by Lokemun Magar

Created on: January 28, 2010

Having special needs does not mean having concessions in life. I am a mother with special needs and I am the main caregiver of a son with special needs. Both of us carry Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder traits, and are musically gifted. I am glad I do not have my husband to blame for such a son as my son is my mirror, showing me what is also in my blood.

As a teacher, I have also come across many children with special needs. One day, I awoke to a new awakening: everyone of us is special. Hence nobody is so special until he has to be treated so differently from others. Armed with that renewed frame of mind, I now handle life with a different and more positive outlook.

Having been a child with special needs myself makes it all the more challenging to raise a child with special needs. I chide myself as I chide my son. On the other hand, when I praise him, I praise myself. I cannot imbibe in him what I am not a role model of. I go through what I expect him to. I have no rights to impose on him what I cannot change of myself.

Children with special needs have souls and spirits as other children do. All children have fragile and pliable hearts and minds. All need love, fairness, discipline, and equality in every way. All have the rights to feel they are normal, as normal as their special needs will allow them to be.

While children with special needs need to know how to handle their own 'specialty', they can also be taught to extend that same attitude towards other children with special needs. In learning empathy, they learn to love themselves and others, forgive themselves and others for not being able to do some things, and be thankful for themselves and others.

Children with special needs can, and should, grow to be like others if they are treated as such. Hence, my son gets the same treatment as other children when he loses items - he learns to take responsibility for the consequences of his being distracted easily. Like everyone else, he has to bear the loss of dropping a five dollar bill or paying a cab driver with two ten dollar bills for a five dollar cab ride and getting only five dollars in change. 

It was a hefty twenty dollar tuition fee in learning to handle money with care. There was no blaming of the cab driver for being dishonest, or slipshod in collecting payment - he would have to answer to his Maker, as my son would to his. Living with and loving children with special needs means letting them face

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