Charity: Parenting Special Children

Local charity celebrates 15th birthday

Parenting Special Children is proudly marking 15 years of supporting families in Berkshire. The charity exists to improve the wellbeing of families of children and young people with any special need or disability (SEND), including those who have suffered early life trauma (foster and adoptive families), living in Berkshire and surrounding areas.

Parenting Special Children was founded in 2006 by Ruth Pearse, the CEO of the charity, to meet a need that she identified after receiving a diagnosis for her daughter. At that time, there was a lack of support and an accessible community for families at diagnosis. Very few specialist parenting programmes existed to enable families to learn more about the diagnosis that their child or young person had received and to connect with other families in a similar situation. Since then, the charity has gone from strength to strength, helping thousands of families and professionals in Berkshire.

Families facing a broad range of adversities, such as social isolation, trauma, sleep issues, poor mental health and domestic abuse, are supported by the charity and receive specialist practitioner support through a variety of services.

Parenting Special Children stays true to its beginnings, identifying gaps in provision and empowering families by offering courses and workshops, both pre- and post-assessment, to ensure that they receive the support they need. These have expanded to include a wide range of topics such as sleep, trauma, transition into adulthood and child/adolescent-to-parent violence.

In response to the needs of the families they work with, Parenting Special Children has grown considerably over 15 years. The charity now offers a trauma and attachment service, sleep service, support groups including community groups in the most deprived areas of Berkshire, Kinship and Dads/Male Carers group, family events. There is also a dedicated helpline, which saw a 50% increase in calls during lockdown.

In addition, the charity runs groups for young people including social interaction groups and an autistic girls’ group. In response to the complexity of issues being faced, Parenting Special Children has recently implemented a 1:1 family project offering a holistic approach to supporting the whole family.

Apart from being quick to respond to actual need, another key strength of Parenting Special Children is that 95% of the professional team, including the trustees, are parents of a child with SEND. They are therefore part of the SEND community with lived experience of the many challenges families face.

If you are a local business looking to partner with a local charity to help make a difference to the lives of local families, they would love to hear from you.

www.parentingspecialchildren.co.uk