The Bottom Line
By Christopher R. Auer, MA, with Susan L. Blumberg, Ph.D., with a foreword by Lucy Jane Miller, Ph.D., OTR; 192 pages. Subtitle: A Family Guide to Understanding & Supporting Your Sensory-Sensitive Child
Change "Sensory Processing Disorder" to "Special Needs" in this book's title and you'll have a truer sense of what it's about. Not really a sensory-processing book at all, this book gives thoughtful and practical advice on handling the strains a special-needs child puts on marriages, siblings, extended family relationships, checkbooks, and parental nerves. So why the SPD misdirection?
Pros
- Offers invaluable advice on dealing with special needs as a family
- Keeps a fairly upbeat point of view
- Information on communicating in a marriage, a family, and a community is genuinely useful
- Text is friendly and easy to read
- Particularly useful to families facing a new diagnosis
Cons
- This is NOT a book about Sensory Processing Disorder, whatever the title says
- Gives an inaccurate impression of the severity of SPD for most kids
- Misses an opportunity to really talk about specific ways for the family to deal with SPD
- Interviews with notables inserted throughout aren't always to the point
- Follows the whims and experiences of the authors at expense of organization and focus
Description
- Chapter 1: An Overview of Sensory Processing Disorder
- Chapter 2: SPD Is a Family Affair
- Chapter 3: Strengthening Relationships
- Chapter 4: Dads Are Needed, Too!
- Chapter 5: Taking Care of Siblings
- Chapter 6: Learning to Talk About SPD
- Chapter 7: Bringing Hope
- Chapter 8: Making it Happen -- Building a Healthy Family
- Chapter 9: Parting Thoughts
- Resources
References
Guide Review - Book Review: Parenting a Child With Sensory Processing Disorder
Honestly, I'm puzzled by this book. It's like they took a solid text on parenting children with special needs, and at the last minute said, "Hey, Sensory Processing Disorder is hot. Let's tack on a chapter about that, insert a few other mentions throughout the book, do a find/change on the word processor to change 'special needs' to 'SPD,' and market it as a book on sensory-sensitive kids!" And that's too bad, for a couple of reasons. People coming to this book looking for the promised information on Sensory Processing Disorder aren't going to find it, and may come away with the impression that SPD is always a subset of something much more significant and scary. And parents of children with special needs that do not include SPD will never think to pick it up, although they could find a great deal of needed information here.
So let me be clear in this review, at least: If you are specifically looking for a book on Sensory Processing Disorder, what it means and how to deal with it, there are a great many better books than this one -- maybe most particularly Sensational Kids, by foreword writer Lucy Jane Miller. The information provided here on SPD is sketchy and slight, and the bulk of the text is much more apropos to families of children with SPD in combination with other developmental or cognitive disabilities than to sensory issues in and of themselves. If, on the other hand, your child does have developmental or cognitive disabilities and you are concerned about the impact it's having on your marriage, your other children, and your ability to work with professionals and community members, then this book will be an enormously valuable addition to your parenting library. I can only hope that a future edition of this helpful handbook trumpets its true strengths and calls all special-needs families to its pages.
