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Understanding Your Young Child with Special Needs

Understanding Your Young Child with Special Needs

Pamela Bartram

Part of the The Tavistock Clinic - Understanding Your Child series

Paperback: £9.99 / $15.95

2007, 234mm x 156mm / 9.25in x 6in, 80pp
ISBN: 978-1-84310-533-6, BIC 2: JMAF VFJD

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Introduction

This book is primarily for parents, although it will also be helpful to any professionals working with babies and pre-school children with special needs. As such, when addressing the reader, it can be assumed that I am addressing parents. The area of special needs brings many parents into contact with a range of professionals, in health, mental health, education, social services and the voluntary sector. At times, I will address the interest of professionals specifically.

The title suggests an intention to inform parents about how to understand their child with special needs and this requires some qualification.

First, as this book is about children, much of it will, of necessity, focus on the ordinariness and not the "special-ness" of the child. In this I hope to counteract a common tendency to focus on disability and special needs at the expense of thinking about the individual child - her personality, family life and the feelings and behaviour which are part of her normal developmental processes. However, I will try to hold a balance between thinking about the tasks and challenges of "ordinary" parenting and those specific to the parents of the young child with special needs. This balancing act mirrors that which parents of young children with special needs have to attempt much of the time.

The second qualification stems from my belief that most parents already have a deep connection with and therefore understanding of their young child with special needs. Nevertheless, their confidence in their own understanding and responses is vulnerable to disruption by factors which come along with the special needs themselves. It can easily appear that other people have the expertise about the child, rather than parents themselves being the experts. One mother ruefully admitted she imagined someone else has "a secret store of answers" to which she wished to gain access! I do not wish to add weight to that idea. I hope, therefore, that intertwined with my own voice, the voices of parents who bring up children with special needs will come through, bringing to this account their knowledge and experience.

The third qualification has to do with the inherent challenge of understanding babies and small children whose minds or bodies are handicapped, to varying degrees, by disability. Just as it is hard for them both to express themselves and make sense of the world, so is it an ambitious task for us to make sense of their experience. An account of children with special needs would be a poor one if it did not acknowledge that inevitably, we sometimes reach the limits of our understanding. Yet in order to feel a properly human connection with the children and with each other as we care for them, we must try to understand.

This book, like the others in the series, is written from a psychoanalytic viewpoint and values the idea, therefore, that powerful feelings and unwanted thoughts, when unacknowledged, can throw spanners in the work of our relationships and endeavours. A fundamental tenet of psychoanalysis is that the more we are able to understand ourselves, the better we can hope to understand and communicate with others. This entails having time and space to notice and reflect on what we are experiencing. That kind of understanding is not the same as the acquisition of facts about conditions. To acknowledge its importance is to emphasize the deeply personal and inherently emotional nature of the complex bonds between self and others and especially between parent and child.

In my experience of working with the parents of young children who have special needs there can be many obstacles which get in the way of this self-reflective activity. Some obstacles are practical, to do with the pressure of the everyday demands associated with a child's special needs. Others have their origins in feelings, especially the fear of being overwhelmed by difficult and frightening feelings. Often there is a mixture of the two.


'One mother of a child recently diagnosed with a severely disabling condition told me she dare not stop and think too long about her feelings. "There are so many appointments to attend, forms to fill in and my other child to care for, I'm afraid that if I start to think about what I am feeling I won't be able to keep going."'


There is a very personal balance to be struck between persevering with the job of parenting, sometimes described by parents of children with special needs in terms of "battling to keep going", and stopping to reflect on your predicament and its impact on you. Families as well as the individuals in them have different ways of managing. However, the depth of parents' relationships with and understanding of their children can be enriched by having the opportunity to understand their own assumptions about as well as their contributions and reactions to their children. This in turn leads to a sense of greater well-being.

This book therefore is not a vehicle for giving instruction or advice. It is, rather, an attempt to reflect on the experience of parenting a young child with special needs, informed by an understanding of child development and of the emotional states of parents and children. I hope this process will free you the reader to find creative ways of parenting which are individual to you and to which you feel emotionally connected.

A final note on the vexed subject of terminology. My colleague, the child psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Valerie Sinason, often commented on how problematic is the terminology of disability. It appears that no words or phrases remain acceptable in our culture for long, no doubt a symptom of our deeper difficulty in living with disability and all it conjures for us. Valerie Sinason's first version of this book, published in 1993, was entitled Understanding Your Handicapped Child, a title which only fourteen years later seems out of date. "Spastic", "Learning Disabled" and "Mentally Handicapped" have all in their turn given way to new terms which for a while seem more acceptable until they too are one day deemed offensive and in need of replacement. As one author puts it, "Old meanings infect new words" (Stoller 1985, p.5).


'One mother told me with feeling that she hates to hear her child described as a "special needs child". She felt he should be described as "a child with special needs". To her, this distinction was very important, emphasizing as it does, first the child and only second the special needs.'


Even now, the term "special needs" will in turn give way to new phrases. For the time being, however, I hope readers will accept my use of the terms "child with special needs" or "child with a disability", with the assurance that they are intended neither to denigrate nor to offend.

All of the stories in this book are based on encounters with real children and their families. However, their identities are disguised to protect their privacy. I will refer to "he" and "she" throughout, with no particular criteria for the use of one form rather than another.