Welcoming Children with Special Needs:

A Guidebook for Faith Communities

By Sally Patton
Review by Rev. Dr. Devorah Greenstein,
Accessibilities Program Associate, UUA
Boston, MA

Are you looking for a well-organized book that has useful ideas about how your congregation can include all children in your religious education program? Is your religious education program struggling to find ways to include children with “special needs”? Are you looking for a well-written, easy-to-use book full of innovative ideas for any religious education program? If you answered “yes” to one of these questions, Sally Patton’s newly published work, Welcoming Children with Special Needs: A Guidebook for Faith Communities, is a book you will treasure. There is one caveat: I recommend that you purchase a few copies because this is a book to pass from hand to hand, and it will be a pity if your congregation’s single copy ends up in the stack of “to read” books on someone’s bedside table.

Welcoming Children with Special Needs is a life-affirming book about a difficult subject. Reading it opens our eyes to new ways of thinking about children with special needs – maybe new ways of thinking about all children. It is, in part, a book about children’s spirituality that shows us, as Sally Patton’s website www.embracechildspirit.org affirms, that these children are not mistakes. They are every bit as precious as any child, and if we re-frame the way we look at these children, if we are creative in the ways we offer curricula and religious education experiences, we can weave all children with special needs into the fabric of our faith communities.

All children? Even this child? Does this vignette remind you of a situation you are facing, or one that you haven’t encountered, but are worried that you will?

This year, we have in our religious education program a highly intelligent eight-year-old boy who has been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. He is a handful and seems to take delight in being inappropriate. He will ask people about their sex life, make silly sounds during quiet times, and grab and pinch other kids. His mom’s advice is to ignore him. But does this seem fair to the other kids?

Welcoming Children with Special Needs doesn’t make it sound easy – Sally Patton doesn’t pretend that providing an enriching environment and experience for each and every child “with special needs” is going to be simple to accomplish. And yet, by using stories with difficult examples, the author, who brings her thirty years of working with these children into her book, helps us re-examine the ways in which we might respond to this boy – a child with disruptive behavior disorders, which she says are perhaps our greatest challenge – “the most difficult of the difficult children.”

I start with this story because it is often this level of difficulty that brings us to the point of seeking outside help. And this book will help if you find yourself in this tough situation. However, Welcoming Children with Special Needs is just the kind of book you won’t want to keep on a shelf until you feel desperate. It is, in fact, a book that you will want to peruse, keep on your desk, and take with you when you have a few minutes that you’ll be waiting on line somewhere. It is a supremely readable book, well-written and superbly organized, full of information, references, stories, and just plain know-how.

Welcoming Children with Special Needs is a practical tool

In her introduction to Welcoming Children with Special Needs Sally Patton reminds us that “as Unitarian Universalists, we may not be able to provide therapeutic resources, but we can nourish the spirit and help heal the soul.” Many of us believe deeply that not only can we minister to children with special needs and their families, we must minister to them. But we don’t know how to do it. We intuitively feel it is in our faith communities that children with special needs and their families can gather the strength and support to overcome the obstacles that society imposes, and now we have a guidebook.

After many years of work, a book has arrived that is readable, useable, and doable – it is a book for every congregation. Section one focuses on why and how to implement an inclusive ministry for children with special challenges. The information is divided into chapters with headings such as “Accepting All Children into Our Faith Communities”, “Ministering to Family”, and “Religious Education that Welcomes All Children.” These chapters offer spiritual guidance, pedagogical wisdom, and practical information. Patton shows us how to raise awareness and offer sensitivity training about disabilities. She tells us about a congregation that was struggling with how to include a girl with mental retardation in the Coming of Age group because she was having difficulty understanding and participating in the discussion activities, and how they handled the situation. There are many personal stories of successful strategies:

Often, troubling behavior will stop when you move closer to the misbehaving child. Once, while I was doing a guided meditation with some eleven-year-old children, one girl started giggling uncontrollably, which started a ripple effect of giggling among the other children. I continued my meditation, quietly moved closer to her, and gently put my hand on her back. The giggling stopped immediately.

Section one also includes ideas about ministering to families, advice for providing pastoral care, and insight into “What It’s Like to Be the Family of a Child with a Disability.” The author also points out that giving children with disabilities and their parents, siblings, and even grandparents the opportunity to be heard is the best support we can provide. And because this requires us to be good listeners, Sally Patton, in her thorough way, enumerates the components of being a good listener – referring (as always) to the work of an expert in the field (along with title and author) so readers can learn even more.

Welcoming Children with Special Needs is a spiritual guidebook.

We Unitarian Universalists are on a “Journey Toward Wholeness” – on a path of commitment to becoming an anti-oppressive, inclusive, multicultural denomination – toward a theology of wholeness. This book is a starting point on that path. Every word that Sally Patton has written has been carefully thought out to reflect her faith in and respect for children with special needs. When the author, after much thought, chose to organize section two into specific disabilities, she was aware of the theological dilemma of this decision, and shared her thoughts with us:

Labeling children by their disorder or disability is a double-edged sword. When used properly, labels can help us understand children’s behaviors and problems. They can also help parents obtain needed services for their children. At the same time, labels can cause pain, isolation, and confusion. They can be misleading and emphasize differences for the purpose of exclusion. In an ideal world, we would not have to label. All children would be accepted for who they are and receive the appropriate services and education for their needs. We would accept that everyone is different and that our uniqueness is an opportunity for connectedness.

But we do live in a less-than-ideal world, and so Patton has organized the second part of the book by diagnostic categories so we will have a better understanding of the labels, some of the pertinent contemporary issues, the struggles these children face and, most importantly, ways to minister to the children and their families with understanding and creativity.

Section two provides information on how to apply the lessons and strategies from section one to children with specific disabilities. Each chapter is devoted to a single disability or cluster of disabilities with a:

• short text selection by a person living with the disability or by an expert in the field that helps set the groundwork for the chapter, such as this brief statement: “Deafness is about communication, not sound”;
• description of the disability using words that are easy to understand, always referring to experts in the field, and explaining some of the less familiar terms that may be new to religious educators and ministers;
• discussion of specific nuances, issues, and challenges – for example in the chapter “The Autism Spectrum,” the author discusses the meaning of curing versus coping in relation to autism;
• description of ways to minister to families – pointing out the individual dilemmas and problems, age of onset, possible school-related problems, and issues that will help ministers and religious educators provide that most important support to families; and
• ideas for teaching – strategies, solutions, and reminders – for example, telling us “As Unitarian Universalist religious educators, we should ensure that our focus is on what children with mental retardation can bring to our faith communities, not only on what we have to do to include them in our religious education programming.”

Don’t Stop Learning – there is more!

Because Sally Patton hopes this book will be the start of a journey (not an end) there are endnotes for each chapter and literally forty pages of additional resources (this is a partial list) starting with Physical and Environmental Accessibility; Spiritual Accessibility; Children’s Spirituality and Religious Education; Different Learning Styles; Family and Parenting … and ending with the specific disabilities such as Mood Disorders (in itself divided into Eating Disorders; Suicide; Books for Children and Youth); Anxiety Disorders … ending with “invisible” disabilities such as heart conditions, juvenile arthritis, and lupus (and including a section of Books for Children and Youth). This is like going to a library (or a candy store) of resources that provide a deeper look into any of the topics.

Reading Welcoming Children with Special Needs is like reading a book written by a friend or a family member. Sally Patton is a Unitarian Universalist religious educator and she uses stories and examples from other Unitarian Universalist religious educators. The life-affirming philosophy that resonates throughout the book feels exactly right for UUs. If every congregation takes Sally Patton’s words to heart and puts them into practice – we will all have done our small part to make this a better world for children with special needs and for all of us in turn.