by Fiona Black

Created on: March 25, 2010   Last Updated: March 26, 2010

“Give me a child until he is seven and he is mine forever”. Thus quoted a perceptive writer and it's true. Childhood experiences reach far into your adulthood, so the more positive the experiences can be, the better.

Based on personal experience (having a myopathy of unknown origin), teaching children with special needs and from simply living in a diverse community, I’ve observed that the biggest things going for children are confidence and resilience. You may have the easiest of rides, but still feel life’s a struggle, or be constantly assaulted by random, unfortunate twists of fate and come up a winner. It all depends on where you stand in the glass half full/half empty debate, which is linked to confidence and resilience. These are essential and can be developed, so that whatever hand you are dealt, you can face it because you are strong and believe in yourself.

Children with disabilities get singled out and that’s a fact. Children can be cruel, can torment children who seem more vulnerable than the rest and go for the jugular. Now, more than ever, where venom has reached cyber space, providing no respite for the unpopular, a school student has to have guts to survive. It’s alright at home, where you are (or ought to be) just one of usually other siblings and are therefore paid no deference, but at school, it’s a different kettle of fish. As a child who had scoliosis, kyphosis, a waddley walk, who couldn’t run fast, wore glasses and later braces, life at school was sometimes harsh for me, to the point where there were “tears before bedtime” (in hindsight, it sounds like half my classmates felt out of place and inadequate. If only we’d known…). There were times when I felt the bullied could’ve become the bully, as the best form of defence is attack-but you have to get over it. You may feel an outsider, that you don’t fit in, but it gets tougher as you move into your teens, as you strive for acceptance, as you feel your physical presentation overtaking your psych and damaging your body image-which is pretty fragile as a teenager, anyway-and you wonder what kind of “happily ever after” story there really will be for you….but fear not. Life usually gets better after your teens and so you just need the skills to survive, with as few battle scars as possible.

And I mean surviving in the emotional sense. For a child with a physical disability, all the interventions

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