There are times in a parent’s life that the more challenging aspects of parenthood cause great introspection, particularly if the parent has a child with a disability. Nagging feelings of sadness, denial, guilt, anger, or shame call out for soothing answers that ultimately lead the seeker to peace and acceptance. The answers must come from within; but sometimes guidance can be found in a special and reassuring book.

In Robert A. Naseef, Ph.D.’s book, Special Children, Challenged Parents: The Struggles and Rewards of Raising a Child with a Disability, the author helps parents explore their own hearts and minds by interweaving professional insights with exquisite personal narrative, fictional examples and real life experience. Naseef is the parent of an adult child with autism and a practicing psychologist in the Philadelphia area specializing in families with special needs.

He explains the complex feelings that commonly accompany loss and grieving over "what might have been," provides coping strategies to deal with daily challenges that haunt all parents, instills hope to "go on with [one’s] life" and draws from his own rich life experience to lend illustrative detail to the framework of his book. He pays homage to his beloved son Tariq, now 22 years old, and to the rest of his family through a series of poignant letters, family photographs and stories.

Naseef gently steps the reader through the healing process by providing his own insight and perspective, personally and professionally. With intimate detail, he describes the concerns he has had to face from Tariq’s babyhood up through adulthood. He then identifies the stages of grief, how to work through this process, how to redefine and enrich parents’ relationships with their special child, and how to understand and guide challenging behaviors.

He gives voice to the instinctive fears, needs, and coping styles that men and women have trouble communicating to each other to foster a better understanding of what each goes through. He explores couple’s, siblings’ and extended families’ needs from being related to a child with special needs. He then leads parents to finding "circles of support" through friends and community, working with professionals who serve children with disabilities and anticipating and planning for the future. In addition, Naseef provides a recommended book list for children and an excellent resource list for families.

Most tellingly of all, Naseef, the father, begins and ends his book with touching letters to his son Tariq, which express his longing to experience "what might have been." And in this way, his words strike a cord with us all.

There’s no question that the healing process is lifelong when your child has special needs. The inevitable questions arise, we search for answers, and, once we find them, we return to our daily lives; over time, new pain and questions bubble up again. When other books gloss over such tough subject matter, it is comforting to find a resource written by a parent/professional who is as familiar and understanding of the totality of life with disabilities as his readers are.

     To order Special Children, Challenged Parents from Amazon