My blog exists to help special needs parents develop their own special set of life skills that will give them confidence and peace as they walk through their new reality. When it comes to dealing with special needs, you don’t always know what you don’t know. You need vocabulary and know how. I share resources and knowledge related to:
- Helping adjust to a slower pace of development for your child and how it impacts the family
- Solving behavior problems through a combination of nurture, nutrition and neurological organization
- Improving your personal health through Mom Care: emotions (heart), realistic thinking (mind), health-filled habits (body), spiritual walk (soul)
- Household recovery and maintenance so you can enjoy your home again
- A homeschool method developed specifically for special needs (coming soon!) so you can develop your child’s intellect—whether problems are mild, moderate or severe
1. Helping adjust to a slower pace of development for your child and how it impacts your family
At each stage of development, your child’s delays will impact his life and yours. We all have expectations for our children. Everything published by the medical profession relies on children doing certain things at certain times. Although milestones by age provide good information, they become more and more meaningless as your child never quite meets them on time. They can even become soul crushing.
This blog will help you adjust your expectations so you can help your child progress at his or her unique pace and still enjoy life. I don’t really like the term “new normal” because there is not a lot that is “normal” when raising a special needs child—especially when the disability is moderate or severe. But the reality is that your life will settle into your own version of normal and having the right expectations will go a long way toward making that experience a positive one.
2. Solving behavior problems through a combination of nurture, nutrition and neurological organization
Having been on this journey for a couple of decades and having hundreds of hours of research under my belt (yes, hundreds), I’ve had plenty of time to observe what works and what doesn’t. If you think of all behavior as communication, you can see that your child desperately wants to tell you something. Their bodies are confused inside, possibly due to pain, miscommunication between the brain and the body, undeveloped reflexes or any number of other reasons.
My blog will introduce to ways you can address what’s going on inside your child’s body. The easiest way to think of it is in terms of nurture (how you relate to your child), nutrition (diet, digestive system) and neurological organization (movement, brain function). Meeting these needs will go a long way toward improving your child’s behavior.
3. Improving your personal health through Mom Care: emotions (heart), realistic thinking (mind), healthy habits (body), spiritual walk (soul)
Let’s face it. With a special needs child or children, you become the giver extraordinaire. You eventually get to the point where you give and give, and then suddenly find that there is nothing left—no energy, no emotions and possibly little to no hope.
I’m here to tell you there is hope. There is a way to regain balance and health. When we are hit with such a dramatic change in our lives, we can get stuck in that mode of trying to solve all the resulting problems. That works—for a while, but raising a special needs child is a long-term problem that requires a long-term, measured solution. Burning the candle at both ends indefinitely is not a solution, nor is it realistic. My blog teaches you how to rebuild a life that you actually enjoy, even if it still involves hard work every day.
4. Household recovery and maintenance so you can enjoy your home again
In all the drama of your life, have you lost control of your household? Oftentimes, the way our home looks is really a reflection of how we are doing inside. If that is the case, cleaning up your home is not just a physical exercise in decluttering and organizing. You may need to deal with your emotions as you work through the physical stuff.
My blog helps you understand how your emotions are reflected in your environment and develop routines and systems that fit your new reality. Drowning in paperwork? There’s a plan for that. Not able to keep up with regular chores? There’s a system for that. Household totally out of control? Try Kamikaze Cleaning™, a household recovery plan to get your home functioning again.
5. A homeschool method developed specifically for special needs (coming soon!) so you can develop your child’s intellect—whether problems are mild, moderate or severe
I hear the cry all around the internet: What curriculum should I use for my child? The needs are so vast: dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ADD/ADHD, nonverbal, intellectual disability, developmental delay, sensory processing disorder, OCD, motor planning problems, vision problems, and the list goes on and on. You can find curriculum to address some of these learning issues, but what about when your child has many problems or undefined problems?
My blog helps homeschoolers understand how to teach the special needs student through identifying learning and teaching methods that circumvent disabilities so your child can continue with academic work even while participating in therapy to improve overall function.
I am working on a homeschool method designed specifically for special needs students that combines several popular homeschool methods such as classical education and child-initiated learning integrated with Bloom’s taxonomy. I have developed this method because:
- I believe any child can learn within the right context and from the right perspective.
- I believe that our kids—even those with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities—deserve a true education taught at their level rather than keeping them in perpetual kindergarten. Just because they do not have the ability to indicate what they truly know and understand in a given lesson is no reason to keep them there until they can.
- I believe our kids can learn far more than they can express so this method of teaching is designed to feed their intellects and enrich their lives.
Conclusion
Having a special needs child is a big disruptor, even a shock. The mental condition of parents who raise special needs children is sometimes likened to post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This lifestyle requires learning a new skill set covering parenting, home management, emotional health and even survival. This blog is all about helping you gain perspective, skills and successful systems so you can help your child and move forward into a more peaceful and rewarding life.
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