Acceptance as Parents

If you are a parent of a child with special needs, one of the first things you need to do is to accept your role as a guardian, protector, guiding light, and responsible entity of your child. Many parents expend great emotional energy trying to determine their own role as parents of a special needs child. The first thing to establish is that you are the primary responsible person and will be as long as you live. This is not a choice, it is an obligation. It may be a burden or it might be a blessing (or likely a mixture of both with emphases on blessing), but it is the requirement for being the parent. Once you accept this as your duty, it makes other decisions much easier. You may not and should not abdicate your responsibility for the ultimate happiness of your child.

Knowing this, however, does not necessarily mean that you are the sole care-giver throughout the rest of the child's life, but it does mean that you are overseer of the child and you are the guardian. Your prime directive is to provide a safe, secure learning environment that allows your child comfort, happiness, and a purpose. In most cases, this is the home where the parents reside, but in some cases this is a special needs residence.

Finding the right kind of special needs home requires careful research, on site evaluation, and money for the residence. Mostly it requires the the person and the guardians be entirely comfortable with the setting. More on this later.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that parents expend great time and energy both denying their child's situation and being afraid to accept any kind of responsibility for the child. In many ways this is understandable due to the sheer amount of resources available to help and the amount of teachers involved in your child's education. The state (and this is true for most states) goes to great lengths to help ease the educational process and protect the child from failure in the classroom. Over a period of several years, it is easy for the parent to become somewhat complacent and even dependent upon the educational process to solve all the problems and turn out a product that is capable of contributing to society.

Unfortunately, while schools can help and all efforts are certainly worth it, in the end the child still has limitations. The parent who denies the realities of the child's abilities or lack thereof is possibly a parent not providing for the welfare of the child and for the future. There is nothing to gain and much to lose by not being able to recognize the limitations of special needs children. Know that recognizing limitations does not mean using those challenges as excuses for mediocrity. Invoking high expectations on your child is the only way to promote the idea that there is a niche for all kinds of people.

But until the parent accepts the child as a special needs child with disabilities, the child is actually endangered by a world that is not designed for those with problems. So in spite of the constant demands on the parents, it is an absolute mandate to provide a safe, secure, comfortable world for your child, a world that allows him to reach his potential.