resources
Keeping children happy
Brian Booth, Shaun Webster, Durbali Roy, John Tattersall and Agnes Briggs, parents with learning disabilities from CHANGE, a leading UK national equal rights organisation led by and for people with learning disabilities, review the DVD Keeping children happy produced by Speakup, in partnership with Steps and Sure Start. Price: £85 (£24 for advocacy groups) Available from www.speakup.org.uk
Keeping children happy is a DVD aimed at supporting parents with learning disabilities with young children.
Overall, we thought the DVD was very helpful to parents. Each chapter went into good detail about all the most important issues that parents have to cope with every day. Advice was given through clear and understandable examples which made the DVD enjoyable and well presented.
However, there were some accessibility issues. We found the chapter titles too small to see. To make it more accessible and easier to read, the writing throughout needs to be larger and pictures to support the text would be helpful. In each chapter it would have been good to have a ‘back to menu’ option on the pages.
Not the only one
The DVD started by saying that being a parent is hard work. This is good because parents who find it hard think that they are the only ones. The list of different feelings about being a parent was very useful. It made you really think about how you feel and realise that it is OK to have all those different feelings. Being able to hear parents talking about their feelings was a good idea. However, a picture of a parent expressing each feeling, next to the title of the feeling that is being talked about, would also be helpful. Some feelings were not commented on as much as others. It would have been good to have an equal amount of examples.
Including children’s feelings and advice on identifying them is excellent and shows that children’s feelings are just as important as parents’ feelings. This helps parents understand their children better.
We thought the DVD had good advice about parenting skills. It was good to hear parents talking about their experiences of parenting, showing the problems but also offering solutions. We thought it was very important to show parents how to deal with difficult situations in a calm and patient way. There was a good mixture of examples from both mums and dads.
It’s good to talk
The DVD pointed out different people to go to for advice and help. We think it is a good idea to encourage parents to talk and seek help if they need it. However, not all parents with learning disabilities experiences are positive when they ask for help. Parents can be reluctant to seek help due to judgment about their parenting skills which can lead to the involvement of social services in a negative and sometimes devastating way.
There was good advice on coping with mealtimes and making them enjoyable. It was a good idea to encourage parents to get children involved in helping prepare for the meal. However, we suggest that it would have been good to have some advice about the importance of a balanced diet.
The DVD showed good examples of parents spending time with their children in a positive, happy way. It was good that parents were shown how to do things together with their children but also allowing the children to do things on their own. It might have been good to mention that it’s OK for children to get dirty when playing.
To sum up, we think that all parents would benefit from this important DVD. We also think that all people who support parents with learning disabilities should be encouraged to get a copy of this very useful DVD so that as many parents as possible can benefit from it.