June 16, 2019 - Raising World Children

How Parents Can Help Their Children with Speech Disorders

Speech disorders are more prevalent than many think. If you are the parent of a child with one of these disorders, it’s up to you to provide your child with a significant amount of support.

Early intervention is essential to help ensure that a childhood speech impediment doesn’t become a lifelong social barrier for your child. Below are a few ways you can help your child with their speech disorder.

Read with Them

Reading to your child can be incredibly helpful, especially if they have a speech disorder. Though reading is always helpful for instilling a love of language, reading out loud helps to provide a model for how to pronounce words.

This, in turn, can support your child’s ability to speak properly and even provide support for any therapy in which he or she might be enrolled. Having your child read along is an important element, as well. This gives them structured one-on-one feedback on where they need to improve and how to pronounce their words.

Record and Listen

If your child is older, it might be a good idea to let them record their voice. This will allow your child to hear what they sound like, giving the child a chance to focus on areas of weakness and to gauge their progress over their speech problems.

While this isn’t quite as useful for younger children, it can be a great tool for older kids who want to be more involved with their own treatment. This can also help bring greater awareness to your child of where they struggle and what it sounds like when they are speaking correctly.

Singing

Singing lessons can also play a role in helping with speech issues. Speech lessons are more about just hitting the right pitch—they have quite a bit to do with things like volume control, enunciation, and even proper breathing. If your child has difficulty with speech, allowing him or her to take singing lessons may be a way to allow your child to make significant progress. Practicing good breathing, resonance, and pronunciation through singing is a great way for a child to better understand how they can alter the sound and consistency of their speech.

Get Therapy

It’s vital that any child with a speech issue works with a licensed speech therapist. Taking the time to look at therapy solutions for speech issues should help you to find a therapist in your area who can help your child. Early intervention is essential for helping children overcome speech problems before they reach adulthood.

A therapist can help coordinate a variety of therapy methods, including many of the options mentioned above, to address your child’s particular struggle.

If your child has speech problems, do what you can to support him or her. Read to your child, look into singing lessons, and find a good therapist who will help your child to overcome the obstacles that may be in their way. It may take quite a bit of effort, but you’d be surprised by the progress a child can make when they have the right kind of support available.

Being a Parent While Losing One – What No One Knows

He was our lighthouse, my dad. The rock that we could hang on to, at times of storm. We never expected to be shaken up, the way life shook us one day, not this early in our lives. The dreaded phone call came on a regular summer morning. It was their wedding anniversary, the day that we should have been celebrating. Instead, they were rushing off to see a doctor as he had been getting severe headaches. And then began my days of being a parent while losing one.

The doctor took an MRI and asked him to get admitted immediately. They saw bleeding in his brain and dad kept insisting that he felt fine. When the doctors at the hospital said what they said, he told them “,

If you do the things that you are saying, things are not going to be normal for me.” And he was right. The next nine months were the hardest times that a man and his family would face. His life went back and forth between the hospital and home and our lives went back and forth between hope and fear. One phone call took away life as we knew it.

Being a Parent While Losing One

Facing reality…

While our mom was thrown in the midst of full-time care giving, my sister & I had our own share of realities to face. It started with , which one of us could get to them faster and for how long. We both had our own families to take care of, our husband, children, in-laws, all of whom proved to be our rock.

As we went back and forth between our homes and our parent’s residence, we had to contend with the big G, the humongous guilt factor. When we stayed with our parents, we felt bad for our little ones, and when we came back home, we spent sleepless nights worrying about our parents. It was a lose-lose from all ends, or at least it seemed that way. Being a parent while losing one is unimaginable.

Parenting …

The nine months seemed to have passed in a daze. To be honest, as I sit here trying to recollect what kind of parenting I did in those months, I can not point a single moment in time when I did anything great.

But the days did pass by, one day at a time. Lunches were made, kids were dropped off and picked up from their activities, home-works were accomplished, parent-teacher conferences were attended and we managed to stay sane through it all.

Emotional roller coaster…

However, even the little ones had to experience their share of emotional upheavals. Though my younger one was not fully aware of what was going on with his grandpa, he had to undergo separation from his mom, at least a couple of times.

So, every time I would come back from the trip, he would make me promise that I wouldn’t go back. And every single time, I promised him that no matter how many times I had to leave, I would always come back.

My older daughter became my rock, even as she occupied herself with her school work and taking care of her little brother. As much as she was heartbroken at the thought of her grand-dad, she always stood by her mother. She sometimes became the second mom of her sibling, and at other times, a strong shoulder for her mother, so much so that her mother lost track of who was the parent.

The dreaded final days…

Even as we dealt with day to day activities, my dad’s health deteriorated. After repeated surgeries, we all began to accept the fact that he couldn’t survive the latest of his health crisis for long. We didn’t want him to undergo any more trouble and we couldn’t bear to watch what it was doing to our mom.

The decision was officially taken out of our hands as my dad went into a coma and the doctors too asked us to take him home, as there was nothing else that they could do.

As our mom struggled with watching him slip out of her hands, we struggled with maintaining our sanity, especially in front of our children. I had to leave one more time, just so that I could spend a few days with my dad and support my mom. I have often wondered where we got all the strength to deal with the necessities of taking care of a terminally-ill person. But we held strong, especially my mom, surrounded by a network of well-wishers and some very able doctors and nurses.

While my children coped with my absence, I sang to my dad, talked with him, held his hands and promised him that we would take care of his wife, our mother. And when my son came down with flu, despite my husband’s protests, I flew back to take care of my son, at my mother’s insistence. I will always admire my mom’s clear-headed thinking at times of such emotional turmoil. We each had to do our duty, and there would not be any confusion on who does what.

Lessons Learned

No matter what kind of situation life throws at you, it comes with its share of lessons. We always think that we could never handle something, and it could be anything. Then, one fine day, that situation stares at you, you are faced with being a parent while losing one and you find yourself coping with it in ways you never thought were possible.

You are surrounded by your village, people near and far, friends and acquaintances, near and distant relations, each and every one of them contributing in their own magical way. But the most important contribution is your own self. You are stronger than you ever imagined, braver than you ever thought. You tackle it, one problem at a time, and one day at a time.

And, the biggest parenting lesson that I learned was from my mom, there is no guilt in parenting , period. You do not have to feel guilty over your choices, nor should you make others feel guilty over their choices.

You do what you can do, to the best of your abilities. Some of them will be right and some might even be wrong and you face the consequences of each of these actions …again to the best of your abilities.

Nothing more, nothing less. A standard that we always saw our dad live up to, and what we continue to live by, as we move on in to a life without him.

5 Gifts Kids Can Easily Sew for Fathers

Every parent loves it when their child gives them a present, whether it’s for their birthday, Christmas, New Year, or any other holiday actually. And when that present is something that the child had made themselves, the parent’s joy is even greater, accompanied by a sense of pride and fulfillment. Here are gifts kids can easily sew for fathers.

Most of the time, kids create something for their mothers, but this time, we’ll be showing you something a little different. We’ll show you five gifts kids can easily sew for their dad. Dads also like presents, so this time, it’s all about them.

Denim bookmark

This is an ideal gift for fathers who enjoy reading and always have a book by their side when they’re relaxing. Since the material in question is denim, an adult will have to help the child just a little, when it’s time to use the sewing machine.

Necessary materials for this present are a piece of denim which you can cut out from an old pair of jeans, a piece of fabric that will act as a stabilizer, a pretty ribbon, a pair of scissors, a sewing machine and a thread.

First thing you have to do is to cut out the denim in the size you wish the bookmark to be, two pieces of almost identical dimensions, one being just a bit smaller than the other. Then cut out the stabilizer in the same dimensions as the smaller denim piece. Lastly, cut the ribbon about an inch or two longer than the denim piece and burn its endings so that they don’t fray.

Now it’s time to start sewing. Denim is a tough type of material, so you should use a needle specifically designed to pierce denim. A heavy duty sewing machine is also recommended, because it can sew with denim easily.

Position the longer denim strip first, then put the stabilizer, then the second denim strip, and finally, the ribbon, all on each other. Stitch the ribbon to the fabrics and you’re done. You can cut off the excess stabilizer material, just be careful not to cut too much.

Keychain

This one can be done by hand, which means that your child can do it by themselves. Cut out a piece of fabric in the form you wish, a square, a circle, an octagon, anything works. Then stitch a second cutout to the mentioned piece by hand. Try to make the second cutout something that looks nice, like a heart or a star, it will make the keychain look much better. Then just attach an actual keychain to it and that’s it.

Laptop sleeve or bag

Useful and pretty, a laptop bag is a great gift for dads. All you need in order to make it is a piece of fabric, a zipper or a button, and a sewing machine. Cut out two pieces of fabric in dimensions slightly larger than the laptop and then stitch them together on three sides. Insert the zipper on the fourth side, or add an overlap with a button and you can hand it out to dad.

Phone or glasses case

This is even easier than the previous gift, and is smaller in size. As long as you can sew in a straight line you can totally make this case. All you need is fabric, felt, thread and your trusted sewing machine. You’ll be using wool felt as a lining in order to both cushion and protect the phone or the glasses from scratches.

Pajama pants

This is the most complex project on this list, meaning that only older kids who have experience with sewing can make it. Steal dad’s pajama pants for a while and trace them to make a pattern or use on the free pajama pants patterns here. Then choose a nice and soft material and start cutting out the patterns. Stitch them together, insert a string at the waistline and maybe add some pockets and the gift is ready to be wrapped in decorative paper.

Check out more crafts you can make for your family here.

Now you know how to make a gift for dad and surprise him on Father’s Day. Whichever one you decide to create, dad will surely love it and treasure it.