El Brown, M.Ed., Author at Early Intervention Strategies for Success

Emerging Parenthood: Trust the Process – Don’t Rush the Process

El is an educator, entrepreneur, author, and PhD candidate specializing in Early Childhood Education/Early Childhood Special Education at George Mason University. Prior to leaving the traditional classroom, El served as an Elementary and Early Childhood Educator in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. She is the founder of KinderJam, an Early Childhood Education care, enrichment, and training agency. Above all, El is the proud mother of an 11-year-old son on the autism spectrum, affectionately known as SuperDuperKid (SDK). El can be reached at elbrown@kinderjam.com.

The post Self-Actualization: Hello, I am the Parent of a Child with Disabilities appeared first on Early Intervention Strategies for Success.

Normalization – The Hope Phase

El Brown, M.Ed. — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 11:47:46 +0000

We are nearing the end of our discussion on the levels of awareness of parents of young children with disabilities. We have explored the ostrich phase – a time when a parent has a lack of awareness about disabilities and may not recognize the characteristics of a disability displayed by their child. Additionally, we have examined the phase of special designation – the stage at which parents have, through some transformational experience, recognized that their child indeed has a disability, and will require some additional assistance form a service provider to maximize their personal potential.

Third Level of Awareness: Normalization

Today, we are going to explore and discuss a parent’s third level of awareness – Normalization. As the extremely proud mother of a pre-teen on the autism spectrum, who amazes me daily, I think of normalization as the “Hope Phase.” In this third phase of awareness, the parents minimize differences between their child and his or her typically developing classmates and siblings. They emphasize the need for normalization in their child’s life so that it begins to look like that of other children their age.

At first glance, the normalization phase may look like a step backward, given the fact that the parent fought for special services and accommodation during the previous stage, special designation. However, this attempt to “normalize” the child is simply a part of the process.

Imagine this.

A family is blessed with a child with disabilities. Then, the parents must face all that they don’t understand about their child’s disability and how to raise and care for a child with additional needs. Then, the parents must accept and recognize they need help in providing their child all that he needs to maximize his personal potential. Finally, they realize that having a child with a disability is not a short-term episode. Instead, this is their life, their new normal.

That’s a lot to process.

How does one begin to merge the values, beliefs, hopes and dreams of their family’s “old normal” with their family’s “new normal” of loving, raising, and caring for a child with disabilities?

Trust me. It takes a lot of faith and hope.

Faith and hope that one day your family will again achieve homeostasis and some semblance of smooth sailing or normalcy.

A Parent’s Theory of Hope

After living in the triage and fight modes indicative of the ostrich phase and special designation, things are beginning to calm down during the normalization phase. The parent is beginning to find her rhythm. She is beginning to visualize her version of the future for her child. She is beginning to think, “My child and our family just might be okay.” Therefore, in her mind hope develops – hope for her child and hope for her child’s future.

Now, she must have the faith to test her theory of hope.

The clearest example of this stage of hope was detailed to me during a discussion with service providers at one of my workshops in Atlanta, GA.

The preschool team and parents had worked together with a four-year-old who required some assistance to walk. The preschooler got a walker and had confidently learned how to maneuver about the school with her walker. However, for preschool graduation, her mom was adamant that her child was not to use the walker to walk across the stage. Instead, she wanted her daughter to walk across the stage with the assistance of a teacher.

The preschool team pushed back.

But the mom didn’t budge.

The preschool team saw this as denial.

But this was actually normalization.

One the greatest motivators of parents of young children with disabilities is hope. In that moment, that mother may have needed to see her child walk across the preschool stage with assistance, but without the walker, to envision her child walking across the stage for graduation from high school or college. Regardless of if you see the goal or hope as unrealistic, don’t squelch hope. That hope will power a parent forward long after your time with that family has expired.

How Can You Help?

If parents don’t have the faith to test hope, how can we expect them to keep working with their child to assist their child in maximizing his or her personal potential?

If parents don’t believe gaps can be minimized, what is there to motivate a parent to continue to advocate for inclusion and opportunities for his or her child with disabilities?

During the normalization phase, parents are strengthening their advocacy and cheerleading voices for their child and their families. You can help with this. How? Simply give a parent a small win that will offer huge motivation. If, as a team, you try it and it doesn’t work yet, at least you have shown the parents that you listened to their hopes for the child and you support and encourage the family and their goals for the child’s future.

I cannot say it enough. Hope is the single greatest motivator for a parent’s continued work with his or her child with disabilities. Hope gets us up in the morning. Hope propels us to try new things with our children. While “normalization” is the word that is used, my interpretation of this phase is the onset of hope for quality of life and well-being for my child with disabilities in a world where he is in a marginalized population. And because of my faith to test my hope, my child AMAZES me daily!

Have you ever encountered parents who had, what you would consider, unrealistic developmental goals for their child with disabilities?

Given the new information you have about the normalization phase, how would give that parent reliable information about the characteristics of the child’s disability while nurturing parental hope?

Check out El’s archived webinar: Mama Bear: Using Parent Narratives and Experience to Improve Engagement Practices

Be sure to read the other posts in this series:

Self-Actualization: Hello, I am the Parent of a Child with Disabilities

The post Normalization – The Hope Phase appeared first on Early Intervention Strategies for Success.

Special Designation: A Parent’s Aha Moment

El Brown, M.Ed. — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 11:14:53 +0000

In our previous discussion about the levels of awareness for parents of young children with disabilities, we explored the ostrich phase – a time when a parent has a lack of awareness about disabilities and may not recognize the characteristics of a disability displayed by their child.

Today, we are going to explore and discuss a parent’s second level of awareness – Special Designation. As a parent of a child with disabilities, I like to think of Special Designation as the “Aha Phase.” In this second stage of awareness, parents have, through some transformational experience, recognized that their child indeed has a disability and will require additional assistance from a service provider to maximize his or her personal potential. This transformational experience may come in the form of a quiet realization. Or, a question is asked by a teacher, trusted friend, or family member, such as, “Johnny isn’t talking yet. What do you think about that?”

During this phase, the parent may begin seeking guidance from service providers. “Sally is not walking yet and she is almost two. Her sister started walking before she was one. I’m worried. What should I do?” The parent’s rationale during Special Designation is if there is a “problem” with my child’s development, then surely there are professionals who can fix this problem. At this time in the parent’s journey, the parent is looking for support from a more knowledgeable other in the area of disabilities.

That more knowledgeable other is you.

My Experience in Special Designation

Let me share with you my own experience in Special Designation as a new parent of a child with disabilities.

In 2008, I found myself home alone with my 17-month son. My husband was deployed to Iraq and I busied myself caring for our son in his absence. Early during the deployment, I had experienced what would be my third and final miscarriage. After the miscarriage, I chose to stay home with my baby and try to process the sorrow I was feeling. Therefore, I didn’t engage with friends and neighbors for playdates and outings. My son and I had always been extremely social. Since he was four weeks old, we attended Parent and Me classes, enjoyed daily outings with friends, and went on weekend excursions with Dad. Language was all around us. People were always talking. I was always talking. I was always narrating for him. So, in my mind, he was talking, too. We had an intuitive language, Therefore, without realizing it, I compensated for the words my son never spoke.

However, with the absence of people and talking around us, I began to notice something that I had not fully acknowledged before. My son wasn’t talking. If I wasn’t talking, there was complete silence. There was absolutely no conversation in the house. None at all. I talked, and my baby listened, at least I thought he was listening. But I knew for certain, he wasn’t making any attempts to speak to me. This was my single greatest “Aha” moment as a parent of child with disabilities and the catalyst for action.

Unsure of what to do or how I felt about my son’s lack of language, I made an appointment with my son’s pediatrician. When I took him to the doctor, I said, “My son’s not speaking. He has a couple of words that he says, like ‘hi,’ ‘bye,’ and ‘touchdown,’ but he’s not making any attempts to communicate with me.” The pediatrician examined my son—healthy eyes, ears, and heart. The pediatrician then said to me, “Children develop at different rates. Just keep doing what you’re doing, mom—you’re doing a great job.” Then he gave us a sticker.

I was devastated. Do you know how much strength it took for me to make that appointment, ask for help, and say out loud to someone that I think there is something going on with my child that I don’t know how to fix?

A lot.

Fortunately, I had the skill set and agency to advocate for my son and his needs immediately and I didn’t stop until I found service providers who could best support my child and his needs.

What You Can Do

However, parents come to service providers from different pathways. It is essential as service providers take the time to listen to parents so that every parent has the opportunity to share the details of their concerns. And while a disability cannot be “fixed”, you can assure parents that you are here to walk with them through this journey and together you, with the family’s input, will figure out a way forward.

Special Designation is a step forward as the parent is actively looking for help. Consequently, this phase requires patience and a listening ear from service providers as the parent processes the realization that their most precious child has a disability. Special Designation is a turning point that parents reach before the family begins to establish their “new normal” as a family of a child with disabilities.

As an early interventionist, you are in an opportune position to work with parents during the Special Designation phase as you empower and equip parents with useful skills and strategies that will enable them to best assist the continued development of their young child with disabilities.

Have you ever encountered a parent who had the expectation for you to “fix” their child?

Given the new knowledge you have about Special Designation, how would you respond to that parent now?

Be sure to read the other posts in this series:

Emerging Parenthood: Trust the Process – Don’t Rush the Process

Self-Actualization: Hello, I am the Parent of a Child with Disabilities

Check out El’s archived webinar too: Mama Bear: Using Parent Narratives and Experience to Improve Engagement Practices

El is an educator, entrepreneur, author, and PhD student specializing in Early Childhood Education/Early Childhood Special Education at George Mason University. Prior to leaving the traditional classroom, El served as an Elementary and Early Childhood Educator in the United States, Japan, and South Korea. She is the founder of KinderJam, an Early Childhood Education care, enrichment, and training agency. Above all, El is the proud mother of an 11-year-old son on the autism spectrum, affectionately known as SuperDuperKid (SDK). El can be reached at elbrown@kinderjam.com

The post Special Designation: A Parent’s Aha Moment appeared first on Early Intervention Strategies for Success.

Levels of Awareness: The Ostrich Phase

El Brown, M.Ed. — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 14:05:15 +0000

As an early interventionist, you are in a help giving profession and you want to ensure that you are offering families help that is relevant to the family’s needs. You can achieve that goal by meeting parents where they are when you first engage with them and build from there.

A large component of meeting parents where they are is being able to identify and understand what you are seeing when you engage with the parent. When you work with parents of young children with disabilities, you are operating in a very intimate space in a family’s life.

You have been granted the privilege to witness some very raw and real emotions. As early interventionists, you spend time with parents who are processing and adapting to life during and after the traumatic parental experience of discovering their child requires additional assistance to maximize their personal potential. Most seasoned early intervention professionals are skilled at identifying these emotions, which are often tied to a process known as the stages of grief. However, the emotions that you witness during a parent’s evolution through this emotional development walk hand in hand with a parent’s progression of knowledge and understanding of characteristics of their child’s disability and the support needed to assist their child’s development. This process of knowing is identified as a parent’s levels of awareness.

Levels of Awareness

Parents of children with disabilities have four levels of awareness (Ulrich & Bauer,2003):

The Ostrich Phase
Special Designation
Normalization
Self-actualization

In this post, we are going to discuss the first level of awareness, The Ostrich Phase.

What do ostriches do?

Stick their heads in the sand, unaware of the surroundings.

The first level of awareness is actually a lack of awareness. Parents, who spend time in The Ostrich Phase, typically had very little experience with disability when they were growing up and may have little or no information about disabilities as an adult.

Remember, as the professional, you have the content knowledge. You have a pretty solid idea of what you are looking at, regarding development characteristics. However, parents may not initially have the information or awareness that allows them to identify characteristics in their child that seem very apparent to you. Some parents are completely unaware of the characteristics of disabilities in young children. They have been gifted with this precious child and they really don’t know what they are looking at just yet.

It is common for professionals to identify this level of awareness as denial, as it is at times paired with comments such as the following:

“My mother in law said my husband didn’t speak until he was five years old, and he’s fine now. He’s a doctor. She’s a slow starter like her dad.”

“He plays well with his brothers. He’s just hasn’t warmed up to preschool yet.”

“He’s just super active. So, he may not be stimulated by the activities offered at the preschool. I think he’s bored and acting out.”

“It’s a phase. We are just going to give her time to grow out of it.”

“Are you implying that there is something wrong with my kid? He’s just fine.”

While it may appear that parents are denying “the truth” or evidence and characteristics that seem apparent to you, they are simply operating on a level of awareness that has not exposed them to the information that you have. During The Ostrich Phase, parents are not yet able to see their child through the lens that your content knowledge enables you to see the developmental characteristics of their child. Therefore, the parent’s truth is based on the information they have. Consequently, the parent may truly believe “everything is just fine.”

So, sometimes it isn’t denial you are witnessing, but simply the evidence of things unknown – a lack of awareness.

Be Patient…It’s the Process

You may get a little push back during this phase, if you bring a parent information about the child that he or she had not yet considered.

Be prepared.
It’s not you.
It’s not the parent.
It’s the process.

Be patient with your families, as parents of young children with disabilities are developing in preparation for a lifelong journey of parenting their precious child. You have the honor of assisting them in this most sacred space.

Is there a time in your practice that you believe you may have mistook The Ostrich Phase for denial?

If so, considering your new knowledge, how would you engage differently during a similar encounter with a family now?

Check out El’s archived webinar: Mama Bear: Using Parent Narratives and Experience to Improve Engagement Practices

Be sure to read the other posts in this series:

Emerging Parenthood: Trust the Process – Don’t Rush the Process

Self-Actualization: Hello, I am the Parent of a Child with Disabilities

Reference:
Ulrich, M. E., & Bauer, A. M. (2003). Levels of awareness: A closer look at communication
between parents and professionals. Teaching Exceptional Children, 35(6), 20-24. Retrieved from https://search-proquest- com.mutex.gmu.edu/docview/201180599?accountid=14541

The post Levels of Awareness: The Ostrich Phase appeared first on Early Intervention Strategies for Success.

Emerging Parenthood: Trust the Process – Don’t Rush the Process

El Brown, M.Ed. — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 13:09:30 +0000

While working through the emotions that come with parenting a child with disabilities, there was also a steep learning curve. A journey of awareness that I had to go through in preparation to parent my child. As the mother of a child with disabilities, my journey has included emotions that many professionals would easily recognize as elements in the stages of grief. However, while navigating that spectrum of emotions, I also experienced a continuum of awareness as I gained knowledge about my child and how the disability manifested itself in my child for a lifetime.

My journey of awareness included teaching, nurturing, and advocating for my son. In later years, with additional research, I learned that this process of awareness that I experienced was not an experience that was specific to me. It was a process that emerging parents of children with disabilities experience at the onset of their parenting journey. This process is referred to as a parent’s levels of awareness.

Making Plans for the New Baby

When a family discovers a new baby is on the way, it can be the happiest of times. So much hope, so many dreams for the future of this new life. A baby, while still in the womb, becomes very real to the parents.

They begin to make plans for their child. Not just plans for the immediate future, but visions of long term endeavors dance through the minds of parents. They choose a name, then decide the type of person their child will be. They dream about what sport or extracurricular activity the child will participate in…how many friends the child will have…who the child will take to the prom…what college the child will attend…what profession the child will select. Some parents even dream of when their child will be old enough to have a family of his own, so the parents can enjoy being retired and grandparents.

That’s a lot of promise placed on an unborn child. But we, as parents, do it every day. We cast our hope and dreams of the future on very small children. The vision of these hopes and dreams are very real to us.

Discovering the Child’s Disability

Now fast forward three years later and the same parents, who held these very real hopes and dreams for their child in their hearts, find out that their little one is going to need special support, support for needs that will alter the parents’ original vision. This occurrence can throw even the most prepared parent for a loop. Discovering your child has a disability is a parental trauma.

Even for veteran parents, parenting a first child with a disability is a completely new experience. Additionally, if a parent has limited or no prior experience with disabilities, parenting a child with disabilities is unchartered territory with a steep learning curve. However, with support, parents can develop patterns of positive adaptation that will aid in the process of confidently parenting a child with disabilities.

Understanding the Parent’s Journey

That’s where you as early interventionists, come in. You can best assist the families you serve by understanding that this journey of parent understanding and skill building takes time.

In the coming weeks, we will discuss and explore the levels of awareness that emerging parents of children with disabilities experience, as they develop their parenting self-efficacy. This knowledge will help you, as service providers, better understand the process that the parents you serve experience at the beginning of their parenting journey.

Sometimes, early interventionists want parents to hurry up and see the world and their child the way that the interventionist does. I understand. I was guilty of trying to rush my spouse through this process. However, appreciating each stage in a parent’s levels of awareness will illuminate your ability to trust the process – not rush the process.

Remember a parent’s journey of parenting their child with disabilities spans a lifetime. Just like the children you serve, parents, too, take time to develop.

How do you view the role you play in assisting with the development of emerging parents of young children with disabilities?

Check out El’s archived webinar: Mama Bear: Using Parent Narratives and Experience to Improve Engagement Practices

Be sure to read the other posts in this series: