Therapy for Special Needs Parents

While your neurodivergent child’s siblings and friends are likely attending activities, birthday parties, and play dates, you may notice that your special needs child has to miss because of therapies and related services, isn’t invited, or doesn’t want to participate. This could be due to their fear of social situations, trouble with concentration, language delays, emotional dysregulation, or other symptoms related to their special needs.

You might feel unable to shoulder all the tasks and responsibilities required for raising a child with such complexities.  Sometimes you may feel shame for wishing that your child didn’t have these unique challenges—after all, you want to accept them for who they are.

Perhaps you’ve gone above and beyond to get your child help, connecting them with therapists, social workers, and other specialists. Yet in the meantime, your own self-care has gone unaddressed and you’ve been left with little support.

If you could just believe that you are enough for your child, you’d have the confidence to get through the day’s challenges and feel hopeful about your child’s future.  Acknowledging that you need help to support yourself is a great first step.

A lot of parents of neurodivergent children might not feel like their issues are relevant, yet statistics show that they face common difficulties and they could all benefit greatly from support.

In the US, 10-13 percent of children ages six and up are diagnosed with ADHD, and 1 out of 100 children worldwide are autistic.

This number is growing with increasing awareness around autism and experts believe the rate to be substantially higher with one 2020 study estimating that 1 in 36 children aged 8 years has autism.

Furthermore, 15 percent of public school students received special education within the 2021-2022 year (4), and 9 percent of children ages 3 – 17 have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Many people are still unraveling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on anxiety levels, and this could not be more true for the effects it has had on neurodivergent children and by extension, their parents. The effects of the extended lack of school and social activities, combined with the acute and prolonged stress on families may never be fully understood. Parents are nonetheless left to cope with the aftershocks of it, oftentimes without any help in understanding these challenges.

Some challenges parents face as they work through the demands of parenting include continued social stigma and lack of awareness around neurodiverse children. Many parents learn through hard experience that schools are not often equipped for supporting students with special needs who think and learn differently or need additional help. Parents are asked to learn about their kids’ rights in school at the same time they are required to advocate for them.

There is a fine line between knowing when your child requires more support, and when you’re doing all you can for them. Therapy can help parents untangle these complications and provide a helping hand to face each day with confidence.

Many parents feel fearful about their kids’ futures and their abilities to learn, socialize, and live independently and these fears can become overwhelming. Counseling is a place to explore your feelings without fear of judgment and identify where you ruminate and get stuck in negative thoughts and behavior patterns as the parent of a special needs child.

We want to know first and foremost how you are feeling, and give you a space to express yourself and your worries freely. In addition to individual therapy, we offer group support , so parents can feel less alone and isolated as they navigate their parenting journeys. The long-term goal is to help parents develop tools so they can feel more grounded and remain as steady as possible when their children are struggling.

In therapy, we offer a lot of support for the emotional work of parents of special needs children but also work on self-acceptance. We can’t fix everything, and in a lot of cases we learn our kids don’t “need fixing.” We can take in an infinite amount of information on our child’s neurodivergent issues, and we may even make strides in helping them achieve their goals – socially, academically, or otherwise. But this is exhausting to do on your own, especially while you’re trying to manage your own mental health challenges. That’s why therapy is so vital.