Strengthening Your Marriage Or Partnership While Raising Children On The Spectrum

This session, designed for professionals and parents, addresses the challenges of handling intensified parenting demands while trying to find a way for all family members to have a good quality of life. Emphasis is placed on how to protect a marriage or partnership from the wear and tear of such ongoing stressors. The authors of Married with Special-Needs Children and Disability and the Family Life Cycle will share 10 key strategies and insights from many other parents. The stressors placed on families raising children on the spectrum are well known. There is no doubt that there is a multitude of them including: lack of time, information overload, remaining vigilant, special diets, handling meltdowns, struggles getting proper educational supports, lack of sleep, dealing with insurance companies, worries about the future and uncertainty about the best strategies and therapies.  What is less well-known is how to effectively cope with these stressors in a manner that enables a couple’s relationship to stay healthy and how to balance the needs of other children in the family and yourself. This session, is designed for professionals and parents, and addresses issues and concerns faced by couples raising children with spectrum disorders.

The authors of "Married with Special Needs Children” and “Disability and the Family Lifecycle” will discuss the challenges of parents who are faced with intensified parenting demands and navigating a complicated path to find a high quality of family life for all members. One of the greatest challenges is how to protect a marriage or partnership from the wear and tear of such ongoing stressors.

Dr. Laura Marshak and Ms. Fran Prezant will provide insight into practical strategies that strengthen couples’ relationships and maintain some balance in the family. Their workshops are based on years of working with parents of children with disabilities in various therapeutic and advocacy capacities as well as the research for four books they co-authored together.

The focus of the content for this presentation will be equally relevant to the needs of parents with relatively newly diagnosed children as well as those who have been living with autism spectrum disorders for many years.  An understanding of how this can impact couples over time will be shared. Emphasis will be placed on what can be done to address common problems such as growing apart due to being exhausted and consumed, different coping style, disagreements about therapy and future expectations and difficulty feeling like anything more than “parent-partners” with no connections except through the focus on the child. The issue of how to work as a team with your partner, under these circumstances, will be discussed along with how intimacy can be maintained. They will elaborate on ten key strategies for couples that they have been found to be useful in managing many of the complexities that go along with having a child with an autism spectrum disorder.  Although couples’ relationships are emphasized, attention will be paid to other important and sometimes related issues such as the use of individual coping strategies as well as the needs of siblings who are not on the spectrum.

  A portion of the workshop’s content is drawn from research they have done with hundreds of parents raising children with a variety of disabilities.  Parents raising children with special needs were asked what they experienced as common problem in their couples’ relationships as well as strategies they found to be particularly useful.  Excerpts of these valuable parental insights will be will be incorporated and integrated into the presentation along with the professional perspectives of the presenters. The speakers will also  share findings of research in which parents  offer  their perspectives  about most helpful (and non helpful) actions provided by professionals with whom they interact and actions that can be taken by professionals that will help  proactively harness parent strengths in ways that assist the child and the family unit.

 The focus of the workshop will be of practical value to professionals as well as parents and may provide valuable opportunities for both groups to interact in the question and answer segment.