“No Child Should Have to Decode Their Own Survival”: Inside the Work of Dr. Jessica Engel

george cassidy payne

At first, it is easy to mistake Dr. Jessica Engel’s story for a familiar arc: hardship to achievement, uncertainty to expertise, private struggle to public authority. But the more closely she describes it, the less linear it becomes. What emerges instead is something more complicated and more revealing, a life built inside systems she was never initially trained to understand, but had no choice but to learn in order to protect the people she loved.

The result is not just a career in advocacy but a philosophy forged in real time.

“I grew up in a blue-collar family, living paycheck to paycheck,” she says. “If anyone told me I would make it to a PhD, I would have thought they were insane.”

Before psychology, before educational advocacy, before the language of IEPs and legal rights became part of her vocabulary, there was theater. Then there was dental assisting, nearly a decade of steady work that never quite fit. It was stability without direction.

“I wasn’t really happy,” she says. “I felt like I wanted to do more, but I didn’t know what.”

That question might have stayed dormant if life had not forced it open. At 26, she became pregnant with her daughter. Around the same time, she transitioned jobs and lost access to paid leave. It was her husband who interrupted the expected script of endurance and exhaustion. He offered something she had never considered: space and encouragement.

“I had never thought being a stay at home mom or furthering my education was an option,” she says. “But he saw that I wasn’t happy.”

Those early years were not defined by career movement, but by reflection. And eventually, by a return to a question that had never fully disappeared: what kind of work actually matters?

Psychology had always lingered in the background. She initially imagined therapy, clinical work, one-on-one practice. But a university internship redirected that vision in a way she did not anticipate.

At a guardian ad litem office, she was assigned her first case.

It changed how she understood vulnerability, systems, and silence.

“I valued what they were doing,” she says. “Giving voice to the voiceless. Advocating for kids who cannot advocate for themselves.”

She started as a volunteer. Then she stayed. Around the same time, her personal life intensified her awareness of how uneven access to support could be. She navigated a custody battle involving her stepson, who had significant ADHD and ODD. Later, her daughter was diagnosed with a decoding disorder that required her to learn the education system from the inside out.

That is when advocacy stopped being theoretical.

“I started to learn how to navigate the system,” she says. “Not academically. Practically.”

That distinction runs through everything she describes. Systems are not abstract structures in her account. They are lived experiences defined by paperwork, timing, language, and persistence. Knowing they exist is not enough. Knowing how to activate them is everything.

From guardian ad litem work to mentorship programs and crisis centers, her path expanded through accumulation rather than design. Each role exposed another layer of the same pattern: services exist, but access is inconsistent, and knowledge is unevenly distributed.

“There are so many services available to children,” she says. “But families do not know they exist.”

What began to form was not a specialization, but a synthesis.

“You have people who only focus on child welfare or only the legal side,” she explains. “Very few can look at all of it together.”

Her work became an attempt to do exactly that: connect education systems, legal frameworks, and psychological realities into something usable for families who often enter these spaces overwhelmed and underprepared.

But the deeper foundation of her approach is not institutional. It is personal.

“I lived it myself,” she says. “That is why I can connect without judgment.”

That lived experience includes a childhood shaped by financial precarity and limited adult availability. It also includes learning, early on, how to function without clear guidance. That history, she says, is not separate from her professional identity. It is part of it.

“I do not think children should have to be alone in that,” she says. “Someone should be there to advocate with them.”

Nowhere is that belief more visible than in her work with educational advocacy and individualized learning plans. For many families, she argues, systems like IEPs and 504 plans are not simply tools of support. They are gatekept frameworks that require prior knowledge to access effectively.

A central barrier, she explains, is structural.

“Schools are legally required to meet needs,” she says. “But resources are limited.”

That tension produces a quiet inequality. Families who understand the system early gain access. Those who do not often spend years without realizing what is possible.

“If it is not documented, it does not exist in the system,” she says.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, rising levels of anxiety and depression among students have intensified these pressures. But Engel is careful not to reduce the issue to staffing or funding alone. There is also stigma.

“One of the biggest misconceptions,” she says, “is that IEPs are only for physical disabilities.”

In reality, she notes, learning differences, behavioral conditions, and mental health challenges are often part of eligibility. But misunderstanding persists, shaping how families interpret support and how children internalize labels.

“The problem is when kids start believing they are lazy or not smart,” she says. “There is nothing wrong with them. They simply learn differently.”

Her own daughter’s experience makes this concrete. Initially performing below grade level, she received targeted accommodations: reduced distractions, adjusted testing environments, and individualized instruction. Over time, her performance shifted dramatically.

“She is now an A student working above level,” Engel says. “It was not about ability. It was about access.”

But perhaps the most consistent thread in her work is not academic performance or institutional critique. It is voice.

Children, she believes, are too often positioned as passive subjects within systems that define their futures. Her approach resists that framing directly.

“I think people are not used to children having a voice,” she says. “But they should.”

In her own home, that belief is not abstract. Her daughter has attended IEP meetings since age eight. At first she listened. Then she spoke. Eventually, she began shaping parts of her own educational plan.

By middle school, she was actively participating in decisions about services and accommodations.

“That is the goal,” Engel says. “To teach them how to advocate for themselves.”

The philosophy extends beyond education into how she understands adulthood itself: not as protection, but preparation. The aim is not to shield children from systems, but to equip them to move through them without losing themselves in the process.

There are limits, of course. Schools operate under constraint. Teachers work within systems they do not fully control. But Engel’s response is not antagonistic. It is procedural, persistent, grounded in communication.

Always document. Always clarify. Always keep the child at the center of the conversation.

Her perspective on neurodiversity follows the same logic. Difference, she argues, is often misread as deficit because systems are not designed to see variation as normal.

“Everyone’s brain is unique,” she says. “It does not make someone less.”

Autism, ADHD, processing differences — these are not anomalies to be corrected, but variations to be understood. The challenge, she suggests, is not only clinical but cultural.

As the interview draws toward its end, Engel resists framing her work as exceptional. Instead, she returns to something more elemental: the relationship between lived experience and responsibility.

“I think my childhood brought me into psychology,” she says. “But life is what built everything else.”

It is a quiet distinction, but an important one. Because in her telling, advocacy is not a role someone steps into after the fact. It is something shaped slowly, often reluctantly, through proximity to need.

And in that space between systems and lived reality, she has built a practice defined not by authority, but by recognition: that every child navigating a complex world deserves more than access.

They deserve a voice that does not require translation.