“We get by with a little help from our friends”-The Beatles
Dan shared his thoughts on Jeffrey’s sports night experience last week and now it is my turn.
The ENTIRE event two words kept coming into my thoughts…HELPING HANDS. If you look at some of the pictures you can see all the times I captured a fellow student or faculty member literally touching Jeffrey and guiding him through an activity.
It seems so simple, yet it is so profound. They were using skills that Jeffrey’s therapists taught us through years of therapy, to not only give him verbal cues but to also use touch as an additional stimuli to reinforce behaviors or encourage action. Jeffrey tends to get “stuck” (motor planning issues) and simple verbal cues are impossible for him to comprehend much less put into action. When he is stuck we can become incredibly frustrated, “come on…let’s go…MOVE…”, but this frustration only makes his “stuckness” worse, he literally becomes frozen and our frustrations rise. We begin to circle the drain into the abyss of ineffective parenting and general family unhappiness, we all feel it and it is awful.
But if we remember to do the opposite of our impulses, to speak gently and simply, and to use the power of touch to gently move him into action-that is where the magic happens. Here is where we see the “click”, we can tell he is hearing and processing what we are asking him to do. It all starts with us and our toolset, and the students and faculty that night knew exactly what to do to support Jeffrey. Maybe they are trained, or maybe it was innate, but for me it was an act of pure love and humanity towards our son. One I will never forget!
~Kami
