PARENTAL SUPPORT
Being an Exceptional Parent:
Nine Ways to Nurture Your Own Special Needs By Tasnuva Sarwar Tunna, PhD NO ONE TELLS US HOW TO BE A PARENT, LET ALONE A PARENT FOR CHILDREN WITH EXCEPTIONAL NEEDS.
I
was on the precipice of losing myself to suicide. The darkest hours of my life entail the soul-wrenching questions: “Why me?”, “How can I raise my son when I don’t even know how to raise myself out of this pit?” I didn’t get to study Special Needs Parenting 101...did you?
We are not given a manual, and yet we are given the most complex set of parenting/parenthood puzzles in raising a child with different abilities. My journey from that to lifting my head above water and helping other moms lift theirs has taught me a few important survival tactics I am revealing to you today.
1. MINDSET MATTERS It all starts with the right mindset. Mindset is our cultural and societal beliefs we curate from birth onwards. The conscious part of the mind is only 10 percent, while the rest is subconscious. This part is actually the driver we don’t acknowledge. Our minds play games. We tell ourselves negative things all throughout the day. Of the 50,000 thoughts coming to us in a day, only 20 percent are positive. Eighty percent are negative, self-deprecating ones! Imagine that. We beat ourselves, we cheat ourselves, and we pretty much incapacitate ourselves from being our best just
Exceptional Needs Today | Issue 3 | 51
