NeuroKind, 24-26 Hely Street, Wyong (2026)

16/10/2026

🌱🥕 ARE MEALTIMES BECOMING STRESSFUL FOR YOUR FAMILY?

Does your child have a limited range of foods they feel comfortable eating? Do unfamiliar foods bring anxiety, sensory overwhelm or avoidance?

Perhaps eating at restaurants, attending birthday parties or sharing family meals can be tricky. Or maybe you're concerned about the variety of foods your child eats and would love to see them feel more comfortable exploring something different.

💚 Food exploration doesn't have to start with eating.

Introducing GUT GARDEN, our Term 4 Neuro•Cook program!
Led by Jasper Hooper, Provisional Psychologist and Nutritionist, this 8-week program brings together cooking, psychology, sensory exploration and the fascinating connection between our gut and brain.

🌿 What makes Neuro•Cook different?

There's no pressure to taste, try or eat.

Children are supported to engage with food in ways that feel comfortable for them. Looking, smelling, touching, preparing, arranging ingredients or simply being nearby are all meaningful ways to participate.

Throughout Gut Garden, children have opportunities to:

🥕 Build familiarity and confidence around different foods.
🧠 Explore their sensory experiences and learn about the gut-brain connection.
👩‍🍳 Develop practical cooking skills, independence and choice.
🌈 Explore food variety while keeping familiar foods available.
🤝 Connect with other children through shared cooking experiences.
And families are part of the experience too! 💚

Our Family Gut Lab sessions invite children to share their learning with their families, with our beautiful Gut Garden Family Recipe Book providing ideas to continue exploring at home.

We know that every child's relationship with food is different. Our focus isn't on making children eat something new — it's on creating positive, supported opportunities for curiosity, participation and connection.

📅 Starts Thursday 22 October
📍 NeuroKind, Wyong
🌱 8-week program
⏰ Term 4 enrolments closing soon!

Your child doesn't need to enjoy trying new foods to belong in Neuro•Cook.

If you're wondering whether Gut Garden might be suitable for your child, we'd love to have a conversation.

📩 Send us a message or email [email protected] to enquire about enrolment.

💚 Small steps. Big discoveries.

14/10/2026

🩵 It’s OCD Awareness Week 🩵

“I didn’t know that was OCD.”

It’s something people living with OCD hear — and sometimes think themselves — surprisingly often. Because despite the way OCD is commonly portrayed, it isn’t simply about being tidy, organised, particular or liking things done a certain way.

That’s why the theme for this year’s OCD Awareness Week is:

💬 “That’s OCD.” 💬

A reminder that OCD can show up in ways that are far more varied, complex and often invisible than many people realise.

🧠 So… what can OCD actually look like? 🧠

It might look like:
😟 having an intrusive thought about harming someone you love — and becoming terrified about what having that thought “means”
💭 repeatedly questioning whether you’re secretly a bad person
❤️ analysing your relationship over and over, trying to feel completely certain about how you feel
🔄 replaying a conversation again and again to make sure you didn’t say something wrong
🙏 silently repeating words, phrases or prayers until they feel “right”
❓ asking for reassurance — getting a moment of relief — and then needing to ask again
🩺 repeatedly checking your body for signs of illness
🚪 avoiding people, places, objects or situations because they trigger intrusive thoughts
🧠 mentally reviewing memories to work out whether something really happened
🔢 counting, checking, arranging, washing or repeating things until they feel safe, complete or “just right”

From the outside, some of these experiences may not look like OCD at all.

But that can be OCD.

🌱 OCD is complex — and it doesn’t look the same for everyone 🌱

OCD can attach itself to almost anything a person cares about.

Health. Relationships. Morality. Identity. Religion. Responsibility. Contamination. Harm. Sexuality. Mistakes. Memory. Symmetry. Certainty.

And the compulsions used to manage that distress can be just as varied. Some are visible. Others happen entirely inside someone’s head.

Two people can both have OCD and have experiences that look almost nothing alike. And even for the same person, the theme can change over time while the underlying OCD cycle remains.

💚 OCD and neurodivergence can also overlap 💚

OCD commonly co-occurs with neurodevelopmental conditions including autism, ADHD and tic disorders — and that overlap is seen across the lifespan, not just in children and adolescents.

Research suggests that:
➡️ In young people with OCD, around 8–10% may also meet criteria for autism.
➡️ In some adult clinical OCD samples, around 1 in 4 people have also been identified as autistic.
🧠 ADHD is also commonly reported alongside OCD, with reviews suggesting co-occurring ADHD in around 19% of paediatric OCD samples and around 9% of adult OCD samples.
🔄 Looking from the other direction, both autistic and ADHD populations also show elevated rates of OCD compared with the general population.

The exact numbers vary depending on the study, age group and clinical setting — but the broader picture is clear:
OCD, autism and ADHD can and do overlap in both young people and adults.

🩵 Why matters 🩵

When we reduce OCD to neat desks and colour-coded cupboards, we miss the people whose OCD doesn’t look anything like that.
People who may be frightened by their own intrusive thoughts.
People carrying out exhausting rituals nobody else can see.
People who think:
“Surely this can’t be OCD.”
“What if this thought means something about me?”
“What if I tell someone and they misunderstand?”

Awareness helps make those conversations safer.

It helps people recognise OCD earlier, reduces shame, and can help people find appropriate, evidence-based support sooner.

✨ This OCD Awareness Week, let’s start the conversation ✨

Share accurate information.
Challenge the stereotypes.
Listen to lived experience.

And remember that when OCD doesn’t look like the version we’ve seen on tv…

That’s OCD, too. 🩵

For more information and resources:
International OCD Foundation — https://iocdf.org/
OCD BOUNCE — https://ocd.org.au/about/bounce

13/10/2026

We’re incredibly proud to share that the Yindyamarra Healing Program, developed and delivered by Matthew Craig and Jason May, has been recognised as Regional Highly Commended in the 2026 Central Coast NSW Business Awards.

Matthew Craig, Managing Director of NeuroKind, accepted the recognition on behalf of the program.

Developed and delivered on Darkinjung Country, Yindyamarra is a six-week culturally grounded healing program for Aboriginal men at The Glen for Men. Built around the Social and Emotional Wellbeing framework, the program brings together psychological knowledge with Culture, Country, yarning, art, breathwork, grounding, reflection and relational practice.

One of the things that sits at the heart of Yindyamarra is that Culture and Country are not treated as additions to therapy. They are central to the way the program was designed and delivered.

As Matthew reflects, culturally safe psychological support is deeply relational. It means thinking carefully about power, trust, vulnerability and the different ways people engage in healing; rather than assuming meaningful psychological work has to happen in a traditional therapy room or through talk alone.

Yindyamarra has also been strengthened through genuine collaboration, with cultural, clinical, community and participant knowledge contributing to its development and ongoing evolution.

The Yindyamarra Healing Program was developed and delivered in collaboration with:

The Glen Group
Hunter New England and Central Coast Primary Health Network
Charlie Sales
Debbie Haynes
Dr Jaime Wroe
Bawamarra Cultural Services
Bulgawan Indigenous Corporation

We also want to acknowledge the men who participated in the program and contributed their experiences, ideas and feedback to what Yindyamarra became.

This recognition is a beautiful acknowledgement of the vision Matthew and Jason brought to Yindyamarra, Matthew’s ongoing leadership and commitment to the program, and the many people who helped shape and strengthen it along the way.

There is much more to share about Yindyamarra, and we look forward to celebrating the work more fully alongside The Glen’s upcoming formal program release.

Congratulations, Matthew and Jason; and congratulations to everyone who has been part of the Yindyamarra journey. 🖤❤️💛

12/10/2026

National Carers Week 🌿

You might not call yourself a carer.

You might just be Mum. Dad. Partner. Sibling. Friend.

The person who remembers the appointments. Fills in the forms.
Advocates. Plans ahead. Co-regulates. Researches. Drives. Organises. Keeps things running. Becomes the safe person.

And sometimes there are parts of caring that can feel much harder to say out loud.

I’m tired.

I miss parts of the life I thought I’d have.

Sometimes I feel resentful about how much this asks of me.

I feel guilty for even thinking that.

I love them deeply.

Those things can exist together.

Loving someone does not make care weightless. Caring can be meaningful, joyful and deeply connected — and it can also be exhausting, isolating and leave very little space for you.

This National Carers Week, we want to recognise the parts of caring that often happen quietly and the feelings that people may not always feel permitted to talk about.

You do not have to stop loving someone to need support for what caring asks of you.

And support should be more than being told to “look after yourself”. Carers deserve somewhere to talk, somewhere to be understood, and practical help when the load is too much.

Free support is available through Carer Gateway, including counselling, peer support, coaching, respite and practical assistance.

💚 To every carer in our community: your experience matters too.

10/10/2026

🚦 Does this actually need to be a battle?

When you’re parenting a young person who finds demands hard, it can start to feel as though everything matters.

Shoes.
Teeth.
School.
Screens.
The lunchbox.
The shower.
What time it happens.
How it happens.
Whether it happens right now.

And when every demand becomes equally important, everyone can end up spending an enormous amount of capacity on things that… perhaps weren’t equally important after all.

One practical way to slow things down is to ask:

Is this a MUST, something that MATTERS, or actually a PREFERENCE?

🔴 MUST

Safety, essential health needs, other people’s rights and genuinely essential obligations.
These are the things where the destination may not be negotiable — but we can still think carefully about how we support the young person to get there.

🟡 MATTERS

Things that genuinely support wellbeing, development and participation.
Education matters.
Teeth matter.
Hygiene matters.
Sleep matters.
Relationships matter.
But the goal and the route are not necessarily the same thing.
Can we change the timing?
The environment?
The level of support?
The sequence?
The method?

🟢 PREFERENCE

And then there are the things that can feel incredibly important in the moment… until we stop and ask:
Whose preference is this actually?
Does it matter that the clothes match?
That the shower happens before dinner rather than after?
That the lunchbox is unpacked immediately?
That something is done the way we’ve always done it?
Preferences aren’t meaningless. But they can be where some of our biggest and least useful battles happen.
This isn’t about removing every demand or letting children decide everything.
It’s about becoming more deliberate about where we use the family’s limited capacity.

Because:

IMPORTANT DOESN’T ALWAYS MEAN URGENT.

And sometimes we can:

DROP THE BATTLE WITHOUT DROPPING THE GOAL. 🌱

🚦 Must • Matters • Preference is one of the practical ideas we’ll explore in our upcoming Parent & Carer Masterclass:

🧠 PDA: When “NO” Isn’t the Problem

Understanding demand • Protecting autonomy • Building capacity

With Dr Jaime Wroe & Dr Linda Campbell

📅 Monday 19 October 2026
🕕 6:00–8:00 pm
💻 Live online
🎟️ $99 per household
🧰 Includes the Neurokind PDA Field Kit
🎥 Live event only — no recording available
📩 To register: [email protected]

Discover • Connect • Belong

09/10/2026

World Mental Health Day 2026 🌿

One question I come back to a lot in my work is:

What if we changed the outcome measure?

We can become so used to measuring ourselves by productivity, independence, how much we got done, whether we kept up, whether we needed help — that we stop noticing whether those measures are actually useful for us.

And when the measure is always “Did I do enough?”, it can be very easy to conclude that we are failing.

But sometimes a more meaningful measure might be:

Did I protect my capacity?
Did I stay connected to what matters?
Did I notice my limits?
Did I make a choice that supported my wellbeing?
Did I act in a way that was sustainable for me today?

That doesn’t mean pretending things are fine. It doesn’t mean lowering meaningful goals or ignoring distress.

It simply means remembering that productivity is not the only way to measure progress.

Sometimes progress looks like changing what counts as progress.

— Dr Jaime Wroe, Psychologist
NeuroKind

09/10/2026

📚 It’s almost back-to-school time 📚

Which means lunchboxes are reappearing 🥪, uniforms are being found (hopefully) 👕, alarms are being reset ⏰… and lots of families are starting to shift out of holiday mode.

For neurodivergent families, that transition can be a big one.
For some children, returning to school brings back welcome routine, familiar people and predictability. 🌱

For others, it can mean a sudden jump in:

🔊 sensory input
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 social demands
🧠 executive functioning
🔄 transitions
❓ uncertainty
📋 expectations
🎭 masking
⏰ and the general business of having to be somewhere, dressed, fed and vaguely organised by 8-something in the morning.

That can take a lot of capacity. 🔋

A child who seemed fairly settled over the holidays might suddenly be more tired, more emotional, more rigid, more avoidant, more explosive, more withdrawn… or just very, very done by 4 pm. 😮‍💨

💛 Neurodivergent parents are transitioning too 💛

Back to school can mean switching from holiday rhythms back into alarms, lunches, uniforms, transport, emails, appointments, calendars, therapy schedules, school communication and approximately 47 tiny things that all need remembering at once. 🗓️📧🚗

For neurodivergent parents, that can bring its own executive functioning load, sensory overwhelm, anxiety and decision fatigue.

And if your child is also finding the transition hard, you might be trying to support their nervous system while your own is quietly waving a tiny white flag in the background. 🏳️

🌱 So, what can help?🌱

As back-to-school gets closer, it can help to think less about creating the perfect return to routine and more about what might make the transition a little easier.

🌿 Make things more predictable where you can 🌿

Talk through what the first few days might look like. Use visual schedules, calendars, photos or reminders if they help.

🧺 Reduce unnecessary demands 🧺
The first week back may not be the week to revolutionise every morning routine, tackle every overdue job and suddenly become a family who meal-preps on Sundays.

🛋️ Protect recovery time 🛋️

After-school decompression can matter. Quiet time, familiar activities, fewer questions, snacks, screens, movement, solitude — whatever actually helps that particular person reset.

🏫 Keep communication open with school 🏫
Sharing what helps, what overload looks like, what your child finds hard and who they feel safe with can make the transition easier to navigate.

⏳ Remember that the hard bit might not happen on Day 1 ⏳

Some kids hold it together beautifully at first… and then the cumulative load catches up a little later.

💛 Include yourself in the support plan too 💛

Parents need predictability, recovery and reduced load too.

✨ The goal doesn’t have to be a perfect return to school ✨

It can simply be:

How do we make this transition a little more manageable for the nervous systems involved?

🌿 More predictability.
🤝 More flexibility.
🔋 More recovery.
💛 More connection.

And perhaps slightly fewer missing shoes. 👟

📚 Back to school is a transition for the whole family 📚

05/10/2026

🌸 FINAL CALL FOR ENROLMENTS! 🌸

🏰The Spring Court Grand Finale is almost here! ✨

The kingdom’s final quest awaits… and this is your last chance to join our Cadets for a magical day of adventure, connection and springtime wonder. 🐑🐰🐥

At the Spring Court Grand Finale, Cadets will step into an enchanting experience filled with:
🌿 Woodland mysteries to solve
🐾 A live baby animal farm
🎮 Interactive games and sensory-friendly fun
🤝 Team-based adventures that build connection, confidence and belonging

After journeying through the seasons, it’s time for one final adventure in the kingdom — and we’d love your Cadet to be part of it. ✨

Program details:
🧙‍♀️Cadets: 6–12 years
📅Date: Thursday 8 October 2026
⏰Time: 10:00 am – 2:30 pm
📍Location: 24–26 Hely Street, Wyong
📧 Last chance to enrol: [email protected]
📞Phone: 02 4331 0243

Don’t miss the final quest — enrol now before places close! 🌸🏰✨

05/10/2026

🔎 Before we decide what to DO… do we actually know what problem we’re trying to solve?

A young person says:

“NO.”

And it can be incredibly tempting to jump straight to the strategy.

Should I lower the demand?

Offer choices?

Use declarative language?

Give them more time?

Hold the boundary?

Help them?

Back off?

But there’s a question that probably needs to come first:

What’s actually making this hard?

Because the same “NO” can come from very different places.

🧭 I need more ownership here.
❓ I don’t know what’s going to happen.
🎧 Something about this feels awful.
🧩 I can’t start, switch or sequence this.
🎯 I’m scared I’ll get it wrong.
🤝 Something about this interaction is making it harder.
🔋 I might technically be able to do this — but I don’t have it in me right now.

And sometimes:

I just don’t want to.

That matters too.

The aim isn’t to decide that every “NO” is anxiety, autonomy, sensory overload — or even PDA.

It’s to get curious enough to understand what problem we’re actually trying to solve.

Because a strategy designed for sensory overwhelm probably won’t solve uncertainty.

More predictability won’t necessarily solve executive load.
Reducing a demand won’t necessarily address fear of getting something wrong.

Even a great strategy won’t help much if we’re solving the wrong problem.

SAME “NO”. DIFFERENT PROBLEM. DIFFERENT RESPONSE.

🔎 The Demand Detective is one of the practical formulation tools we’re developing for our new NeuroKind PDA Field Kit.

It will be included for families attending:

🧠 PDA: When “NO” Isn’t the Problem

Understanding demand • Protecting autonomy • Building capacity
A live Parent & Carer Masterclass with Dr Jaime Wroe & Dr Linda Campbell, where we’ll go beyond another list of PDA strategies and explore how to work out what may actually be making something hard — and what to do with that information in real family life.

📅 Monday 19 October 2026
🕕 6:00–8:00 pm
💻 Live online
🎟️ $99 per household
🧰 Includes the NeuroKind PDA Field Kit
🎥 Live event only — no recording available
📩 To register: [email protected]

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sharing more sneak peeks from the Field Kit, along with some of the ideas we’ll be exploring in the masterclass. 👀

CURIOUS BEFORE CLEVER. 🌱

Discover • Connect • Belong

03/10/2026

🌿 A reminder that NeuroKind will be closed tomorrow, Monday 5 October, for the Labour Day public holiday.

We hope the long weekend gives you a chance to slow down, rest, recharge, and spend some time doing the things that help you feel your best. 💚

Our clinic will reopen and return to our usual hours on Tuesday 6 October.

We hope you have a safe and restful long weekend, and we look forward to seeing you again soon!

If you need support while we’re closed, the following services are available:

• Lifeline: 13 11 14
• 13YARN: 13 92 76
• Mental Health Line: 1800 011 511
• Domestic Violence Line: 1800 656 463
• Parent Line: 1300 1300 52
• Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800

If you or someone else is in immediate danger, please call 000 or attend your nearest emergency department.

NeuroKind

16/10/2026

14/10/2026

13/10/2026

12/10/2026

10/10/2026

09/10/2026

09/10/2026

05/10/2026

05/10/2026

03/10/2026

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Sponsored

Share

Category

Listing takedown request