Category: Parenting
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Therapeutic Parenting: Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable!
Of course not. Caregivers are themselves humans that bring their own experiences into the relationship and family space. We don’t need to be “perfect” all of the time. In fact, perfection should never be the point or the goal. As Dr. Tina Payne Bryson mentions, “Our kids need us to be imperfectly perfect.” When we show…
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Without Restraint: How Skiing Saved My Son’s Life
As a toddler, Ryan had difficulty controlling his emotions and was placed in a therapeutic school that relied on detrimental methods of behavior modification, such as physical restraint. Over the next four years, he was restrained hundreds of times at school, and we were advised to restrain him at home. He was also heavily medicated…
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Corporal punishment has no place in a civilized society
The Cassville School District in Missouri has decided to bring back corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is a form of punishment intended to cause physical pain to a person in response to undesirable behavior. In the case of Cassville School District, physical pain will be inflicted on students of all ages with a paddle. According to the Superintendent,…
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Safety First: A quick start guide for parents working to keep their kids safe from restraint, seclusion, suspension, and expulsion
When I held each of my two kids as newborns, I promised to keep each of them as safe as possible. I know that the world isn’t fair and that no parent can (or should) shield their children from all of life’s difficulties, but I thought that since I had a relatively safe childhood, I…
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An Avoidable Crisis: The Unlucky Ones (Part 2)
Dr. Ross Greene refers to kids with “lucky behaviors” and those with” unlucky behaviors.” Kids with lucky behaviors are often more capable of “using words” to describe their feelings. These kids often pout, cry, whine, withdraw, and these lucky behaviors usually get them empathy from the caregiver. This is why they are thought of as…
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Our Road to Augmentative Alternative Communication (AAC)
When I think back to the long road that we’ve been down when it comes to augmentative and alternative communication and using an AAC device, it’s unreal. When a speech-language pathologist (SLP) tells you that it will take a child 2-3 years to begin to grasp this new language, much like learning any language during…
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No laws in Nebraska, leads to abuse of seclusion and restraint
Our nation’s schools use seclusion rooms for students as young as five-years old. They don’t call them that of course. It doesn’t sound nice to call them what they are. They sometimes call them alternative learning rooms. Let me pose a question here – how much ‘learning’ can take place in a padded room with…
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“It hurts, please let go” stories of restraint and seclusion in North Dakota
enforcement or SROs in the school setting that may not be credentialed to work with kids. I am concerned that there is zero representation of tracking circumstances for these children charged by SROs or School Districts that address specifically the lack of fidelity to the legal binding contract of the child’s IEP (Individual Educational Plan)…
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My Child Can’t Talk. How Will I Know if Someone’s Hurting Him at School?
My son is autistic and has a significant intellectual disability. He attends middle school in a self-contained classroom. Recently, we learned that one of his classmates was physically restrained by staff 33 times in a period of 8 weeks — at least once to the point of unconsciousness — without report to the child’s parents.…
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Respectful parenting, my journey
As a mother to 6 children, I have witnessed my share of the ups and downs in child-rearing. However, shortly after my 4th son was born I knew there was something missing and it wasn’t in him – it was in me. I was unsure of how to handle his sensitivities and dysregulated emotions. He…