Growing up with UpsideDowns When Josh Bradley was a baby, his Mum’s coffee group turned into something bigger – a charitable trust that today funds the speech therapy needs of nearly 300 children with Down syndrome across Aotearoa. Josh was there from the very beginning in 2003, and remained a member until 2017. Following his TV stardom on Down for Love, his Mum, Nic, spoke to me about their journey. Nic was a new Mum in winter 2000 when she first met Jo Adamson, a second-time Mum who’d also just had a new arrival with Down syndrome. Josh was Nic’s first child, and she was glad of a friend who had a bit of extra parenting experience, but whose child with Down syndrome was the same age as Josh. “She had her third and I had my second at the same time as well, so it all just worked, it was really good. It was lovely for the kids and it was great support,” says Nic. Together, they began to realise the strengths and weaknesses of public support when it came to their children with Down syndrome. “We both did sign language – Makaton – and we both found there was no back up to that.” I asked Nic about the role of Makaton in those early years for Josh. “Huge, absolutely huge. And so beneficial. I would highly recommend it to any of your new members, get them straight onto it, because it just means that the kids don’t get frustrated. And our kids get frustrated a lot - and who can blame them, when you can’t actually get what you want or what you need or get across how you’re feeling – it’s just a basic human need really, eh? And to be able to do it so young, to say that you’re thirsty or you’re hungry or you need a hug… it gives you warm fuzzies!”
Young Adult
However, this was something they’d taken on themselves, and there wasn’t much available to develop Josh’s speech beyond what Makaton could provide. “The public speech therapy was so hit and miss and so few and far between, and we just needed to do something else. Neither of us were oozing money, but we went private.” Unfortunately, Nic’s experience of public speech therapy is strikingly similar to the stories we hear at UpsideDowns in 2022, over two decades later. The graph below shows the results of a 2020 University of Auckland study that demonstrate the gap between what is provided and what families need, many spending thousands of their own limited funds each year to access them.
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