One evening in fall 2019, as Kristin McConnell was tucking her five-year-old son Kellan into bed, he hugged her and whispered, “I love my life, Mom. I love who I am.”
These are words every parent wants to hear—assurance that for all our missteps, for all the times we fed them chicken nuggets instead of organic carrots, looked at our phone instead of our kid, or didn’t handle a tantrum as gracefully as we might have, the person we love most in the world is going to be okay. But for Kristin McConnell, the words carried extra weight—because there was a time, not long before, when Kellan was decidedly not okay.
“When my son was three, he was a typically developing, happy kid,” McConnell said. “We’re not entirely sure of what happened over the next year.”
Things started going downhill when the family moved from Seattle to the nearby town of North Bend. Within weeks, Kellan went from a curious, perceptive toddler
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