Wether your world is the special needs world or not, everyone’s experiences are valid. This is where they are coming from. It’s where you are coming from. If we listen we can find common ground to stand together on the important things and stop fighting. Because who has the strength and energy to fight?
Read more. . .
Screen time is over. . .The great debate between, “Are my kids watching too much TV?,” becomes even more high stakes when you add ADHD or Autism into the picture. We have both at our house. Read more. . .
“Recently, I heard someone say that “The root cause of anger is fear”. That made me sit up and ponder. I needed to think about this. That’s an interesting concept. Do I agree with that statement?… was there research to back it up?” Read more…
When my son was first diagnosed with Autism, I visited the local Autism Society and brought home armloads of books. Then I returned again and got more stacks of books which I delved into. Autism, ADHD, Sensory Disorder, I tried to find out every single thing I could. It continued for a couple months. Autism wasn’t a diagnosis I was expecting nor was it one I knew a lot about. I burned out on all those books. Read more…
“Creating something is life-giving, freeing, exhilarating. It makes me feel alive and not just exist. It feeds something inside of me that craves expression. There have been multiple medical studies over the years about just how important it is to create and how it can cause healing and help us in other ways.” Read more…
“We are in a messy middle trying to figure out how to make school work for my 12 year old son with Autism, ADHD, Dyscalculia, a sleeping disorder and a few other things.” Read more. . .
Girls need to be taught to look for problems in their world and then be empowered to make changes and build things that can institute those changes. Girls are traditionally more drawn to making changes for the better in our world. Giving them the tools to do that makes STEM subjects much more appealing to them. Read more…
I had been wanting to see The Greatest Showman since I first started hearing about it. It’s a musical, it has Hugh Jackman, and I’d heard great reviews. What more could you ask for? I finally got to see it and it did not disappoint. It was so good I went back to take my daughter to see it.
But I want to talk for a minute about the circumstances surrounding my getting a chance to see it. The day before had been complete hell and I won’t go into all the details but I was literally at the end of my rope. I knew if I didn’t reach out and ask for some help, I was going to crash magnificently.
I reached out and asked someone to take my kids for just an hour the next day. I just needed to be able to walk away for an hour. Leave my responsibilities and breathe. Prior to dropping off my kids, I was shaking and the anxiety started to escalate, both from dealing with what had happened the day before and an episode with one of my children right before we left. Instead of one hour, my friend gave me three.
One of the first thoughts that entered my head when I left her home was that I should see if I could make a showing of The Greatest Showman. I raced to the theatre and sat down just a few minutes after it started.
For the first half hour, I was gripping my phone case as I was filled with dread that she would call and need me to pick up my kids. After that, I gradually started to relax. But what was relaxing me wasn’t the fact that I had left my cares behind for a couple hours, though that certainly helped. It was the music.
Music has a literal power that is real. Studies have been conducted and music has been found to aid in the growth of plants, help people study, provide not just comfort but decrease pain. Think about it. How many times has a song lifted you up and made you feel like you can get through things? This is one of many reasons why people work out to music, it helps them push that much further. How many times in your life is music tied to a memory or event and made it more meaningful? It’s no accident that the important parts of a film are often filled with music.
I sat there in that darkened theatre watching a movie that had about as much fiction as fact, but the music was moving me. It was the music that was healing my soul. It was the music that was making me stop, breathe, relax and remember who I am.
I am a creator, a musician, a writer. The Arts feed my soul and without them, it starves. I know this and yet I forget to feed this part of me.
Even if you aren’t a musician or lover of the Arts, they can still heal you, and bring peace to your soul. I think perhaps that is why most religions also have a canon of music that accompanies their worship. Words combined with music transcends what words alone can do. It reaches places within us that are hidden, internal, the place where our soul lives. The place that is the “real” us.
If you haven’t seen The Greatest Showman yet, I highly recommend it. But more than that, take the time to feed your soul. Turn up the music.
This was previously published by Parent Co. January 25, 2018.
Your child has just been diagnosed with a life-threatening or life-changing diagnosis. You are dealing with all the emotions, grief and stress that comes with this new normal. As you begin sharing this news with others, one of the first things you are told is, that the rate of divorce is much higher with families like yours.
This is really the last thing you want to hear. Your child has just been diagnosed with a major issue, with which you’re trying to come to terms with. This in and of itself is life-altering HUGE. Now, you have to add on top of that worrying about whether or not you’ll beat the odds of the new marriage category you have just been put in statistically? This feels like adding insult to injury.
A while ago I was working on a blog post and I was going to mention this statistic, but I stopped and thought I should look this up and see what the current stats are. I found plenty of articles to back this opinion up like this one in the Huffington Post, or this one on Families.com. However what drew me in, was a research study published by the National Institute of Health. I wanted to look at this one because I knew it would have excellent sources and reliable information. What I found surprised me.
Previous studies have shown that there was an increased risk of divorce, however, one of the problems with these studies is that it only looks at snapshots of time, only looking at school-aged kids or adult children. It doesn’t look at the lifetime of the marriage.
The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study which the NIH published, offers excellent insight into whether or not the divorce rate is higher for families with Special Needs children, the results of a 50-year study was published in 2015.
“…we found that divorce rates were not elevated, on average, in families with a child with developmental disabilities. However, in small families, there was a significantly higher risk of divorce relative to a normative comparison group. ”
The results found that there was about a 2% higher risk, and when you are talking statistics it is usually felt that there is a 3% margin of error, making the difference negligible.
They did, however, find an interesting result about family size. Among families without special needs the more children they had the more likely they were to divorce. However, the opposite is true of families that have Special Needs children. If they had more children they were less likely to divorce, the hypothesized that perhaps it was due to the care of the child with Special Needs being distributed amongst more people and easier to manage, also providing extra support as the parent’s age.
The study did have limitations which should be noted- There were not many minority populations represented within the study and the study was conducted with a cohort of people who tended to get married younger and have more children than today’s couples. Future studies are warranted to see if the study can be replicated and if it continues to hold true with the later marriages and fewer children that are being found in today’s families. However, it has been found in other studies that marriage later in life generally makes for a more stable marriage so it is unlikely that that would change the result. Due to this being a longitudinal study and the rigorous methods used to take into account known issues to factor into divorce, I feel this is a good snapshot of what things look like within many of our families.
The take away is that there is hope. You aren’t doomed to divorce your spouse. Your marriage will take work and care like anyone else’s but you have just as much of a chance to make it work as anyone else.
So ignore this statistic that gets thrown at you and spend time with your spouse and child.
*Before you leave, check out the book I’m giving away–
My generation spanned the pre technology world. We played outside, got dirty and rode our bikes everywhere. 
We survived and learned how to use technology and have been changing the world with its use.
For this reason, I call foul on everyone who keeps saying we need technology in schools so our kids can keep up with the world. There’s no reason our kids can’t do the same. (Now if you are saying we need it to access different learning venues, that’s a different discussion.)
15 years or so ago I was a Nanny and working for a family who was getting ready to enroll their child in preschool. They traveled around to various schools to interview them. The one they settled on was one that advertised that they had computers for every kid. It was a very prestigious preschool. They spent every day sitting at computers learning.
3 and 4-year-olds should not be sitting at a desk on the computer all day. Most kids have an intuitive sense of how to work computers. With their access to them now, each generation seems to be even more intuitive. They’re going to pick it up and you don’t have to send them to Preschool for it.
Little kids development needs time in the outdoors, time playing with blocks and other children. They are building skills that will help them for the rest of their lives. We will stunt their growth if they aren’t provided with time and chances to experience these things.
So I will continue *attempting* to limit my child with Autism and ADHD’s consumption of his tablet time and attempt to get him outside instead.
