Effective early child and family support has three essential pillars

Health, Education and Family Support

Editorial: The needs of a baby or infant who has disabilities and of their family mean that effective support must include considerations of the health, wellbeing, education and development of the child and the wellbeing of the whole family.

Effective support the

‘Therapy’ – do we really need this word in early child and family support? A question for discussion

I have not seen a universally agreed definition of ‘therapy’ in early child and family support

Peter Limbrick writes:

If we are imagining a sunnier future post C-19 for families whose child has various developmental difficulties, then I would like to play with the idea of dispensing with the word ‘t

For First Nations people the bushfires bring a particular grief, burning what makes us who we are

Extract from an aricle in the Guardian on 5/1/2020 by Lorena Allam:

There’s a midden at Murramarang on the south coast that dates back to the ice age. It holds the stories of 12,000 years of Yuin occupation in layers of stone tools and spearpoints, fish bones and oyster shells.

To get there y

‘It takes leaders to break down silos: Integrating services for disabled children’ (CDC paper). Further observations focusing this time on what families can do to help integrate local services

‘If fragmentation has been highlighted...as a problem for children and families, there is nothing to prevent parents setting up a meeting...and inviting service managers to it.’

This is the third part of a series of informal observations on the Council for Disabled Children’s paper, ‘It takes leader

Seeing early child and family support as a mosaic of triangles

If the triangles cannot be clearly seen in the mosaic, there is something wrong in the design

Note: This piece was written as a contribution to an international discussion during May 2020. Notes [1] and [2] were added in June 2020.

Peter Limbrick writes: I firmly believe there are some almost univer

‘Seeing the whole child’ and ‘Seeing the child in the family’ What can these phrases mean to practitioners in ECI?

Who is competent to achieve these ambitions with babies and young children with disabilities and special needs?

Peter Limbrick writes: I am offering below a brief report of an attempt I made last year in the special circumstances of visiting a family I had not met before in the Czech Republic

‘It takes leaders to break down silos: Integrating services for disabled children’ (CDC paper). Further observations focusing on local agreements about good practice

Health, education and social care agencies in each locality must decide and describe what, in their combined view, good practice is. After that, it would be perverse not to abide by it

This is the fourth and last part of a series of informal observations on the Council for Disabled Children’s

‘It takes leaders to break down silos: Integrating services for disabled children’ (CDC paper). Further observations focusing this time on workforce attitudes, and a bit about cake

‘I have seen therapists being unwilling to share ideas with portage workers because of differences in levels of training. The portage workers characterised this as professional snobbery.’