JKP author Cara Koscinski MOT, OTR/L, The Pocket Occupational Therapist for Families of Children With Special Needs, explains how play can benefit your special needs child. Occupational Therapy, Developing Skills Through Play Occupational therapists are fortunate enough to be a critical part of the treatment team for children with special needs.   Any difficulties children may…

JKP author Barbara Bissonnette (The Complete Guide to Getting a Job for People with Asperger’s Syndrome: Find the Right Career and Get Hired) gives tips about navigating the job search for individual’s with AS in a new article featured in the Metro New York by Bruce Walsh: “What’s the difference between writing a career book…

“[This] is not a book about disease but about finding solutions according to different ways of gaining back one’s physical, emotional and psychological energy balance. For many, it is also a path towards empowerment and finding a new meaning in daily activities.”

“One orthopedist operated on a boy without my knowledge on a Friday afternoon. Fortunately, the mother and grandmother knew I had insisted that physical therapy should be started immediately. The child’s school physical therapist was a friend and made house calls over the weekend, so the boy would not stay in bed. He was able walk for several more years because of this. Thus, parents and grandparents must be very aggressive in order to be sure that appropriate orthopedic surgery is being done and physical therapy received, as needed.”

“Underachieving children typically don’t feel connected. The process of training children to reframe their visual connectedness with the world is not only about vision. It is about utilizing vision to reframe the relationship between children’s inner reality and their external reality. Vision is merely the vehicle, the classroom, the training ground. The true benefits accrue when a child, perhaps your son or daughter, takes what he or she has achieved in the safe and nurturing environment of therapy and applies it to the outside world. It is then that a child’s entire sense of who they are and what they are capable of, has been modified for the better.”

“Person-centred thinking and planning helps people think about all the resources available to them, and then helps them and the people who support them use those resources to their full effect. It makes every penny of funds they receive – either from public or private sources – stretch so much further. When money is tight, it is even more important to use resources as effectively as possible. And what better resource is there than what a person (or those close to them) believes is important to them and works well for them and what they want for their lives? We can’t afford not to listen to people well and to act on this information.”

By Charlotte E. Thompson, MD, author of Grandparenting a Child with Special Needs. Over the years, many grandparents have contacted me about how to be sure a grandchild with obvious muscle weakness received a correct diagnosis. Unfortunately, misdiagnosis often occurs because there are no diagnostic tests for many neuromuscular disorders and not enough pediatric neuromuscular experts…

JKP is exhibiting at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Jessica Kingsley took a few minutes between meetings to talk about why we attend this major international event, and to highlight some of the things we’ve been talking about.

“I have so many memorable experiences of using Developmental Drama: Someone’s face full of laughter and sheer joy when their name is ‘drummed’ to a climax in the warm-up…The sudden, unexpected and totally right response to a new event in the story…A whole group of children with multi-sensory impairment huddled together, looking upwards in wonder at a new and bright ‘hole in the sky!’ It goes on and on. I am a very lucky person.”

We are thrilled to announce that several JKP books have been honoured in ForeWord Magazine’ Book of the Year Awards, which were established to bring increased attention to the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors. Dr Darold Treffert’s Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant won…