I NEED YOUR HELP and I WANT TO SHARE YOUR STORY

 

Parents, I need your help with an important project, looking at special needs parenting from a global perspective.

The purpose and focus of this project will be to address the day to day life of raising a young child with special needs.  It will include short stories or vignettes from parents in different countries who are raising a child with a disability.

The stories will focus directly on the issues we as parents all face raising our special needs children: How to handle the sibling connection, how to get our children out into the community, how to manage through the schools, and how to deal with self-esteem and bullying.  It will include stories from diagnosis to real life, the ins and outs of how we, as parents, make this different kind of family work every single day.

It will help to answer the question that all parents’ have, regardless of whether they are parenting a child with special needs or not.  The question of “how do other parents do it?”  How do they live their day to day lives, how do they cope emotionally and physically with this task of raising their child, and how do they instill in their child the feelings of self-adequacy and self-advocacy that they will need throughout their lives.  It is not intended to focus on the latest therapies or the cutting edge medical interventions that are happening, but on honest accounts and stories from parents in cultures both alike and different.

The project will ultimately become a blog series, looking at each countries special needs resources and sharing our stories as parents.  I am happy to change the identifying information or only use first names when retelling the individual stories, depending on what you as the parent are comfortable with.  I would like permission to tell these stories both in a blog format and eventually in print format.  

The more we share with each other, the bigger and stronger community we build of special needs parenting and the more barriers we break down in the world.  

Your story will become an inspiration for someone going through similar struggles, and will let all of us see how cultures other than our own find their way.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing your stories with me, and with the world. I consider it an honor to have you entrust your story to me.

Please contact me if you have any questions, or any other friends from around the world who have stories to share.  I am happy to discuss the project with anyone interested in sharing.

Patty O’Machel

pattyomachel@gmail.com          https://parentingoutsidethelines.org