Ten Special-Needs Tools I'd Like to See By Terri Mauro, About.com
Our world is full of technological wonders, but when it gets down to everyday life with a child with special needs, we're often still operating by our wits and our grit. Here are ten labor-saving, stress-cutting, anxiety-eliminating devices I'd like to see to make our days a little easier.
1. Finger-Sucking Patch
My son will not stop sucking his fingers and shirt, even now at age fifteen, and if we do succeed in pulling him off it all behavioral heck breaks loose. I figure he gets about the same comfort from those activities that a smoker gets, so we'll need something like a patch to replace those good feelings. Gum, I know, does not.
2. Cloak of Invisibility
Oh, wouldn't you love one of those? For those times when your child is just flat-out out of control and there's nothing you can do but remove yourselves from the premises? Doing so unseen would be so much easier. Also useful for those times your child repeats something incredibly embarrassing that everyone knows came from you.
3. Speech Neutralizer
Speaking of children who repeat the wrong things, I'd love some little zappy device that pulls back words after they've been uttered. Gosh, how useful. I'd neutralize the embarrassing things my kids say, sure, but also the times I yell and wish I hadn't, or say something mean in a moment of weakness, or tell something more about my kids than I should. Maybe make people in IEP meetings take back what they said, too.
4. Portable Time-Travel Device
I don't want to travel far, here. I'm thinking of about a two-hour window with which I could, say, jump over an endless block of waiting-room time and just see the doctor right away. It would be hard to fine-tune, I guess, because you never get an accurate assessment of how long your wait will be, but I suppose it could be broken into short little time-hops.
5. Android Aide
I've paid for aides to help my son at day camps and church classes, and wished I had help for him many times more than that. A faithful robotic family-owned companion would come in pretty handy for that, programmed to follow our lead on handling my kids' needs. If it could help with algebra homework, too, right there it's earned its keep.
6. Brain Uploader
Reading and learning are time-honored ways to get facts in our heads, but often our kids don't have the ability for that and we don't have the time. It'd be cool to have some gadget that just uploads the info we need directly into our brains, eliminating the middleman. I'd like that to bring to meetings about my son, too, so I didn't have to trust professionals to listen to me but could just zap what they needed to know into their unsuspecting noggins.
7. Mini-Force Field
Nothing major, just something I can, say, throw around the dog when my son just WILL NOT LEAVE HER ALONE. Throwing himself against it would give him some nice proprioceptive input.
8. Handy Hypnotizer
You're at church, trying to get your struggling child to keep as still and quiet as neurologically possible, and somebody turns and gives you That Look. You flip your hand up and flash them a signal that puts them into a trance 'till the end of the service. A prayerful, meditative trance. But at the last "Amen," they start quacking like a duck.
9. Social Speech Translator
My daughter sure does need this. You'd enter some bit of kid-speak, and the translator would tell you in plain language what it means, whether you're being teased, whether the teasing is mild or malicious, and what an appropriate response should be. Perhaps an added feature would allow her to speak and have her speech translated correctly into her peers' lingo, with proper inflections and all.
10. Full-Mattress Sheets
Okay, so this isn't so high-tech, but I just got a look at my son's unmade bed, and ... if they could create some sheets that would stay on when a kid spends his nights strenuously rocking back and forth -- maybe something that surrounded the entire mattress like a pillowcase instead of perching delicately atop -- it would make bed-making in this house a heck of a lot easier, you know what I'm saying?