What were parents of children with special needs most interested in over the past year? Behavior charts, school papers, and sensory integration toys. The ten articles below represent the most visited articles on the About Parenting Special Needs site for 2006. Use this list to remind you of topics you meant to check out, see what other parents have found useful, and find information your family needs for the year ahead.
Behavior charts -- on which doing chores, behaving, and handling self-care tasks are rewarded with points -- can be effective ways of getting children to do what parents want. But often parents of children with special needs find that their kids don't respond to point charts; the concept is too abstract or the gratification too delayed. Adjusting and simplifying the chart idea to your child's particular needs and abilities can help. Here's how to do it.
A good Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP) can make a big difference in how a student with special needs acts and reacts in a school setting. However, getting the appropriate school personnel to do the necessary behavior analysis and put a plan together can be a frustratingly lengthy process. You may want to try proposing a behavior plan of your own -- particularly if you have a good relationship with your child study team, and your child's teachers are as frustrated by the delays as you are.
A periodic homework assignment for schoolchildren is to put covers on textbooks. Many schools make it easy by allowing stretchy BookSox, but others insist on these old-fashioned brown paper bag numbers. While most kids will learn to do this on their own, children with special needs may always depend on Mom or Dad to handle this particular assignment. Can't quite remember how? Here's your cheat sheet.
If you have a child with sensory integration problems, there's a whole world of catalogs out there that offer more appropriate playthings than you'll find at your local toy store. Whether you're looking for something big like a ball pit or weighted blanket, or small like a vibrating stuffed animal or a pleasing pencil grip, here's where to shop.
It looks like misbehavior. It sounds like misbehavior. And it certainly feels like misbehavior. But for many children with special needs, lying, acting up, disrespectfulness and other signs of apparent disobedience may have more to do with a lack of communication skills, motor planning ability, sensory integration and cause-and-effect thinking than with deliberate malicious intent. Does this mean you have to allow out-of-control behavior as just another fact of a special-needs parent's life? No. It just means you're going to have to look at things from a different angle.
Organizing and writing a research paper can be a daunting task for children with learning disabilities. The best way to pin that information down and put it in a form that others can follow is to use an outline. Here's how to use one to write a research paper.
Shampoos with tea tree oil aren't the best-smelling things you're ever going to put on your child's head -- but as much as you don't like it, lice dislike it even more, and will find a treated head altogether less hospitable. That makes it a good natural solution, particularly in conjunction with another technique such as smothering the bugs. You'll also want to have everybody else in the family shampoo with it to stay lice-free.
That tried-and-true I-II-III A-B-C outline works whether your child has to churn out a paragraph, a page or a paper. Here's how to use it for a strong single paragraph.
Who decides when a life no longer has value? Doctors? Patients? Spouses? Parents? Insurance companies? What if there are differences of opinion? Are doctors ever motivated by cost factors? Are parents ever motivated by unreasonable hope? Might doctors ever slant the truth to make families comfortable with end-of-life decisions? These are questions that affect not only end-of-life issues, but also quality-of-life issues for persons with disabilities. They are therefore of grave interest to parents of children with special needs, who must make so many choices for their children with such conflicting advice.
Colored wristbands to promote a cause are everywhere these days. Here are an armful for child-related charities, along with information on how to make your own.
