Posted by Carey Nieuwhof | Earlier this week we said that one way to see where your children are heading in life is to look at their friends and the people who influence them. Your closest friends are a preview of the future you. Now, I totally understand that will cause some of us to…
Posted by Terry Scalzitti One of my favorite movie scenes comes from Braveheart. William Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, is standing with a small army of Scottish warriors staring in the face of a charging English Cavalry. Do you remember the scene? As the horses are charging straight at Wallace and his band of brothers,…
Posted by Brooklyn Lindsey | Parents don’t usually post pictures of their kids on the second day of school. That made me consider taking another set of pictures this year, one at about 6:30 PM every evening on that first week to show a side of our family that we may not be particularly excited…
I have a secret to share with you. Sometimes, I don’t always know how I feel about my son’s autism. It seems there is a vast divide between two extremes of perspectives from parents of kids with disabilities. On the one side, there are parents who view the disability as something that makes an otherwise…
I remember my father once telling me, “It’s dangerous to live.” What he meant was that life is full of risks and dangers and that if we are constantly worried about those risks and dangers, then we’re not really living. I’ve often recounted this quote whenever a therapist overplayed the safety card with Ben—you know,…
August is Special Needs Parents Appreciation Month. My friend and fellow dedicated mother, Sandra Peoples, founded this 31 day observance in 2015. And while her intentions were noble, there are sadly some in the adult disability community who roll their eyes at this annual observance. They regard such a celebration as public martyrdom and contend…
Posted by Reggie Joiner | Hannah is our first-born daughter, and she has a lot of leadership potential. That’s just another way of saying that she challenged the process a lot growing up in our house. I distinctively remember having a conversation with her one night when I was tucking her into bed. It was…
The transition from summertime to back-to-school can happen so quickly that we’re already in our new routine before we even realize it. Below are some suggestions for how to create an intentional and meaningful back-to-school rhythm for a kid in each phase. Preschool: BacktoSchoolRhythm_Pre_single Elementary: BacktoSchoolRhythm_Elem_single Middle School: BacktoSchoolRhythm_MS_single High School: BacktoSchoolRhythm_HS_single
Having a child with a disability can be difficult. There are moments you wonder if anyone will ever understand or get what it is like to walk in your shoes. You parent a child with special needs and sometimes you feel alone and invisible. But you are not. Today, I want to tell you that…
This is for the family whose life is not as they expected it would be. It’s for the family: who may seem normal from the outside, but on the inside is hurting, lonely, exhausted, confused, stressed, and unsure of the future. who lives on eggshells in their home, trying their best to parent a child…