Christy Brown Overcoming Challenges

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Overcoming Challenges With Love and Support Parents of children with special needs are faced with many difficult challenges, both emotionally and physically. Christy Brown is a successful author who was born in 1932 with a severe case of cerebral palsy, a neurological disorders that disabled him from using any other part of his body other than his left foot. In the essay “The Letter ‘A,’” written by Christy Brown, he wrote, “almost every doctor who saw and examined me labeled me a very interesting but also a hopeless case” (74), but he proved them wrong. Despite the almost impossible odds, his family’s determination and relentless hope in him helped him develop and become a successful writer and painter. The medical field has greatly advanced in the last 85 years and there is much more awareness of disabilities and special needs today. However, parents of children with special needs still face many challenges. There is no magical solution to overcome the emotional stress that families live with when raising a child with …show more content…

Understood.org provides great information on The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal law that protects children with disabilities and ensures that they receive free and appropriate public education (n. pag.). With the services under IDEA, parents are involved and have a voice in their child’s education. If schools find that a student has special needs after being evaluated, parents and the school work together to develop an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which is “a legal document that spells out a child’s educational goals, disabilities and the services and support that the school will provide” (n. pag.). With the growing awareness of disabilities in our society today, there are many resources out there for parents to access that can help them through difficult

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