The example of a family!

The 

The above scene of 12 August 2029, of a family demonstrating the needs of their son to sit, stand and walk at 2 years of age left a disturbing thought in my mind. I was engaged in welcoming similar children for clinical appraisal from November 1983. Thirty six years later, something seemed to disturb me at the end of meeting with the family of this child above. The parents were keenly involved to  facilitate the developmental progress of their son. They needed further guidance and support. I was moved by their helplessness and desire to find a way forward. 

It was at the end of the day, it occurred to me about the need to have some reading materials for parents, well illustrated with drawings to help parents to evolve a home based developmental support for children when children have developmental needs. While discussing this with Anna, she too felt enthused to attempt designing a manual for parents. 

That thought led us to design and publish, two manuals for parents in the last two years. The first, Enable Your Child is a parent friendly appraisal of different developmental needs of a pre-school child in fifteen domains. The second one, Engage Your Child is a manual of  ideas with line drawings of different activities, that parents can do to promote the developmental efforts of the child by using toys and play based activities. 

I recall this journey, to acknowledge how parents have been our pathfinders in our involvement in child development and rehabilitations. It was their questions and needs which prompted us to find the next step to move on. 

With our retirement in the last three years, we have been engaged in preparing some ore reading materials for parents and professionals by summarising our experiences. 

We feel grateful to parents and professionals for having been the resource for us to summarise our observations and learning in child development by preparing a few more reading materials for publication! 

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)