the longer term alongside it, however, changes the direction of travel.
Survival mode is not a failing. It is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation, and nobody should feel judged for it.
But your child’s future deserves more than whatever is left over.
Start this week.
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Written by
Scott Mackey
Founder of Legacy Capital Management, a St. James’s Place Partner Practice in Stoke Poges. Advises families, business owners and professionals across Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire.
More about Scott →More articles
This article is general information drawn from professional and personal experience, not personal advice. Long term SEND planning is highly individual, so take specialist financial and legal advice to build something that fits your family.
Legacy Capital Management is an Appointed Representative of and represents only St. James’s Place Wealth Management plc (which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority) for the purpose of advising solely on the Group’s wealth management products and services, more details of which are set out on the Group’s website at www.sjp.co.uk/products.
The ‘St. James’s Place Partnership’ and the titles ‘Partner’ and ‘Partner Practice’ are marketing terms used to describe St. James’s Place representatives.
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