Classified with intellectual disabilities, Benson (not his real name) is a friendly fourteen-year-old with an engaging smile and an easy personality. I first met Benson when his mother called me after she read a newspaper article about my work...
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5 Things Parents Can Do To Help Their Disabled Teen by Mike Kelly ONE: Get your son or daughter with challenges exposed to their community through a vocational experience when the child is 11, 12 or 13-years-old. This could either be...
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5 Great Jobs for Teens With Disabilities by Mike Kelly For some reason, society has unreasonably low expectations of youth with disabilities and a propensity to stereotype. In fact, there’s a prevailing and widespread belief—sometimes even...
Read More 5 TIPS To Help Get Your Disabled Teen A First Job by Mike Kelly It’s not so easy to get jobs for youth with disabilities. Because our society had become so impersonalized, most every job seeker is forced to go online to apply for a job...
Read More Gianna is bespectacled fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school with thick and wavy dark brown hair that falls below her shoulders. She has bright amber eyes and a razor thin build. Though Gianna has Cerebral Palsy, she lives on the sunny side...
Read More Tall and slender with a wide smile, brown hair and pale blue eyes, Connor is a movie-star-handsome seventeen-year-old high school junior that girls his age would typically want to date. Because Connor has Cerebral Palsy, cannot walk, and uses a...
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We’ve all seen the news stories on TV of professional athletes committing crimes or demonstrating other reprehensible behavior. We’ve also read about multi-millionaire professional athletes charging their fans $50 or $100 to sign an...
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BELOW READ WHAT SOME NOTABLE INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS SAY ABOUT THE NEW BOOK “SPECIAL STORIES…” WHICH FEATURES CHILDREN WITH INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGES “In life you meet a lot of very interesting people. Some are takers...
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PART 2 During my next visit to Charleston the following December, I was once again contracted by Lindsay’s parents to help their daughter with a new project. Her parents reported that she was still working well with Carly at The Market, but...
Read More PART 1 Due to the flexibility of my job and my wife’s work—combined with our desire to travel and embark upon new adventures—I was able to build a small caseload of students in Charleston, South Carolina each winter. During my work in the...
Read More I realize that we have to give names to things, but I’m not sure that “disability” or “disabled” should be used to describe human beings. Read the below story about one teen I worked with and let me know how...
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The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention state that roughly 1 in 7 American children have a developmental disability—over 3 million kids nationwide. Because of that number, one would think that there would be many books prominently...
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