Parents' Corner
Believing in Your Child
I have been thinking a lot lately about what makes parents successful in working with their children. Often, it is the family that sees their children who use AAC be successful first. Often, families get children to do things that the professionals don’t’ believe possible.
If it were knowledge that made success happen, then the people who were trained to work with children with special needs would be the most successful, because they generally start out with more training in working with children with disabilities.
Though parents do love their children, it’s hard to believe that love, by itself, is the deciding factor, because there are successful professionals who don’t love the children they work with like parents do.
So what makes the difference?
I would suggest that the key is found in the first paragraph of this article, “the professionals don’t believe possible”. It is belief in the potential of our kids that makes the difference.
Parents have an incredible ability to believe that our kids will amount to something. At times that belief is rooted in nothing more than hope that it can happen. I was in a room full of Speech Pathologists some years back, and I listened to a discussion I will never forget. The SLP’s were discussing how to tell parents that their child would never go to college, or even learn to read. One wise SLP said to the rest, “We don’t need to tell the parents that. Simply say, ‘ If you want your child to go to college, this is the next step.’ It’s not our job to take away their belief in their child. ”
That speech pathologist knew something very important about the power of parents. When parents believe in their child, good things happen!
What does the simple act of believing in our kids do for them?
When we believe that our kids will someday be skillful communicators, we expect communication out of them. We expect that when they are gesturing and saying words on their AAC system that seem unrelated, there is a purpose behind them. Even when we’re struggling to understand our children, we are confident that THEY know what they want to tell us! We call this the dumb grown up syndrome at our house. The child is trying hard to communicate something, the parents believe that something is being said, but can’t for the life of them figure out what it is! But the simple act of believing that there is something to be communicated helps our kids to hone their skills so that eventually they can communicate anything to anyone who will listen.When we as parents don’t set limits on our kids’ potential we free our minds to figure out HOW our kids can learn the skills they need, instead of wasting our energy on grief because we believe that they can’t. For busy parents of children with significant disabilities, this is an incredible bonus—none of us have time to waste on grief!
The other thing that happens because we continue to believe in our kids is that we have expectations of them. “I expect you to communicate to me, and if you choose to yell instead, you will find yourself in time out.”
There is no more perfect example of the power of a parent’s belief in her child than this recent picture sent to me by a parent. For years, Mom has insisted that her child CAN learn to read. The school district has told mom that the potential simply isn’t there. This mom refused to stop believing and began to take advantage of little moments to start teaching. In the car, Mom began to spell out, “Bus. B-u-s, “ every time they saw a bus.
After a while of spelling this in the car, mom was fixing dinner one night, and noticed that her daughter was saying something as she played with her alphabet tiles. Her daughter had used her alphabet tiles to spell the word bus, and was saying, “bus. B-u-s. bus” as she worked!
Because Mom believed that it was possible, she found a way to begin to make it happen. All over the world, parents are believing in their children. And amazing things are happening! Never forget the power of believing!
I always value your feedback. parents@aacinstitute.org.
