I just finished the draft of eight pages on helping your young child
with special needs learn language. I also spent a good chunk of the day
going through photographs to use to illustrate points on our website.
On the one hand, I thought,
"Maybe this is too simple. After all, what are we saying here? Talk to your child. Read to her. Use educational toys. It doesn't matter if the toys are brand-new or if you made them yourself."
Is all this really obvious? Perhaps, but other things that are wrong are equally 'obvious'. At left is a picture of Julia practicing for a report at school. She is in third grade. She is reading from a speech that she typed on the computer. She is wearing a headband she made. She has two blankets for visual aids and in her report she talks about how Pendleton blankets and star quilts are different. She looked this up on the Internet.
On her left is another visual aid, a poster she made with pictures she copied out of books from the library. The cardboard she pasted these on is left over from something and the different colored papers are left over from something else.
My point, and I do have one, is that these skills did not come about overnight or because we did one parent-child activity together. In looking through the pictures over the years, there were hundreds of snapshots of me reading to Julia, of Julia at 18 months old pretending to read a magazine, of Julia and her sisters looking at something on the computer. Then, there were hundreds more pictures that just showed the environment she lived in. No matter what room in the house she was, there was a bookshelf behind her, books or magazines on the floor around her or a computer in the corner. One of the best examples was a photograph of Julia and two of her sisters sitting in front of a computer. On the wall behind them is a poster of Albert Einstein and to the left of them is a bookcase full of books.
If you had asked me last week, I probably would have told you that I did not spend as much time reading or talking to my children as I should. Like most children, they are constantly asking for more, for more of my time, more attention, more stuff. If it wasn't for my husbands annoying habit of constantly taking pictures, I would not have realized the number of times and different contexts in which Julia was exposed to reading. It dawned on me that we are an example of what programs such as Even Start mean when they talk about a 'rich literary environment'. The important point, I think, is not that one day we woke up and said,
"Hey, let's make a literature-rich environment for our kids."
We simply got into the habit of going to the library instead of McDonalds, probably after my older girls' father passed away and we couldn't afford McDonalds. We also bought books here and there, from the book fairs at school, used book sales at the library, bookstores. The nice thing about books is that they are easy to pass down from one child to the next so by the time the fourth daughter, Julia, was born, she had all of those books that her big sisters had outgrown.
All of this, buying your child a book instead of a Happy Meal, reading to your child at night, encouraging your child with her homework, buying a computer instead of another TV, reading a magazine yourself instead of watching Oprah - it is all just habits. Like any habit, whether it is exercising every day or improving your diet, it really isn't that simple to get ingrained, but once you do, like any habit, good or bad, you barely notice what you are doing after a while.
Helping parents get into those habits is a major purpose of our Disability Access and RUSH projects. Could parents do that without our help? Yes, and all that you need to do to quit smoking is to stop smoking cigarettes. Pretty simple, huh? As someone who tried several times before successfully quitting, though, I can vouch for the fact that it is always better to get a little help from your friends.
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