Tag Archives: inclusion

Autism Activities: How One Boy Found Judo

The children stood in pairs and took their judo holds, ready for the signal to move. Rhys was in position, standing opposite a boy, who was about the same height, with brown hair, cut short and a reflective t-shirt under his jacket.

But my son wasn’t in a pair. A black belt stood behind him, whose arms came around Rhys, hand over hand as he held the judo hold that had been instructed.

As the signal came, they moved. The physical support for my son guided him in the motion, helping him fight his opponent, until a leg spotted a weakness and the fall rendered defeat.

Not one word was spoken.

The teaching was adaptive, and non-verbal.

But the skill being taught was the same.
The throws and the methods were the same. The desire to learn was the same.

I have been turned from away from so many other activities and groups, with comments like:
“This is not the right setting for your son”
“Maybe wait a few years for when he can follow instruction” or
“We don’t have the funding to support him!”

I see these examples of ableism everyday.

I hear it in conversations. At venues where my son is not welcome. In processes which restrict my son’s ability to participate.

Verbally telling Rhys to do a task, or to sit in line or catch a partner, is not an instruction he is able to easily understand or formulate in his mind.

But why restrict the learning of a skill to one way of teaching? A method where only those able to learn that way can learn?

Restriction is discrimination!

It’s ableism!

Restricting to one way of teaching has meant my son has not been welcome.

Not welcome in many, many situations.

And it means he has been excluded!

Rhys’ judo club is not a special needs club, or a club that has funded one-to-one support. It is just a club which turns no one away. It is a club that wants to develop the skill of judo, no matter what method of teaching is needed to achieve that.

It only takes the commitment to adapt to allow all to thrive. And by thriving we can all look to develop further into a community of strength and inclusion.

There are no excuses to discriminate!

Autism, Shopping, Obsessions and Chocolate Cake!

When your son shouts “Shopping!” at 6:50am, you forget about a lie in, pull on yesterday’s joggers, and get your son dressed. You react to a verbal request with no hesitation. You do it because you have spent years waiting for your son to talk. Years crouching down, holding up picture sequence cards and trying to work out what your son wants. Years praying to hear his voice, the tone, the amplification, the bit of his personality that you have waited to get to know.

As you turn into the carpark and watch his face light up at the Morrison’s sign, you feel a lump in your throat. You feel emotional, because you remember the blank stare he always had across his face, just looking at the back of the car seat in front of him. No pointing at the trees flying past, or screams in excitement at the sun as it followed our journey from the sky.

As you step out the car and take his hand, you well up when you ask him “Rhys, carry bag?” and he takes the shopping bag in his hand. Your son who could not follow any instruction. Where language was just a mash of sounds that he could not process, meaning calm words in scary situations had no effect, or words of warning were as good as not being heard. But he can now understand.

You feel like you have hit the jackpot, when you walk hand in hand into the shop, the shopping bag held in his hand. Yes, just calmly walk into a shop! A place where surfaces beam bright light, strange beeps and pings hit the ears and vibrations of trolley wheels penetrate the body with pain. An environment where you have sat on the floor so many times. Your son in an uncontrollable meltdown, kicking and screaming in an environment he cannot tolerate. But today you just walk!

“What do you want?” you ask, crouching down to your son’s level, knowing your stuff and how to talk to your son, the years of education you have taught yourself and the snipits of information you have grasped from the limited professional help you have been provided. “Chocolate cake” he says with no hesitation, but waits for your lead. An exchange of conversation you never imagined would ever happen. A moment of exchange between both of you, where you have reached a stage of understanding. The pain of constant strategy, baby steps and the goals it results in, have all been worth it.

As you walk into the bakery isle, you son points to a cake with no hesitation. With no delay of deciding what to choose. You don’t challenge it, you take the cake he has pointed to, the double tier chocolate cake for twelve, when you cleary know there are only five in your family. It is because of his action. The action you spent months and months working on by physically holding out his arm, placing his fingers in a fist and letting his index finger point at objects.

You then let him carry his cake to the self serve till and push the boundary like you have done so many times before. You pray you are not going to push your son too far, too far that things will fall apart and put you back on the floor in a meltdown situation. But without trying you will never move forward, and you know if it fails, you will learn how to adapt for next time. So you instruct your son to scan his cake. You show him the bar code, and let him wait for the beep. You then direct his finger to the touch screen and you both press “checkout” together, and wait for the last beep as you help him touch the reader with your card. Then you punch the air in triumph, because this simple goal for others, is something you dreamed would never be possible for your boy.

As you walk out the shop you loose control of your emotions when your son, holding his cake, in amplified tone, shouts “Chocolate cake” at the security guard. It is only 07:30am, and that has made that guy’s day.

So this morning we had a sugar breakfast. But today was a day where “No” was not an option!

To all those parents who are unable to take their children anywhere. To the parents who sit on the ground trying to calm down their kicking and screaming child. To those parents who feel they are clueless and lost and drowning.

You are not alone.

Keep trying.

Keep hope.

Keep your head up high.

It may not feel like it now, but you are doing an amazing job. You are helping your children find their way. You are creating a foundation you and your child can build on together.

You will look back at your past self, and never imagine reaching the place you are now.

And who knows what the future has in store!

For us, it will be a chocolate cake breakfast every Saturday! Because I want to start every day like we started off today! And I hope you can too!

We will wait for the light, but until then, I will sit in the dark with you!

The house stank of bleach. A two hour marathon of scrubbing and cleaning. No clutter remained, each piece of rubbish discarded, with papers filed and books returned to their shelves.

But it still wasn’t right.

It was like one of those makeover shows. Looking around my house I could still only see the before shot, the one through the grey filter, no sparkles or brightness surrounded me. I felt defeated, the need to find some control in my life when everything was falling apart, but my world still looked physically dull and uninviting.

A cry came from the other room and with a deep breath, I pushed my feelings down into my stomach, I wiped the tears from my face, smiled a fake smile and walked through to my three year old son who had awoken from a nap on the couch. His cry was the only sound he could make, the only method of asking for attention. There were no words or babbles, unlike my friends children of the same age.

He was non-verbal with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. A diagnosis we had received a few months earlier.

But it was not the diagnosis that had changed my current mental state, it was the lead up to it. It was the constant changes in our lives. The change from the lives we thought we would have, to a life that was spiralling out of control. A new path that we didn’t have the map to. A new set of rules we didn’t know how to follow.

Every day I woke with a fresh positive perspective, with a view that each new day would be better, but it never materialised. Each day grew darker, with feelings and emotions bottled up. The need to not lose strengh or show weakness in a world of comparison at the school gates.

I felt so alone.

No one understood.

My friends led different lives, where their biggest worries were of lost jumpers and water bottles, or what day was PE. Had their child got the right pencil case or whose playdate was next?

My worries were greater. The same things which were routine to everyone else were impossible to me.

I worried about how to leave the house without my son having a meltdown. I worried about whether he would ever speak, whether he would ever understand me, whether he would be able to live an independent life.

I couldnt walk into a shop, an activity centre or a church hall, because they were unfamiliar to my son. I couldn’t bend down to his level and explain, or talk him through it – words were meaningless. They were useless to a boy who didn’t know their meaning. We were foreigners from different worlds.

So as I sat next to him, I cried. The feelings I pushed down had run out of space to hide. My body ached with pain from the overload of emotion, where my world was an entrapment that closed in on me.

The cries of excited children ran past my window, calling after their friends, and it made me feel worse. My son silent next to me, oblivious to what I was feeling.

I felt like I had fallen from a place of control and shattered into a million pieces. But somehow I had held it all together whenever in public. No one who understood, and I had not allowed them in to understand.

As I cried alone in my front room, the front door opened. My husband stood in the doorway and without words approached me and took me in his arms. He didn’t tell me it would be alright. He didn’t tell me we would get through it. All those words had been said before and were being said without even saying them.

But he said he was there with me. We were in it together, and he would sit in the dark with me. And we would make it.

And we have.

We have come out that grey. The world took a while to get its glimmer back. It took time for us to work out that path and find the way.

Parenting the special needs way is hard. I know that because I do it, and will continue to do it.

It starts out dark, but it does get brighter, and as longs as you are willing to invite others in, they will sit in the dark with you.

You don’t need to sit in that dark alone.
There are many of us here to do that with you.

⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫

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Milestones Worth Celebrating!

I remember standing in a gymnastic hall. All the equipment surrounded me, the parallel bars, beam, trampolines and other strange equipment that I don’t know the name of.

Others were energetically lunging themselves into the foam pit, or doing fancy somersaults on the trampoline.

Kids ran around us joining in with the toddlers open floor session. Some joined in with the songs and their corresponding actions that were being enacted on the open floor. Others were energetically lunging themselves into the foam pit, or doing fancy somersaults on the trampoline.

As parents followed their children around the different pieces of apparatus, I could overhear a parent next to me. Her little girl was about two, and carefully tackling the well thought out obstacle course that had been setup by one of the instructors. Her mother held her hand as she walked over the soft mat up to the low ground-level beam. “Come on darling” she said “you can do it”.

The little girl was nervous but reluctantly put her first foot forward, the only stability she had was from her arms which she spanned out on either side of herself to distribute her weight. As she took each step, she came closer and closer to the other end of the beam. Her mother slowly walked next to her, judging if she was going to make it, ready to grab her hand if the wobble became a potential slip or fall.

The mother watched her daughter’s every step, but she only watched with one eye, because her other eye was on the rest of the room. She checked to see if anyone else was witnessing this achievement in the making. Her daughter was in her element, she was reaching a milestone worthy of an applause.

As the little girl took her last step and accomplished the great feat, her mother lifted her in the air, and slightly louder than required said “Well done, you are amazing” then swung her around and looked for the next opportunity for success.

I turned away from this celebratory event and stared down at Rhys. He sat on the floor oblivious to all the people, children and noise around him. I followed his line of slight across the wide open space and up the wall about ten meters away from him. Half way up was a white clock, the numbers one to twelve around the edge.

Out of all the activities, entertainment, and gymnastic equipment, he had chosen the item that had the least relevance to the situation, but an item that meant more to him than any of the things that surrounded him.

I had no hope of getting Rhys to walk a beam like that little girl. I had no ability to even get him to engage with the room. The clock on the wall was his only interest, not the ability to display his achievements of somersaults or dismounts off a low beam.

Since this situation about five years ago, I have overheard many milestones being celebrated by parents. They are being celebrated in parks, play centres and all across social media. A video of a child’s first words, or a little boy initiating a pee all by himself behind a tree because he knew he needed to go!

Rhys is accomplishing so many things, but often I feel that I don’t have enough words to describe the mountain we have climbed to achieve them. It is so hard to explain the feeling when Rhys runs down an unknown path for the first time, or he says “drawing”, taking a pen in his hand with no reluctance, or he understands a simple command like “pass me that book!”

… to others it just doesn’t seem to be as bigger deal to them as it is to you.

It is a feeling of wanting to shout it from the roof tops. It is not like the mother in gymnastics who secretly invites you to share in the accomplishment. In contrast, you want to fly a banner through the sky and publish it in a newspaper. But to others it just doesn’t seem to be as bigger deal to them as it is to you. Their children did all these things as part of their ongoing development. They are not milestones they recorded or celebrated. They just happened!

But that doesn’t matter because they are not their child’s achievements. They are Rhys’ achievements. They are the result of hard work, and I have realised that I don’t need the acceptance from others to confirm that they are worthy of a bottle of champagne, because I know what we have gone through to achieve them. He may have taken a bit longer or a lot longer to get there. But it is not a race, we all do it in our own time.

There is no need to look to others for acceptance that something is worthy of celebrating. We all know that feeling inside when something remarkable happens, and when I look at Rhys, I know deep down he is celebrating with me too.

🕝🕑🕧🕣🕞🕜🕟🕢🕥🕙🕦🕚🕠

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The Life of a Special Needs Parent

Special needs parents lead different lives.

We spend a life of searching. Sifting through websites, articles, picking up rogue posts off social media, or a snippet of information from a conversation. Information which will change things for our children going forward.

In the begining we quickly realised that there was no special parenting guide or resource base where everything was waiting for us. You had to find it, and they hide it so well, scattering it in a multitude of places!

We lead a life of fighting

We lead a life of fighting. Fighting the authorities for the best support and education for our children, and then fighting to keep that support. We fight for a referral, and then have to wait months, sometimes years to get the services we deserve, to only get pushed aside with a written report ready to file away with the others.

Our children are discharged from speech and language specialists when they are still unable to communicate or speak a single word, leading to new fight to keep what you were promised.

The documentation is endless. Multiple write-ups of our child’s development, always in a negative tone, visually showing in black and white, all the things our children cannot do, rather than the difficulties that have overcome or the amazing barriers they have smashed down.

We hold legal documents which define the education to be delivered to our children, and then fight the schools to deliver it. Education that is published as free for all, but really it is just for those where it is easy to cater for.

We lead lives of staring and comments. A life where we stand out because our children are louder than others, or attract attention to themselves by shuttle runs up and down supermarket isles or getting super excited at a moving piece of equipment, their hands flapping in a overload of euphoria.

We communicate differently, in ways we have had to research, try, fail and then finally succeed with. Stooping down to our child’s level and holding up pictures or round coloured traffic light cards, to help them understand what is next or about to end.

Stares come from those parents who can just shout for their kids to follow, confused at why we don’t just tell our children through voice commands about what to do. They hold their heads up high thinking they are better parents that us – but we know different, we know how far we have come.

We have to contend with angry parents whose children have been pushed, hit or kicked by our child. We try to articulate that the reason wasn’t out of violence, but rather a form of non-verbal communication, or frustration or sensory overload. We continuously voice our apologies for something out of our control. But those parents don’t listen, they just want justice for their hard, a hard that is so much different to ours. So we start to avoid those places, we steer clear of those people.

We know all about sensory overload, an area which meant nothing to us before. We learn how to help our children manage it, how to notice the signs and places to avoid. It becomes a central reason for the way our children act and how we coordinate everything we do.

Our children can’t go to all the places.

Because our children can’t go to all the places. Some places are too over-whelming. It could be a birthday party, or a catch-up at a play centre, or an unknown location you don’t have a picture for. We decline these places because we know the potential outcome. We know it may not be pretty.

We are however parents who make our own rulebooks. We create new goals for our children, milestones you will never find in professional checklists or folders. We punch the air in jubilation when our children manage to zip up their coats after years of hard work, through the use of strategies and techniques we have mastered along the way.

We high five our partners, keeping our celebrations within our tribe.

We high five our partners when we watch as our child follows a verbal instruction, because we have had years of them not understanding, just sitting blank faced at our request.

We keep our celebrations with our tribe, the parents who know the same struggles. Because there are no words to explain the feeling when your child finally says their first word, years after the rule book said they should. Other parents are past that stage, that phase was years ago, when their children were also celebrating their first step or ball throw. They have moved onto newer and bigger things.

We feel the loneliness, the separation from other families. We talk about our hard to those who understand, because only by living through it, do you know how hard it actually is.

But our children are still here. They may not be meeting the expectations of society, but they are exceeding all of ours!

Special needs parents are taking each day at a time. They are fighting for their kids. They are advocating for their children’s conditions and pushing for inclusion in a world which cuts them off.

And while we do that our children will continue to grow and develop in their own way…

Because..

…the world doesn’t define what our children are to become, our children define the world they want it to be.

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