I first suspected I had ADHD as a teenager, but finding the right professional to take me seriously was much harder than I expected. Previous attempts only ended in frustration and tears.
Enjoying the holidays with a food allergy sounds like an oxymoron doesn’t it? After all, eating together is an integral component of the holiday season. I looked forward to making our traditional holiday foods until I was diagnosed with a dairy allergy in 2012. What was to enjoy about the holidays when the foods associated with it were off limits to me?
It was a short, ten-minute drive from the hotel to the residential facility. I maintained composure while I navigated the busy public roads, and then residential streets. I had a whole range of emotions racing through my body, mind and spirit as we pulled into the campus. This was not just a pleasure drive or a routine errand, this was a significant milestone in the life of my son and our family.
While Halloween is a fun time of year for many children, it can be a really difficult time for some, including many children with additional/special needs. For them it can be a confusing, anxiety-inducing, or even utterly terrifying time. But it doesn’t have to be like that. If we stop for a moment to think about the things they might find hard and how to put things in place to help them, children with special needs can safely join in the fun, too. So what are some of the things about Halloween that children with additional needs can find hard?
“While we’ve had many years of travel speaking together on marriage, discipleship, and other topics, we are seldom alone and ‘just us’”Joe & Cindi Ferrini write on the struggle of never truly being along as special needs parents, and the importance of making time “just for us.”
My daughter is a gifted communicator even though she rarely speaks in sentences. “Mom” is one word that has a multitude of meanings. There’s one version of my name that I hate hearing, the one that conveys to me that she is upset or scared. As she yells “mom,” I often cry out to God in those moments, too.
Leaders in the church who educate children about God are vital to families. For many of us, these church leaders are presently not in our children’s lives, due to crowd restrictions with COVID-19. But faith and understanding about God can occur naturally, if a parent takes a few small steps. Here are three suggestions.
I had an ambition to teach my daughter to pray even though her spoken vocabulary was limited to a few words. I broke down the act of prayer, employed some well-known speech therapy techniques, and began helping her develop her own prayer life. Like many other skills we have worked on in the past, this took time and repetition, but my daughter learned to pray.
