By Peggy Lou Morgan; 203 pages. Subtitle: Everything You Need to Know to Plan for and Protect Your Child's Future.
When you're up to your eyebrows in therapists and IEPs and doctor visits and research, it's hard to imagine a time when you'll have to deal with issues like where your adult child is going to live and work and find friendship. Often, we put those thoughts off -- but that time comes more quickly than you think, and without some advance preparation, it's rough on everyone. Morgan, author of Parenting Your Complex Child, provides a calm, experienced voice to lead you through.
- Handles a subject that's often lost among all the "cure your child!" books
- Gives a parent's-eye view to all the arrangements you'll need to make
- Uses the author's own son as illustration
- Provides lots of sample forms and instructions sheets
- Offers a calm voice on a subject that makes many parents panic
- There's a lot of work to do, and you haven't started it yet
- Most appropriate for families of adults with significant disabilities and communication problems
- Chapter 1: The Nest Is Never Empty - An Empty Bedroom Does Not Clear the Nest in Your Heart
- Chapter 2: That Nagging Question - What Happens to My Child When I'm Gone?
- Chapter 3: Loneliness Is the Only Real Disability - Relationships, the Most Important Part of Life
- Chapter 4: Your Child's Pursuit of Happiness - The Struggle for Rights
- Chapter 5: Discovering Your Child's Dream
Chapter 6: Researching the Options - Chapter 7: Drafting a Transitional Plan
Chapter 8: Setting Goals to Accomplish the Transitional Plan - Chapter 9: Estate Planning
Chapter 10: Working With Your Attorney - Chapter 11: Implementing the Plan a Step at a Time
- Chapter 12: The Nest May Seem Empty, But You Aren't Done Yet
- Chapter 13: Continuing the Civil Rights Movement for Disability Rights
Appendixes - Sample Forms
There's no stage of raising a child with special needs that's not, in some way, overwhelming. But those early stages, post-diagnosis, are the ones that get all of our passion and energy. Driven by love and grief and curiosity and a vision of maximized potential, we throw everything we have into giving our children all the attention and interventions possible.
By the time the transition to adulthood comes about, maybe we're just tuckered out. Or pragmatic and not easily moved to the kind of passionate action that once drove us. Arranging for workshop programs or residential placements may seem too final, like giving up on that happily ever after. So it's good to have a book like Parenting an Adult With Disabilities or Special Needs to jumpstart our advocacy and remind us that it's still all about maximizing potential.
Morgan concentrates not so much on the legal and financial issues involved in parenting adults with special needs -- though you will find information on those -- as on the emotional and practical steps parents need to make to assure their adult children's future. Keeping a detailed notebook on your child's likes, dislikes, routines, and history, for example. Helping your child transition to a new living environment while you're still around to visit. Making sure there will be familiar things and faces wherever your child ends up. Finding work that doesn't just occupy time, but makes it meaningful.
Those things are really not so different from the creative ways we advocated for our kids when they were little. It's time to work up enthusiasm for that process again, and Morgan's a great coach, sharing stories of her own son and providing examples of all the work she did for him for the rest of us to copy. The sooner you get to it, the better.
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