The above -- if any poor souls don't recognize it -- is
a frame from the retired Calvin & Hobbes
comic strip, by Bill Watterson.

My computer was unwell since before the holidays, and my husband, child and myself have been unwell through the holidays, and so there's many an inevitably-themed article that never got written, for assorted, perfectly good reasons.  Yet here we are, on New Year's Eve, and there's just no getting around at least trying to push through doing that little bit more with intentions, tonight.  Isn't that always the way?  It seems a fitting set-up for an article about New Years' resolutions, anyway.

However you feel about -- and whatever your luck is with -- New Years' resolutions, it's hard not to at least think about what they could be, should be, if were going to make them, then they would be...  Everyone else seems to be talking about them, whether they are friends veritably binging on self-awareness (and you're bracing yourself for the imminent purge), or whether they are, like the character of Calvin in the strip above, reveling in self-denial that inspires you to, mentally at least, make a list of resolutions FOR them.  And, while there are really very few of us who wouldn't benefit from keeping the most common kinds of resolutions made by everyone else -- being healthier physically, financially, and in our relationships -- there's a certain edge to resolution-ing that I feel is especially important for special-needs parents:  It's not so much about meeting specific goals, in a specific time-scheme, as about continuing along a track which, overall, makes progress from whatever the last goals met were.  I've yet to meet a diagnostic expert who doesn't feel at least a little bit better about seeing a "less functional" child who is making slow but steady progress overall, than they do about a "higher functioning" child who appears to be at a developmental standstill.  While that's tangential to the point at hand, the relevance there lies in the value of progress, in and of itself.

I'm not saying that specific goals don't have their place.  We need them, otherwise it's far too easy to get stuck in surviving-just-where-we're-at mode, and lose track of the better things we're aiming for, and the baby steps we need to take, to get there.  I'm just saying that specific goals sometimes need to be secondary to the broader goals of our kids being healthier, happier, and somehow more capable than they were before.  Doing otherwise can shift too much focus to all the stresses and pitfalls of the process, and away from the progress....something that's not good for us as caretakers, or the kids we're caring for.  For one thing, it's easy to procrastinate tackling challenging obstacles, when our-lives-demand-constant-improvisation opportunities don't match careful agendas.  You swore to yourself that your kid would be potty-trained by the time grandma visited, but said kid just hasn't been responding positively until today, and grandma is coming the day after tomorrow, and ugh, if the process really starts now it'll still be going on when she's here, and that's sure to prove embarrassing, and maybe it's better to just pretend that the big surprise for grandma was kiddo learning to eat well with a spoon, because that was mastered a few weeks ago...  (This is just an example, not a claim that major routine changes should not be taken into account when planning or tackling major life-skills projects.)

For another thing, sometimes we can prove foolishly oblivious to opportunities for things to happen, because we're zoomed in so closely on some other thing in particular that we're hoping will happen.  Ok, so your daughter feels like reading her new library book with you, and it seems like phonetics finally began to "click" for her, but it's a really nice day outside, just perfect for running around and strengthening her legs, and her P.T. was hoping she could do 10 min. on the treadmill next session, so really she can just pick the book up again later, I mean she can do that any time, and once that "click" has happened, it's sure to come back...  (Again, this is just an example -- an example in which it might have been better to make the most of the literacy skills "click" while it was there, instead of waiting for it to come back, and instead find another way to get in the physical therapy, once the first opportunity -- in which the child was already actively engaged -- had exhausted itself.  Or, to find a way to combine the therapies, by, for example, having the girl wear ankle-weights and kick her feet back and forth while reading on her stomach.  By unnecessarily prioritizing work towards one milestone over another, just because the progress was, in a way, getting a sooner progress report, the opportunity was missed to make the most of working towards both milestones.)

Similarly, the more microcosmic approach to therapy structure, in which there is a hyper-focus on a very particular task, towards a very particular end, to be completed in a particular way in a particular span of time, can stunt highly beneficial creativity when it comes not only to figuring out which different therapies might take place simultaneously (requiring a slightly longer therapy period at any given time, but making for less therapy time required, overall, to cover everything), but also to figuring out which different therapies might support and aid each other.  Look at the recent early intervention program for children with autism, called the Early Start Denver Model, or E.S.D.M.  This is a highly interactive, play-based therapy model, which "finds the smiles" and then builds on them in multi-dimensional, motivation-driven ways.  The half of the 48 children that participated in the two-year program and received the new style of intensive therapy, showed significantly larger gains in I.Q, as well as listening and comprehension skills, than did the other half, which received a more traditionally established, community-based autism intervention.  We're talking about an I.Q. improvement of about 18 points, compared with a 4 point improvement.  Beyond that, for seven of the children in the treatment group, the overall improvements were pronounced enough to warrant a change in diagnosis from autism to a milder condition!   Only one child in the community-based intervention group was given a less severe diagnosis.  The key seems to be that in this kind of intervention, therapy is fun, therapy is social, and therapy is both interesting and sort of distracted from itself, in that -- and benefiting from the fact that -- therapy is a flexible amalgam of more than one thing at a time, instead of pressure on any given isolated task.  Even though it is still guided, the child feels that they have more control (which feeds confidence, which in turn fuels progress) because the tactics within the larger scheme are adjusted along with the interests of the child.

Let's face it....the goal of a certain amount of progress is just plain easier to feel good while pulling off -- and, indeed, to end up pulling off -- than very specific goals for how that progress should be made.  Let's say that you, as a special-needs parent, resolve that by the end of the year, your child will have more basic self-help skills.  And, by the end of the year, perhaps they can feed themselves what you've put in front of them, dress themselves, and perform basic functions of hygiene with only minimal "touching up" by you.  Thinking about that has got to feel a whole lot better than stressing one month over how, yeah, yeah, but they didn't yet master how to tie their shoes!  What's more important: everything that has happened, or the things that didn't?!  A focus on progress overall can also prove healthier, in that it's harder to lose sight of how, for all the minutiae of progressions and regressions, the idea is for us to help our children at least generally maintain their current quality of life, while improving upon the ways in which that quality of life is achieved, and, ideally, improving upon the quality of life in general.  I know so many children who have ended up malnourished because their already-established healthy diets were forced from them for long periods of time, in the hopes that it would force larger and faster improvements in their feeding therapies.

So that, oh caretakers of special-needs kids, is my advice.  Resolve to strive for progress with honesty, compassion, forgiveness, humor, flexibility, dedication, consistency, and above all, love.  But please...strive for PROGRESS.