We all have the tendency to get stuck in many patterns and ruts that can make it very difficult for us to achieve our potential as individuals, parents, and as families. When we take time to assess what and how we are doing, we can usually come up with a list of things we acknowledge that we could do better. 

There have been many things said and written about good intentions, mostly related to our failure to execute them. But every positive step forward begins with the intention to do it. Intention needs to be followed up with execution; and execution requires a plan and commitment.

I would like to suggest that although we may often lack the commitment to change and do things for ourselves, we love and care enough about our families and children that we create a plan that structures us into regular assessment of how and what we are doing and creates the intention to improve it, followed by a plan, commitment and execution. What we do today, tomorrow, and going forward matters. Every day and in every way, what we do impacts our families’ and our children’s futures. Let’s identify the ruts we are stuck in and the proactive things we need to be doing to move forward in an organized, structured way to make positive lasting changes. 

Patterns are habits, and habits are not easy to change because we are good at them, and they generally require no thought. Changing habits and patterns requires commitment and a plan. I suggest a plan for parents who wish to really do something with their children that can truly improve all their lives. To this end I would like to propose a Family Reset Challenge. 

The goal of the Family Reset Challenge is to help parents create an ongoing mechanism for family/child development and progress.

I want you to imagine something incredibly simple, something that would generally take less than thirty minutes per week and very possibly as little as ten minutes per week. Something that could improve your lives as individuals, your relationship with your spouse, and the lives and futures of your children.

What I am suggesting is that parents make the commitment and accept the challenge to have a scheduled targeted weekly meeting. Single parents need to schedule this special time as well. Prior to meeting together, I suggest that you take time individually to think about what you could, should, and would change that would benefit your family. Following what could be as short as a five-minute meeting with yourself, meet with your spouse, and when appropriate, with your children as well. Share your thoughts, evaluate where you are, where you want to be going, and create a plan– a plan built around the realities of what is needed to break old habits or create new ones. 

To create a new habit pattern generally takes 30-60 days, so for our challenges I am suggesting that from the get-go you make a one-to-two-month commitment. See it as an investment in your family’s future.

Challenge number one is to make the commitment to the weekly meetings, then in those meetings make the joint decision to create new 30-60 day challenges with the intention of creating ongoing new life changing habits and patterns. 

I have created a list of possible challenges to give you some ideas, but the challenges you create need to be the ones that fit your family and circumstances. 

Challenge Options: 

• Commitment to schedule an implement a weekly parent meeting
• Commitment to dedicate 5 minutes per day thinking proactively as to how you can help your spouse and each of your children 
• Commitment to have a weekly family outing/field trip
• Commitment to a daily family walk or indoor physical activity
• Commitment to not have your children eat any meals alone 
• Commitment to have at least one whole family meal per day
• Commitment to eliminate dairy from the family diet
• Commitment to eliminate sugar from family diet 
• Commitment to eliminate gluten from the family diet
• Commitment to actively teach, schedule, and build the list of your children’s chores and responsibilities
• Commitment to read to your child daily
• Commitment to give each of your children 4 positive comments to every negative
• Commitment to be consistent with feedback and consequences
• Commitment for parents to improve their function by using Simply Smarter
• Commitment to creating very specific holidays from electronics
• NACD Family specific challenges
  • Commitment to do x percent of your child’s program 5 days a week
  • Commitment of each parent to assume responsibility for specific program activities
  • Commitment for parents to read an NACD article or watch an NACD video with discussion weekly
  • Commitment from a sibling(s) to assume responsibility for one or more specific program activities

Do you care enough to accept the first challenge of a weekly meeting? After you succeed in the first challenge, the next is easier; and it just keeps getting easier as you create a new pattern of accountability and acceptance and learn that if you have the intention to make changes and improvement, you are up to the challenge to make it be.

I would encourage families to comment on the challenge concept and to share their challenge experiences and the challenges they have created.

This first challenge of a weekly meeting to assess, evaluate and proactively improve your family is very possibly the best investment of time you will ever make, less than 30 minutes per week, that is 1/336 of your week that has the potential to change everyone’s lives for the better. 

It’s tough to find a better investment and is worth the commitment.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 35 No.4, 2022 ©NACD

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Here we are, at the beginning of not just a new year, but a new decade.

I never quite got the celebration thing. Apparently, the foundation of the New Year’s celebration is to bid farewell to the previous year and welcome the new year. I personally liked 2019. I had the opportunity to see many fantastic changes in hundreds of children.

For our NACD Family, 2019 saw many children with Down syndrome learning to function at levels of their typical peers. Children on the spectrum became more present, tuning in and participating well in our world. We saw children with previous learning and attention issues excelling academically and socially, and “typical” children not only doing great academically, but learning the value of chores and service and being given the opportunity to discover their strengths and passions through our home education programs. And we saw some brain injured children show us what unlimited potential is all about.

I’m thankful for 2019, for the honor and privilege of working with a fantastic dedicated staff and some of the greatest families in the world. Some of our families can measure 2019 by the obvious gains their children have made. The reality is that many of our families do not have an easy road, fighting problems like serious health and seizure issues, or difficult behaviors, and just working hard to get to the point where they can even really seriously implement their program. A step toward better health, better seizure control, less need for medications, and better management of behavior are all things to be celebrated. I celebrate 2019 and our successes, but look forward to 2020 because we can do it even better.

2020 isn’t just a new year; it’s a new decade. Now is a great time to take a step back and reflect over the past year and even the past decade and for us all to evaluate how we can move forward and do it all even better. Truth is, we can all do it better if we commit to it.

We need to establish our priorities, to approach this new year and decade with the intention of working better and smarter. But first, renew and refine your vision. Believe that we and our children have unlimited potentials. We can constantly redefine who we are and take new steps forward toward creating greater and greater visions of what we can accomplish and thus achieve better outcomes.

Parents who are part of our NACD Family–you are not alone. You are part of a powerful team. We not only welcome, we encourage in every way we know how, more communication and interaction. The more communication we have, the more targeted we can be in developing each child’s dynamic program.

Together we can redefine the vision, redefine potential, and not only help our children, but help provide a new vision of what can be for others.

Reprinted by permission NACD Newsletter, January 2020 ©NACD

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Okay, the party is over—let’s get to work!

Let’s make 2019 a year of real change. Make this the year to take a big step toward realizing the vision and the dream.

Start your year by revisiting your vision, your dreams for your children. Clarity of vision goes a long way toward actually achieving the vision. It’s rather impossible to hit a target if you don’t have one. Don’t be afraid to aim high, to hold onto a vision for your children. Our job at NACD is to help you find a vision and to help you take the steps toward realizing that vision.

Our intention is quite clear: it is to help you put together the pieces to fulfill the vision. It’s all about producing results, not just trying, but also succeeding.

One of the things I would like all of you to focus on as we start 2019 is INTENTION. Please read the following article on intention carefully, and feel free to discuss specifics with your coaches and evaluators. Our intention is to help you fulfill the vision for your children and even raising your expectations and building a new vision.

As we all begin this new year, let’s make a commitment to success. Let’s all communicate more than ever, so we can be more targeted than ever. Let’s all understand that every day is an important day and that today and every day we can do something that can impact the rest of our children’s lives. Avoid those who do not share your vision or who can stand in your way. Let’s keep our eyes on the target and work hard with intention to hit it.

Bob

Reprinted by permission NACD Newsletter, January 2019 ©NACD

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What is the purpose of your program? Many of you approach your program as if the goal were to check off a lot of boxes. That’s not the goal. The goal is to produce change. It’s easy to lose track of where we are going and to get lost in the process. As you are looking at your one thing, think about goals. Think about those important things that we are trying to change or develop and focus and work with intention.

Intention is working with a targeted mental focus for the purpose of producing a specific future change.

One of the most glaring things I see when reviewing program videos are folks obviously working without intention, which results in very slow progress. I wouldn’t want to count all the processing videos I have watched that made me want to scream. As most of you know, developing processing skills is rather foundational and really important. You should also know that even an incremental change in processing results in wonderful things, like better understanding, increased language, increase in global maturity, improved behavior, and better cognition-global change! Understanding this importance, many families justly prioritize their processing activities; but what I often see are parents doing the activities without a lot of intensity, which means they are doing it without intention. I often have to pay very close attention to the videos to determine if the child is getting the sequences right or wrong because watching the feedback from the parent or helper, there wasn’t much difference in the response, whether the sequence was done correctly or not. Without quality feedback and reinforcement your child isn’t even going to know what the goal is and certainly is not going to be working with intention.

To digress a tad, on my last trip to our Cincinnati chapter, where I work out of a hotel that sits on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, just across from the city of Cincinnati, I renewed my perspective on intention and intensity. Often on these trips I take a little walk along the river after I have my dinner and before I go back to my room to address more emails. Looking across the river I can see both the Cincinnati football and baseball stadiums. The Ohio River is a big river, and although the stadiums sit close to the river’s edge, they are still quite a way away. During the baseball season the Cincinnati Reds play, and during the football season the Cincinnati Bengals play. If I happen to be out in the evening and a game is being played, there is absolutely no question if someone gets a hit or a homerun or a team scores a touchdown. On this last trip, I was walking and looking out at the stadium when a touchdown was scored by the Bengals. The roar of the crowd from where I was across the river was almost deafening, and then the sky lit up with fireworks. The intention is to win the game, and it is understood that to win the game you need to get hits or advance the ball on the football field. The fans react with intensity to each of these events. There is no question of the intention of the players or the fans. It is also not surprising that teams in cities with good fans who help generate intensity and keep the players focused on the intention do well.

The goal of working on processing is to raise the processing level, preferably quickly. Watching these videos, it becomes blatantly obvious that more often than not the intention is to complete the activity and check off the box. I’m sure as the parent pushes themselves and their child through the activity, they think that they just need to do this another few hundred or thousand times and their child will move forward and ultimately, they probably will. But if we address not only processing activities, but also everything we do with our kids with intention, we can meet our goals faster, and generally much, much faster.

As an example of how we can create intention, I will at times do processing activities with criteria. What this means is that rather than doing a processing activity for a specific duration, such as a minute or two, we do the activity with a target. For example, if we are just starting to get auditory digit spans of five, working with criteria we will let the child know that the goal of the session is to get a five. As soon as they get a five, we have a party and the session ends. Their intention is no longer just to cooperate, to try or pretend that they are trying; it is to get a five! And our intention is no longer to check off a box, it is to get a five. It can be amazing to see how much faster we can move forward when the intention is clearly defined, and the child is receiving good feedback.

One of keys to focus and intention is data and attention to detail. If you are working on teaching your child to identify pictures, read words, recognize numbers, or complete a math process, you can only work with intention if you know where you are and where you are going. For example, if you are trying to develop your child’s sight word vocabulary you need to know what they know. Perhaps you have shown them 50 new words over a month or so. How many do they know? If I were flashing them the words, I would periodically stop on a word and ask them what it was or start a review session by testing a few words. I would mentally keep track of how many of the words they know, about what percentage they know, and even what types of words. Armed with some data we can do a number of things. If you provide your coach and evaluator with the data, they can make recommendations to do everything from change frequencies and durations, to how many new words are being introduced, to what kinds of words to introduce, or even to putting it away for a while. If the data is simply that we have checked off x number of boxes over these weeks, that doesn’t really help us reach our goal. The intention of every session should be to succeed, to teach your child to read more words; and to do that within each session, you need to be gathering data and work with intention.

Intention is every bit as important for every other aspect of program, whether we are teaching a child to walk properly, to track better, or to love looking at pictures. With absolutely every activity we do, we need to be mindful of what we are trying to achieve; and we need to be observant and constantly adjusting, modifying, and gathering data. Our intention is to produce new function, new abilities and to change your child’s life one piece, one step at a time.

I find intention to be a fascinating neurological phenomenon. You can consciously start doing something with intention, but then your brain appears to learn to apply it without conscious effort. As an example, through the years I have had children read short non-fiction articles as part of their program, primarily to improve reading comprehension. Generally, it would appear to the parent who was working with the child during the day that the child was engaged, and since we were working to develop reading comprehension, that they were actually reading to learn. I would on occasion have the parents do an experiment. The experiment was quite simple: at dinner after everyone had sat at the table, but before anyone was allowed to start eating, I would have the child’s father ask them what the story they had read earlier was about. Many parents were shocked when they discovered that their child couldn’t even remember the subject, let alone any of the content. A common answer from children to the question, “What did you learn at school today?” is “Nothing.” If the family repeated this for a few days, the child would start remembering more and more about the story; and if the parents randomly asked the dinner question, the child would usually maintain their new intention, which was not just to read the story, listen to the story, and answer specific questions immediately after reading the story, but to learn and try to retain the information. After the first couple of days I’m sure the child, when they sat down to do their story, was not consciously thinking, “I need to remember this because Dad is going to ask me about it at dinner.” The child’s brain had changed and was applying greater intensity to recalling the information on an ongoing basis. Your brain adapts and changes and even generalizes intention. Very cool!

One Final Note on Intention

Parents generally work with a child with better intention than anyone who is paid. As a parent there are a lot of things you could do with your day rather than work with your child. You don’t do it because you’re getting paid; and actually, many of you could be out doing things for pay if you weren’t home working with your child. You do what you do because your intention is to help your child. Even for you it can be tough keeping your focus and working each activity with the needed intention.

If you are having people help with program implementation or even sending your child to school or therapy, the issue of intention becomes significantly greater. If working with a child or children is a job, often the job is defined as implementing specific methods as best you can. Not a bad objective, but it’s not the right objective. The intention should be to produce results—good results and fast results. One of the frustrations I face every day of my life is educators, therapists, and even physicians applying the same methodologies day after day and week after week and year after year, in spite of that fact that they haven’t worked or haven’t worked well or worked fast enough. It is easy for people to get stuck in the rut of “this is what we do and how we do it and so be it,” regardless of the results or lack of.

Sorry for the little digression—back to program helpers. It is more difficult for people getting paid to help with program to achieve and maintain the proper intention than it is even for parents. As parents and bosses and supervisors, part of your job is to train your helpers well, clearly define the intention, quiz them on the data, and tie their efforts to achievement of the intended results, not checking off boxes. You might find it interesting to note that historically volunteers do a better job maintaining intention than people who are paid, and often the more people are paid, the poorer job they do of program implementation and working with intention. Obviously there are exceptions, but if you are not getting paid or if the pay is minimal, it is more likely that the primary goal it to help the child.

On occasions where we have had siblings help with program, we encourage good intention not by paying the kids or even rewarding them for their time, but for results. It has been fun watching how fast things can change if we do something like, “When Johnny can do two 5s in row, we are all going to go out for dinner and to a movie.” Everyone’s intention is tied to their successfully hitting the target.

Fifty years ago, when I started doing this work, I heard comments such as, “You must be a very patient person,” or, “You need a lot of patience to work with handicapped children.”

I’m not a patient person. To the contrary, I’m quite impatient, which is why I am constantly creating and looking for better ways to do everything. My intention is, and your intention needs to be, to be impatient, to work with intention, and to make it right, make it better, and to improve your child’s life. With our joint focus and intention and, yes, some impatience, we can do it.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 32 No. 1, 2019 ©NACD

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