School will be out for summer vacation again soon. Will your family travel and explore new places or stay home to relax and recharge? No matter how your family decides to spend the break from school, if you are like…
Category: Special Needs Family (page 6)
Fun Rabbit Holes: Exploring New Technology Without Losing Your Place on Your To-Do List
Apps and other digital technology are great—until they aren’t. You may have heard worst-nightmare stories: fatal accidents due to someone’s being distracted by a smartphone; suicides triggered by cyberbullying or doomscrolling. On a less dramatic note, just about everyone has…
Modern Mothers with Disability in the Family
A special Happy Mother’s Day to all hardworking moms! Remember the family images in classic sitcoms? Every mother a full-time housewife who had it all together; every kid healthy and happy; every grandparent a bottomless source of wisdom and encouragement,…
Mother’s Day Wearables: Easy-to-Use Assistive Tech That Moms Love
Whether your mother is a regular geek or a proud technophobe, everyone appreciates little gadgets that help organize tasks, goals, and “me time.” And mothers—noted for being busier and juggling more than most other people—deserve these gifts that keep on…
VestLife: An Organization Solution for Families
Most people today have too much to keep track of. Work duties. Volunteer duties. Personal projects. Electric bills. Cable bills. Car-repair bills. School records. Medical records. Passwords to access all those bills and records. It gets worse when someone in…
Eye-Gaze Technology for ALS
ALS. Short for “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.” Also known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” for the baseball player who died from it in 1941. By any name, it’s a nightmare to be diagnosed with: it eats away the brain’s motor neurons, progressively…
10 Popular Misconceptions about Autism
We wind up April as Autism Acceptance Month with another “Popular Misconceptions” article. (After you read it, take time to brush up on what actually works with autism, through our earlier posts on autism app lists, autism assistive technology, and…
Preparing Kids for Adulthood with Autism
Society is well rid of the days when “special education” meant sequestering kids in classes that rarely taught anything above kindergarten level, and post-graduation employment was limited to “sheltered workshops.” Still, autism and intellectual disorders mean extra challenges navigating the…
Turning Down the Volume for Everyone’s Health
April 26 is International Noise Awareness Day. Whatever constitutes everyday “background noise” in your neighborhood or community, your conscious brain has probably learned to tune it out—but never giving it a thought may be costing you. Noise and Health The…
Autism Apps Sales
April is Autism Acceptance/Awareness Month: celebrate with a new app (or two or three) to make life with autism a little easier. Not all the best life-skills and AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) apps are free, but many are half…