In my last post, I was tickled pink to share a searchable list of children’s hospitals. Today, I’m tickled yellow to share another great resource for parents of kids with special needs.

Wrightslaw Yellow Pages for Kids with Disabilities

Wrightslaw is best known for their educational and advocacy work in the field of special education law. They travel around the country educating parents through their special education law and advocacy training workshops. Recently they launched an online version of the workshop, which is great for parents who can’t leave home because they are caregivers for their children with special needs. But I digress.

How to Use the Wrightslaw Yellow Pages

On the Wrightslaw Yellow Pages webpage, you can find your state in the pull down menu or by clicking on your state on the map of the United States. The yellow pages for my state (Iowa) includes contact information for private organizations, foundations, practitioners, governmental organizations, and more. What a time saver! Once again, I’ll be using the Yellow Pages while doing research for Different Dream Parenting.

How to Be Listed in the Yellow Pages

If you are part of an organization that helps get services to families of children with disabilities, you can apply for a listing in the yellow pages. According to the information at their website, they are looking for “private special education schools, clinics, health care professionals, special education attorneys and special education lay advocates, and related service providers and supplemental service providers as defined by IDEA 2004 and No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Listings are free, however, not all listings will be accepted.” Click here for more information about the application process.

How Will You Use this Resource?

If you have ideas about how to use this resource or know of other great resources of use to parents of kids with special needs, please leave a comment!

Jolene

Sometimes thinking about the future is hard for parents of kids with special needs. If a child is severely developmentally delayed, parents worry about who will care for their child after they die. If a child’s needs are less severe, they worry about whether or not their will find work and be able to live independently. If a child struggles in school, parents wonder if they’ll graduate from high school. If their child graduates from high school and wants to pursue higher education, they wonder if such dreams are unrealistic.

Northwestern College

Knowing those worries can eat away at parents’ hopes for their children’s future, I was delighted to read an article in the current issue of the Classic. This quarterly magazine is published by Northwestern, the small Christian college my daugther attends in Orange City, Iowa. The feature article profiled three differently abled students who currently attend Northwestern.

Academic Support Department

According to the article, “Northwestern’s academic support department offers assistance to all students with documented disabilities. Services include reading tests orally, securing a quiet location for testing, and reviewing papers. The department also offers assistive technology, such as software able to type the spoken word and read scanned book aloud.” Wow.

Free to Be

But more impressive than the description of the support center were the stories of three student currently using them. You can read the article, Free to Be, at http://classic.nwciowa.edu. What you learn there may restore the hope eaten away by your worries. If you know of other colleges providing support services for students with special needs, leave a comment and a URL so we can check them out, too.

Hopeful,
Jolene Philo

If you’re the foster or adoptive parent of a child with special needs, thank you for opening your home to the most vulnerable and needy members of our society. Many of those children endured severe trauma before arriving in your safe and loving homes. And you, though not the cause of the trauma, deal with its effects every day.

Wounded Children, Healing Homes

You need much more than thanks and applause as you parent your kids. Your children need professional therapy and counseling in order to heal. You need practical support, encouragement and access to professional help to survive. You will learn about all those things in Wounded Children, Healing Homes: How Traumatized Children Impact Adoptive and Foster Families, released by Nav Press in January of 2010.

The book is co-authored by Jayne E. Schooler; Betsy Keefer Smalley, LSW; and Timothy J. Callahan, PSYD, with other chapters contributed by Elizabeth A. Tracy, Debra L. Shrier, and Grace Harris.

Help for Parents, Families and School

The book is divided into five parts. The first section is an introduction and the remaining parts are:

• Understanding Trauma and Its Impact on the Family
• Inside the Crisis of Adoption Breakdown
• The Child, the Family, and School
• Strategies for Successfully Parenting Traumatized Children

The final section is followed by two appendices. The first is titled Assessing Attachment-Readiness and Capabilities in Prospective Adoptive Parents. The second is Building a Support System and Finding Resources.

A Road Map, Not a Cure

The information in the book is more of a road map than cure for families living with deeply traumatized children. It gives parents strategies for creating safe, loving environments where children will gradually heal. It is realistic about the challenges involved, the effects on the family, the strain such children place on a marriage. But it also gives hope, provides resources, and acknowledges the reality of failure in some cases.

If you are an adoptive or foster parent caring for a deeply traumatized child, you should read this book. It not only provides information and strategies, but also explains why traumatized kids act like they do and how parents typically respond to them. What reassurance these words can be to parents dealing with difficult behaviors day after day.

After you read Wounded Children, Healing Homes, come back and leave a comment about what you read.

Jolene Philo

Wrights Law is an organization devoted to educating parents about the IEP process. If you have children in the public school system, and especially if they’re nearing age 21, when they will no longer be part of the system, I encourage you to go to their website and sign up for their newsletter.

A recent newsletter titled Transition: It’s Never Too Early to Plan for Your Child’s Future was full of valuable information for parents of kids with special needs who will soon be considered adults in the eyes of the law. The newsletters provide a link to the archives, so you can go back and look at previous editions. The newsletter also has information about books, workshops and other educational opportunities for parents.

Leave a comment about what you find there and your experiences with the organization so we can all learn more!

Thanks,
Jolene

A few days ago, I blogged about Barb Dittrich and her ministry’s website which Twitter helped me locate. Today’s post is about another Twitter find, Special Needs Parenting Magazine.

Special Needs Parenting Magazine

The magazine is an online publication which comes out six times a year. It was founded by Chantai Snellgrove who is the parent of a special needs child. The premier issue was launched in September/October of 2008. Many, if not all, of the articles are written by parents of children with special needs. The magazine has several Q & A columns on a variety of topics.

Planning for the Future

The theme of the January/February 2010 issue is financial, estate and tax planning so adults with special needs are provided for when their parents are no longer living. Feature articles include:

• A Special Needs Planning Timeline: 9 Steps to a Sound Family Plan
• Q & A on Estate Planning for Children with Special Needs
• An Affordable Proposal for Guardianship: The Special Needs Tax Credit Bill
• Special Needs (Or Supplemental Needs) Trust 101

The articles are written in language I could understand, even though financial planning and investment is not my cup of tea.

Browse www.parentingspecialneeds.org

The magazine had other articles on parenting, trimming your grocery bill, relationships, and a surprising wide variety of topics. You can browse the magazine’s website at www.parentingspecialneeds.org. Readers are encouraged to subscribe, even though publication is free and can be read without going through the process. However, you won’t receive the newsletter unless you subscribe.

Submit an Article

Once you’re familiar with the type of articles published in Parenting Special Needs, you might have an idea for an article. If so, study their submission guidelines before you start crafting your story. Then start writing. Who knows what your first story could lead to?

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter

Now that you’ve seen some of my great Twitter finds, don’t you think it’s time for you to join, too? To get started, click on the Twitter button to the right and slightly above this post. Go ahead. You can do it!

See you on Twitter,
Jolene Philo

As I’ve mentioned in previous DifferentDream.com posts, (PTSD Treatment Can Change Your Child’s Life, PTSD and NICU Parents: What About You?, and Critically Ill Kids and War Veterans Have What in Common?) war veterans aren’t the only people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It also affects children who have endured invasive medical treatment, and  PTSD can affect their parents, too.

Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning Show

PTSD nearly ruined our son’s life until he went through cutting edge treatment at the Intensive Trauma Therapy, Inc. in Morgantown, WV in December of 2008. So when he heard the topic of Minnesota Public Radio’s midmorning talk show for January 7, he told me to listen. I’m so glad he did.

University of Minnesota Brain Research

Karri Miller, host of the show, interviewed two scientists from the University of Minnesota. They imaged the brains of war veterans suffering from PTSD and the brains of people without PTSD. By analyzing and comparing the images, they located a PTSD marker in the brain. To learn more, you can go to this link and hear the entire interview. The discussion of the research and its implications are fascinating.

So have a listen and then tell me what you think. I’d love to hear from you.

Grateful for new light on the subject of PTSD,
Jolene

In the previous post in this series you met Rachel, the mentally impaired young woman who wanted to live on her own after graduating from high school. In this post you’ll learn more about her mom, Jane Bernstein.

Jane Bernstein

In addition to being Rachel’s mom, Jane is an award-winning author. Some of her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ms and Glamour. She also teaches English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Loving Rachel & Rachel in the World

But don’t let her credentials scare you. Jane is the parent of a special needs child, just like you and me. She’s written two books about being Rachel’s mom. Loving Rachel is about the first four years of her daughter’s life. Rachel in the World picks up where the first book left off and ends when Rachel is twenty-two. I can’t wait to read them.

To read more about Jane, which has links to some of her published essays, go to www.janebernstein.net. If you’ve read any of her books about her daughter, leave a comment about what you thought of them.

Happy reading,
Jolene Philo

Being the parent of a special needs child is incredibly rewarding, but the role comes with a set of unique challenges. Choosing living arrangements for the child after graduation is one of them.

Charlotte Glynn

Through Twitter, I recently discovered a film that shows how the family worked through this challenge.  The film was created by Charlotte Glynn, the older sister of Rachel, a mentally impaired young woman.

Rachel Is…

You can view the movie trailer and learn more about Rachel and the film at www.rachelis.com. Rachel isn’t an easy woman to live with and the trailer isn’t always easy to watch, but it is very honest. Once you’ve viewed the trailer, poke around the rest of the website to learn more about how the film was made and to hear more of Rachel’s soundbytes.

Well, what did you think of Rachel Is? Leave a comment!

Every now and then, a book comes along that helps both parents of typical kids and those with special needs kids. When Your Child Is Hurting is one of them.

When Your Child Is Hurting

The book’s author and mother of five kids, Glynnis Whitwer is transparent as she shares personal experiences and lessons learned while parenting her own children. The chapters deal with every day issues kids face: loneliness, stress, failure, grief, bullying, body awareness and insecurity. Glynnis begins each chapter with an example of the issue, then provides information, resources, practical tips and a biblical perspective on how to address it. The chapters end with suggested memory verses, encouraging quotes and questions for journalling or discussion.

Special Needs Issues

Depending on the severity of your child’s condition, most chapters can be adapted for parents of special needs kids. In the last three chapters of the book, Whitwer addresses specific special needs: physical disabilities, learning problems, and knowing when to seek professional help.

Parenting all Your Children

Sometimes, parents are so focused upon the demands of their special needs child, the other kids in the family feel overlooked. This book could be especially helpful for those parents by helping them identify and address the behaviors of all the children in their family. The book is available at amazon.com and in Christian bookstores.

Glynnis Whitwer

If you would like to learn more about Glynnis, visit her blog, WelcomeHome.com. She’d love it if you left a comment about how her book helped you parent your hurting child!

Happy Reading,
Jolene Philo

For the past few weeks, National Public Radio (NPR) has been airing a series called The Impact of War.  While listening to several episodes that described the symptoms of PTSD in returning vets, the similarities to our son Allen’s PTSD symptoms (caused by early, repeated medical traumas from 1982 – 1986) were striking.

An Interview with General Eric Shinseki

In a November 13 interview with retired General Eric Shinseki, who is head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he talked about an encounter with veterans during a recent speaking engagement. When he asked if any of them suffered from PTSD, no one said anything. So he asked the following questions:

• How many of you have a little trouble sleeping at night?
• Are you overly vigilant for threats in your own homes?
• Have you been having anger management problems?

Then, Shinseki said, “And then hands go up.”

The Sand Storm: Stories from the Front

In a November 14 episode in the same series, a clinical psychiatrist named Judith Broder describes her reaction to The Sand Storm: Stories from the Front, which was written by a Marine and featured monologues of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The most horrifying aspect of it was the sense that I got that these were really just ordinary everyday guys, and they had seen things and done things that just shattered their whole sense of themselves,” says Broder. “And that they would all need help.” Broder has since started a program to help veterans recover from PTSD.

PTSD in Medically Traumatized Children

What General Shinseki and Broder said described Allen before he was treated for PTSD. For years, our son displayed the symptoms Shinseki mentioned. And as Broder said, he needed help. Thankfully he found help last December at Intensive Trauma Therapy, Inc., an outpatient clinic in Morganstown, West Virginia.

But Allen isn’t the only person struggling with PTSD caused by medical trauma at a young age. If you have a child exhibiting the symptoms above, and you suspect they are related to some sort of trauma (which can include the death of a loved one, divorce, a difficult move, sexual abuse, physical abuse, medical trauma or adoption) go to their website to learn more. Your child doesn’t need to suffer any more. Life-changing treatment is available that doesn’t require drugs or hospitalization in most cases.

After treatment, Allen turned to me and said, “Mom, I have my life back.”

Those were the sweetest words he’d ever spoken. I hope that one day, your child who is suffering from PTSD will say the same words to you.

Allen’s Grateful Mom,
Jolene Philo