We’re emphasizing counseling this month on A Visit to the Pastor’s Study. For today’s program I want to get away from the more common topics when we think about counseling, and focus, instead, on helping a category of people who often get little attention: Parents of special needs children.
When a parent or parents find out that one or more of their children has special needs that will require special understanding, special training, and special services, the response is similar to bereavement. There’s shock with the diagnosis. Then there’s disorganization: What do I need to do now? How will this upset my life? Why me? Finally, there’s reorganization: These are the things I must do so that I can be the best help to my special-needs-child. And you start to do those things – but you realize you’re in a whole new world in which you need guidance. To whom do you go? What are the best helps for both my child and for me? Will this ever get easier? Parents of special needs children need to be honest: Their children need help, but so do they.
In a previous Visit to the Pastor’s Study program, Christina Miller gave us lots of practical helps as we delved into the topic: Autism: Helping Children and Their Parents. You can find that program in our A Visit to the Pastor’s Study archives at our own website, visitthepastorsstudy.org or at our A Visit to the Pastor’s Study site on sermonaudio.com That program, Autism: Helping Children and Their Parents had quite a response. Today, Christina Miller is with us again to zero in on Counseling Parents of Special Needs Children.
And Christina Miller is well qualified for this big counseling task. She’s the daughter of an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor who has helped her to think through every issue from the perspective of the Word of God. Christina and her husband, Matt, are parents of one daughter with Autism, and another daughter with Sensory Processing Disorder. Along with that, Christina is also a teacher of special needs children – and her training and skills are used in classrooms with particularly difficult special needs children. I don’t know of anyone better able to counsel parents of special needs children – and to do that
with a Gospel focus under the Lordship of Jesus Christ who governs us by His Word.
Parents of special needs children: Get ready to get some help…and to get some encouragement, too.
Christina Miller, welcome back to A Visit to the Pastor’s Study….
Here’s a link to the full program:
Yours in our caring Lord and Savior,
Pastor Bill