Meditation Can Provide Perspective to Parents of Children with Special Needs

From Huffington Post's Eden Kozlowski, Founder and CEO of Just Be Meditation.

I am the mother of a child with special needs. My daughter is 11 and was born with her brain's prefrontal lobe not fully developed. The condition is called pachygyria. If you Google it (which is the first thing I did when we were given our official diagnosis), you will be presented with a stifling litany of sites professing the medical challenges and potentially dire possibilities.

The current reality for my daughter: She is physically agile but has fairly extensive learning delays and mood highs/lows... and, at this point, we are seizure-free.

Now, on the other side of my life, I am a long-term practitioner and teacher of meditation and mindfulness. With all of the challenges presented with my daughter, I can honestly say that this practice has been my saving grace. I've had periods of anger and deep frustration but never to the point of sheer depression or hopelessness. Every time I felt like I was at a point of no return, it always pulled me forward with new direction, hope and perspective.

Don't Stop Believin'

From Autism After 16's Liane Kupferberg Carter.

Two days before our 19-year-old son Mickey leaves for sleep away camp, he asks to get a haircut.

No big deal, right? But 15 years ago this would have been unthinkable.
Back then, the barbershop was the scene of some of our worst parenting moments. By 8:00 in the morning of the Dreaded Haircut Day, my husband Marc would already be muttering, “I need a scotch before I can do this”—and he doesn’t even drink scotch.

What Is the Real Picture of Autism?

A few weeks back Lisa Belkin, a wonderful writer, had a piece on a New York Times blog about the recent study addressing the stress parents of children with autism experience. Well, this article has generated much attention and created some interesting comments.

Here is the original column
The University of Washington released a study earlier this month concluding that being the mother of a child with autism is more stressful than being the mother of a child with other kinds of developmental disabilities. One reader’s first reaction to this news was “I could have told you that,” because her son, who is five, has Asperger’s syndrome, and his condition rules much of her life.
Then she read the report, and became angry. Its description of life with a child who has autism was sanitized and simplified, she thought. In part that’s because the words that exist in the English language fall short in evoking what she calls “the nightmare.”

Here is a response written by Lisa Jo Rudy, of about.com, the mother of a teen on the spectrum.

Be sure to scroll down and check out the comments.

The Stress of Autism

Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times interviews Annette Estes, Associate Director at the University of Washington Autism Center and the center's recent study about how parents of children with autism spectrum disorders experience more and a different type of stress than parents of children with other developmental disabilities. Be sure to check out the comments on The Times' page, and share yours with us.