The new issue of Parenting Special Needs Magazine is here! Our article, “Tech Tools for Growing Up”, contains tools for caregivers of teens and young adults to help make the transition from childhood to adulthood a little easier to navigate. Perhaps you and…
September is Newborn Screening Awareness Month—but in modern obstetrics, much screening takes place weeks or months before the birth. Pregnancy has always been a time of extensive preparation—and of learning that things never go according to script. Not even when…
Life inevitably includes unwelcome surprises; and for parents, among the most dreaded surprises is hearing that their baby isn’t as physically and mentally “perfect” as hoped. But if this happens to you, don’t let anyone tell you that your child’s…
Do “disability” and “healthy” sound mutually exclusive? They shouldn’t be. An impairment to one physical or mental function doesn’t render the whole body useless: if anything, other functions become more effective as they’re exercised to compensate. Still, if the person…
Back to school doesn’t have to be stressful. Summer break is a time to relax, unwind, and refresh. Now that you and your children have (hopefully) had a chance to do that, we offer some ideas for getting back into…
Once a new school year isn’t quite so new, students and parents often discover new problems. The fresh routine becomes a rut. The syllabus looks as impossible as emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. The new friends turn unfriendly at…
(This article is partly adapted from “Polypharmacy: What Is It and Are You at Risk?,” a workshop presented by Jay Gupta at the Houston 2022 Abilities Expo.) Polypharmacy: the simultaneous use of multiple drugs by a single patient, for one…
Read Time 5 Minutes “It’s not the ‘challenge’ of having a child with special needs. It’s the privilege of having a kid with special needs.” –Alan Roesch, father of a teenager with neurological disabilities Whether a disability is diagnosed before…
Read Time 5 Minutes In 2020, as COVID-19 outbreaks forced education online, it became painfully obvious how heavily many families depended on in-person schooling. Among the federal assistance programs originated in 2020–21 were a number specifically designed to bridge the…
Read Time 5 Minutes If there’s anything worse than having your plans spoiled, it’s having plans spoiled when they include someone who has autism or Down syndrome, who never heard the unspoken “circumstances permitting” behind “we’ll go to the beach…
