RE:Defending your child's disability???

December 18, 2003

I've felt the same way myself. I should thank the lucky stars that my daughter

has made as much progress as she has, especially when I see and hear what other

parents and kids are struggling through. My daughter is verbal (but behind),

she can write (not too neatly), she is toilet trained (took 6 months at the

time), she is healthy (but who knows what the long term effects of her

medications will be), she can be an angel (or a monster), she has fairly good

motor skills (but could use improvement) etc etc - I do the same thing. I think

we all compare to the NT kids - we have to to keep things in perspective. At an

IEP meeting one time the teachers had such a glowing report on how wonderful my

daughter was doing that the disctrict said " great so now we can put her in a

regular school and classroom right? " The teachers had to quickly restate the

progress in relative terms because in spite of her progress she still needed to

be in a special setting.

I think that part of the problem as parents is also that so many of the tasks

that have to be learned get broken down into many tiny steps, so one task now

becomes 10 or 20 steps. This seems to quickly multply the number of things that

we and our kids need to do, so as we complete something, we still see a huge

mountain of tasks ahead of us. Combine this with the extra time that our kids

need to learn and it can be very frustrating and it seems like we will never

finish. I guess we all need to take a step back once in a while and be grateful

for the things that we do have especially with the Holiday season upon us!

Loren

single Dad to Lara (11.5 M-HFA) Josh (13 NT)

Long Island

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