A Bradford mum has told how she found her tribe after a long battle to help her sons with ADHD.
Zohra Nazir fought through a long and lonely journey to get ADHD diagnoses for her two sons.
But the diagnosis was just the beginning of a fight faced by parents of children with special needs and learning disabilities.
Work, cooking, cleaning, and endless appointments and paperwork for extra support left her feeling lost.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” Zohra said.
“They did all these assessments. I started researching. When I started looking at the tick boxes 99 per cent of them ticked.
“I was trying to balance the job and the boys.
“My boys are older now and there’s so many families that are struggling. All I want to do is help people going through what I went through. The isolation, the stress. I feel I didn’t enjoy my boys growing up. People don’t really understand special needs and that was 20 years ago.”
She is one of the founders of a life-changing support group, Bradford Stronger Together, for families raising children with additional needs.
Set up in early 2022, people have made lifelong friends through gardening at the allotment, cinema trips, walks, and play dates.
The group is run alongside mums Shila, Melissa, Shazia, Tanya and Amrah.
Zohra said: “All the families we meet they’re all fighting some kind of battle. Why should we have to fight for services? For support?
“I’ve met mums who’ve been in tears.
“We’re a family and support network. This is the thing I never had. I’m very much about our mental health as mums, so we can be the best mums we can.
“It’s about the mums making friendships, children making friendships, and being able to think you can make it through life because you’ve got this support network.
“There’s three of us mums who’ve had to do everything ourselves. We’re always having to fight against the local authority, the schools, the services, to get that support for our children.
“I just want to help other people get through that feeling of isolation. We’re there.
“I have a passion to make a difference in people’s lives like they have a family to reach out to. We have built that over the last year and a half. It makes you quite emotional.
“I want people to feel if you’re having a bad day or feeling down they can just pick the phone up.”
To find out more, email bradfordstrongertogether@gmail.com
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