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Handbook for Parents Offers Good Advice, Helps Worthy Cause

Last Updated: 6/7/2010

Jonathan Singer. The Special Needs Parent Handbook: Critical life strategies to help you survive and thrive. The Drive for Rebecca, Inc., 2010.

Price dependant on format. Click on book to order.

In 2002, Jonathan Singer, whose daughter Rebecca has a genetic disorder that causes autism tendencies, drove his family cross-country to raise money for autism research and education. The family raised almost $100,000, which they donated to autism-related programs. Now Singer has written a helpful and insightful handbook for parents of children with special needs and he is donating the proceeds to Advocacy for All, a charity he set up that helps parents become more effective advocates for their children with special needs.

The Special Needs Parent Handbook is a well-written, down-to-earth guidebook that reads like a conversation with a good friend. In it, Singer offers tips for interacting with a child with special needs that he has learned through his first-hand experience of raising both a child with special needs as well and one without. However, The Special Needs Parent Handbook also goes to great lengths to emphasize the need for parents to take care of their personal needs as well. The opening chapter, "Keeping the Family Together," discusses ways for parents to spend more time with each other and their children without special needs, and it also talks about the importance of being there for friends who do not have children with special needs. According to Singer, these relationships with family and friends provide the essential support for families of children with special needs.

Singer's advocacy tips fall into several categories, including chapters on finding doctors who are not only intelligent but empathetic, dealing with school systems that do not want to provide benefits through special education, and working with financial and legal planners and insurance companies. In a particularly helpful section, Singer discusses how to integrate a child with special needs into the general community, and he offers suggestions for teaching children and parents without special needs about a child's condition without sounding shrill or patronizing. In fact, throughout the book, Singer's conversational tone rarely reaches a fever pitch -- you can tell that he is completely committed to his work without resorting to lecturing. When you reach the end of The Special Needs Parent Handbook, you will feel like you gained 15 years of practical knowledge in a matter of hours.

At the moment, The Special Needs Parent Handbook is available as a download from Singer's Web site with a $10 donation to Advocacy for All. Readers can also purchase an ebook version for the Kindle or iPhone. To read excerpts from the book, or to purchase a copy, click here.