Finding the time to play with your child can be tricky, when you're also under pressure to do therapy and strengthen learning skills and bolster development. Try one of these eight play opportunities that do double duty, helping you both have fun and do good.
Therapy catalogs offer a wide array of cool tools and toys, many bearing pricetags more appropriate for a school district budget than a family's pocketbook. Improvise with some homemade items for previews of or substitutions for pricy playthings.
Childhood favorites like "I Spy," "20 Questions," and tongue twisters aren't just fun for kids -- they strengthen speech skills, especially when you tweak them a little for maximum therapeutic value. Get the developmental good times rolling.
Being clueless whenever statements stray from the straight-and-narrow can leave your child open to misunderstandings, hurt feelings, teasing, and confusion. Use pictures, humor, and patience to spell those strange statements out for your child.
Happy Memorial Day! If you'll be getting together with family today or going out into the community for picnics or parades, make a plan for getting through the disruptive day with your child, with toys and backup and an escape route.
It's tempting to drop your child at therapy and let the therapist deal with everything, but your child will benefit more from that occupational, physical, or speech work if you're pursuing those goals, too. Keep the communication open, and be part of the process.
If your child struggles with things like organization, short-term memory, cause-and-effect thinking, and impulse control, consider whether there may be a brain problem rather than an attitude problem. Executive dysfunction will respond better to accommodations than to nagging.
Unless you've found the fountain of youth, there will come a time when your child will come into your money, and without some careful planning, those funds have the potential for making life worse instead of better. A special-needs trust ensures that an inheritance won't cause your child to lose out on important government benefits.
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Functional Behavioral Assessment is a tool schools can use to determine what might be causing the student's outburst and how the teacher's response affects that. If your child's behavior is becoming a problem in the classroom, before punishments pile up, ask for an FBA and keep at it until it's done. It's the first step toward a Behavior Intervention Plan that will change the behavior without harmful disciplinary measures.
The kind of books we need to read as parents of children with special needs aren't the ones that come up in your run-of-the-mill book-club discussions. That's why I'm setting up a book discussion topic each month to talk about the special-needs titles I'm reading, and the ones you are, too. Let's talk!
A new month begins tomorrow -- get off to a good start by printing out your May page of the Love Notes for Special Parents calendar.
