Effective ways to bond with YOUR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILD

As a parent of a special needs child, I struggled for four years to find ways to bond with him and teach him right from wrong, socially acceptable behaviour, and honestly, to also get time for myself.

- SHIREEN JOANNA

Until one day, it dawned on me that none of the experts we had consulted with knew what to do either! The experts had great information on how to manage his symptoms and regulate behaviour. But when it came to practical application and tailored advice for a specific situation and unique child, they fell short.

This is because experts don’t have what parents have — time with the child. When I realized this, I decided to use time as a force multiplier, to enable my nine-year-old son Jacob to realise his full potential. And as I began to use our daily time together to observe and learn, I discovered the following strategies helped me build a bridge across bafflement and chaos, and bond with my son.

Convert time into experiences. In a child with multiple diagnoses, only the parent/primary caregiver knows which diagnosis has the upper hand at a moment in time. On a recent trip to Bangalore, India, I discovered that the flamboyant yet humble Indian auto rickshaw helped me understand my son better. Although autism is his primary diagnosis, he also has ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). His desperate need for stimulation and constant movement was satisfied, time and again, by an auto rickshaw ride and he began to seek out such rides, at any cost. This goal overrode the tendency of his autism diagnosis to avoid overstimulation. The ADHD in him effectively pushed the autism aside, in favor of thrill seeking. It was fascinating to see the conflicting interplay of two different diagnoses and how the secondary one took over. As you spend time with your child, look for off-the-beaten-path clues (such as the autorickshaw, in my case), that could reveal more about the dynamics of your child’s personality and how these dynamics play out in their behaviour and desires.