Customer Reviews

Guiding Your Teenager with Special Needs Through the Transition from School to Adult Life: Tools for Parents

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Guiding Your Teenager With Special Needs through the Transition from School to Adult Life provides insight and practical suggestions for parents, educators and members of the community at large. This book is a reminder to each of us that teaching basic life skills to children with and without diagnosed delays or disabilities, as well as planning for their future, can never begin too early. John and Mary Brown

This book is very well written for special parents from an author who has extensive firsthand experience. It gives excellent insight about all the steps which the parents have to navigate in the school and public system to help their children to become well integrated into the society.

This book is a wonderful resource for parents. It is full of information on how to guide young adults with developmental disabilities toward a successful transition into adulthood. Developing autonomy, learning to self-advocate and prepare for the grown up world of work by building responsibility into your child's routine at an early age and creating incentives and motivation, are all vital aspects of transitioning to adult life. This is all meticulously covered in this well organized book.

From the early years when parents should begin to give a child responsibilities for jobs at home, to the process of transition planning, to the search for programs available once school ends ... it's all here in this very compact book that also includes many other resources for further reading. For parents of newly diagnosed children to those already transitioning out of school, there is something for everyone!

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If she's trying to do a transition plan for teens, she needed to have worded the book differenty.

In the current form, she's directly talking to parents--who can no longer be the center of whatever transition plan is being written up. A transition plan is legally required to be about the future of the person with a disability themselves. And so we needed to be the ones who were addressed. But the book suffers from additional problems.

While her 'close guiding' approach could work for people with severe disabilities needing supervision, the inclusion of information on college leaves me wondering. What is she really trying to accomplish?

Since college students legally must be their own advocates, that section leads me to believe that post-secondary disability law's critical differences from special education is especially not understood. Parents cannot guide their kids in college because there is no yearly planning conference..etc at any college campus. Her ignorance does a horrible diservice to people who will sincerely turn to this book as a resource. Both laws cover disability, but the two have some very important differences from each other.

Future editions of this book need to either pare down the audience she is trying to address. Or they must pare down the options which people could transition to, and conceede the provided list is partial, based on her expertise. When you write books about subjects which you fail to research, myself and others with field experience do see right through.