Special Needs Kids

We never know when a meltdown will happen. We know that certain environments don’t sit well with my five-year-old autistic son. Open spaces cause him extreme anxiety. New places make him want to flee. But we can’t stay cooped up in our home forever—especially for a trip to speech therapy. Yes, we have become quite familiar with the waiting room of our son’s speech therapist. I must say that she has a well-equipped one. There is every type of busy toy you could think of: coloring books, train sets, magnets, a framed metal board, and all kinds of sensory playthings. Even so, my son has bad days. To look at him, you would never assume he has extra special needs. There is

Having a special needs child requires a certain amount of organization to cope with the endless piles of paperwork. In just the first five years of our daughter’s life, more paperwork has accumulated than in my life altogether. I never imagined the avalanche of white that would follow doctor appointments, test results, therapy sessions, medical bills, healthcare claims, prescriptions, as well as school, grant, and scholarship applications. I soon found myself overwhelmed and drowning in piles of important details. Too often I was caught unprepared without detailed information of my daughter’s medical history or current care readily available for inquiring professionals. This created significant hiccups at times. I already had to wait months to see certain specialists, and my face-to-face time with

Since 1998, I have had the opportunity to work with children on the autism spectrum. It has been a huge blessing to be able to serve children in many different settings including home intervention, private practice, and in schools. As a therapist, we are in need of a vast amount of skills in our toolbox to serve a variety of children with a variety of abilities. Each child and family comes to us with unique needs, and it is an honor to be a part of that family’s journey. In my current private practice, I pull on past therapy sessions to help me with treating children today. While I continue to challenge myself to stay on top of the latest in therapy

Some people walk into parenthood with a very specific set of ideas on what it will look like. They have lots of plans. You know the ones, right? “Oh, my child will never act that way in public.” And, “Oh I will never feed my child that.” Those people are delightful, no? Me, I was definitely not one of those people. In fact, if there were a spectrum of pre-parental awareness (think 10—knows everything and 0—knows nothing), I would have been a -20. I was 100% clueless as to what parenting would entail, how I would handle it, and what exactly it would look like. As it turns out, this was both a blessing and a curse for my parenting career. When I was pregnant

Are you looking for a way to care for a special needs family in your life? Congratulations. Because you already have the desire to assist that family, you have all the qualifications needed to relieve the unseen burdens that go along with caregiving. It really doesn’t require a lot of time or money. Parents to children with special needs do not need much from you to help them thrive. But they do need help. Even if they are not asking for it, these families carry an unseen mental load that can often be alleviated by a caring friend. Here are 5 ways that you can step in and care for special needs families: 1. Call Oftentimes special needs parents are so caught