Helping to Reach for Highest Potential
By Tom and Julie Meekins
Champions4Parents.com
There are so many facets to parenting a child with special needs. In the early days, we, like many parents were focused on getting a diagnosis and then defining what comes with that diagnosis. Then, as the days and months and years unraveled, we learned who Amy really was as an individual. Of course, this is ongoing because she, like all of us, is always growing and developing. For us, the diagnosis became less important and her needs, strengths, and abilities become the focus. Does that sound familiar?
The questions most often asked shifted from what does this diagnosis look like to questions like these:
What does she need right now to live her best life?
What will she need next month, next year, or several years from now?
What happens when we are gone?
We all want great things for our children. How can we help our sons and daughters to be the best they can be and to live their best life? Our children’s potential is very unique to each of them. We always felt it was our job to do all that we could to help all four of our children to reach for their greatest potential. It has been a wonderful thing to watch each of them accomplish amazing things.
So, what components go into helping a child live their best life now and into the future?
Self-care. As far as they are able, we want to teach our children how to take care of their physical bodies. Personal hygiene is not always a desired project for some of our children with challenges. Bathing or showering, brushing teeth, changing into clean clothes and other pieces to self-care may come with sensory issues that we may need to help our children to overcome.
Our Amy didn’t get the opportunity to eat by mouth until she was into her late teens. This left her very defensive in her mouth. We had to do lots of oral motor work to help her get used to a toothbrush in her mouth and to help her with dental appointments. Many children have oral motor defensiveness. Just because they are over-sensitive today, doesn’t mean that we cannot help them to overcome that defensiveness to help them with basic oral hygiene.
It is also worthwhile to teach our children how to pick healthy nutrition, to drink sufficient amounts of water, and to get plenty of exercise according to their abilities so they can work to keep their bodies healthy. In the day-to-day craziness of parenting, we sometimes forget to transfer responsibility to our children. We just want to remind you to consider how you might do this with your child.
Care of personal property and the property of others. Just like any child, our children who have special challenges need to be taught how to take care of their possessions and the possessions of others. We are talking about electronics, phones, furniture, clothing, toys, and any other objects in their worlds. This can include keeping their bedrooms and family community rooms tidy. Sometimes we think our special needs children are not capable of learning these things. Take a minute to consider teaching your child some of these basic skills in a loving and patient way.
Many of our children need extra instruction (waaaaay more instruction) and that is okay. If you set out knowing that this will not be a one-time teaching but a constant life skill lesson, it makes it easier when you have to say the same thing and teach the same thing over and over again. Visual Charts and Digital Recordings by audio or video are extremely helpful. Set them up with the information you want them to learn visually with a chart or with a video (or both) and with an auditory recording. Play them often and teach with patience. Sometimes we are truly amazed with what our children are capable of accomplishing when we put some sweat equity into it.
Their important place in the family. Just like every family member, our special needs child is a vital part of the family unit. We want to teach our children just how valuable they are. Sometimes our children get the impression that they are “a lot of work” or “in the way” or “an interruption” or “a bother.” They need a great deal of reinforcement and encouragement as do all of our children. Let’s endeavor to help our children to see their value and along with that the benefits that they get because they are part of our family.
Let’s also teach them that as a valuable member of the family, they also have responsibility to contribute to the community of family. Match their abilities with something they can be responsible for to give them success and purpose. For example, can they fold laundry, or take out the trash, or dust furniture, or pick up toys, or wash a window, or vacuum a floor? Assess from time to time if this child may be capable of something more challenging. Keep raising the bar but do it so they can be successful and always be positive.
Just like any other skill we are teaching our children, you may need to break the task into many pieces and be willing to take time to teach each piece. Remember the tools of visual help with videos or charts and auditory help with digital recordings — with simple step-by-step instructions.
We also want to teach our children to do thoughtful deeds for other members of the family. You know your family. Help your child think outside themselves and focus on another family member in a tangible way.
Skill developing for career or employment. As your children get older, you want them to have the opportunity to work toward higher goals. When Amy was younger, we realized that she had a knack for creating entertaining videos and for engaging an audience while public speaking. We began to encourage her to develop those skills because we wanted to see if there was a way for her to use them for a future career. We began to feel the nudge toward ministry to special needs parents and realized that Amy’s interests and skills with videos and public speaking fit very well in a ministry setting. As it turns out, she is also talented and adept at a good many other skills necessary for keeping a ministry going well. She is great at data entry, scheduling social media posts, and at helping her mama through frustrating electronic and technical snafus.
Observe your child. Record character traits and natural abilities that you could foster and help to grow in them. Give them opportunities to use those parts of their personality and abilities.
Social skills. Many of our children are lacking social skills. This may be due to their particular disability or because it just doesn’t come naturally to them. This is where we can come in. We want to teach our children to be good communicators.
Our Amy has a significant hearing loss which makes it difficult for her to read people and to sometimes understand others’ attempts at communications. When she was younger, we worked our way through many workbooks that taught things like social cues and idioms. We role-played and pointed out good examples as her siblings and friends exercised good social skills. We taught her how to communicate her feelings and desires. None of this comes natural to her as they might for typically developing children. We continue to work hard on helping her to gain the social skills necessary to develop relationships.
This is another set of skills where we often need to take the components apart and teach them piece by piece. There are many resources available to help you navigate helping your child to develop good communication and social skills. Just do a google search on teaching social skills and you can find many helps. The Autism community has done a great job of making these resources available. These helps are good for every developing child – typical and those with more challenges – even if they do not have Autism.
Spiritual Growth. We definitely don’t want to neglect this very important part of our child’s life. We need to feed their souls. We want to give them every opportunity and use every avenue available to us to do so. Even if we wonder how much our child really can comprehend, we need to present the gospel of Christ to them simply and often. We need to understand that we cannot save our children, only the Holy Spirit can do that. Our job is to be faithful in the presenting and in praying for them. Leave the rest to the God who loves them even more than we do.
Formal education: Oh what a melting pot of agony and frustration this can be for our children with special challenges for many different reasons. There are multiple ways to educate our children. There is public school, private school, and varying kinds of homeschooling. We think we will make this a topic for an entire blog post of its own.
We encourage you to take a minute to assess where your child is right now in accordance with some of these skills. Determine what you would like them to know this week, next month, a year from now, five years from now, etc. Make a plan to teach the skills you feel led to focus on with much patience. Reevaluate often. Ask yourself: Have I given every opportunity to help my child understand what is expected? Am I communicating to their understanding? Just because I am saying it, doesn’t mean they are getting it. Am I teaching with a positive attitude? Am I giving verbal encouragement with each little accomplishment, however small?
DON’T GIVE UP! Your child’s present life and his or her future is worth it.
And…don’t do it alone. Get support either from family or friends and/or join a local parent support group. Tap into resources and use the parts of those resources that resonate with you for your specific family.
After reading this blog post, you may be asking questions about your child’s future when you are no longer able to care for them. We are working on a blog post to cover this important consideration as we ask the question: What happens when we are gone?
BUT FOR NOW…If you are ready to delve into making some goals and putting steps in place to reach those goals for any of these social and life skills, and you would like some support, don’t hesitate to email us. We would love to share tips and strategies that have worked for us and countless other families it has been our privilege to know.
Much love,
Tom and Julie
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Tom and Julie Meekins
Champions4Parents.com
HERE’S HOW YOU CAN CONNECT WITH US:
We invite you to connect with Tom, Julie, and Amy through:
Email: champions4parents@gmail.com
Phone: 410-746-9010
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Champions4Parents/
Don’t forget our website: www.champions4parents.com
