What about our well kids?

If you have a hurt child that has well siblings it is inevitable that the hurt child will get more attention at times, if not ALL the time, than your well kids.  That's a reality.  But of course there are healthy ways to do that and unhealthy ways to do that.  As parents, we often have to deal with guilt over this issue.  It's a guilt that can make us feel like we (as well as our children) are losing no matter what we do.  But there's good news too...

Having a hurt brother or sister can actually be a really amazing opportunity for our well kids.  Some of the most kind-hearted and well-rounded adults that I know are the siblings of a hurt brother or sister.  I had friends who had a hurt sibling long before I had a hurt child of my own and seeing their response to their brother or sister has done a lot to ease my anxiety about my own kids. 

That doesn't mean we don't need to pay attention to the needs of ALL of our kids but it does mean that having a hurt sibling doesn't have to be the end of the world for our well kids.  In fact, it may just turn out to be one of the greatest blessings of their lives! 

I hope the article below, written by Janet Doman, is an encouragement to you much like it has been to our family.

My Favorite Question   By Janet Doman

When families come here for the first time with their brain-injured kids they spend a week learning intensively about their own child and about the growth and development of the human brain.

It is an exciting, exhilarating and amazing week for the families and for the staff.

It is also an exhausting week.

At the very end of that week each family meets with a director who checks each part of the program and answers any final questions a family may have. Often this meeting takes place at midnight or later.

Last week I was meeting with one of our new Italian families and it was well past midnight. We went over the program and when the family had finished asking their questions they said they had only one final question, but it wasn't about their brain-injured daughter, it was about their well one. "What shall we say to our well fourteen-year-old about the program?" they asked.

I smiled a big, broad smile and sat back. They had asked my favorite question.

What shall you say to your well daughter? Ask her how many people get to jump into the ocean and pull out a drowning child? How do you think a human being feels about herself when she does such a thing? How do you think she feels about life? Don't you wish every child had an opportunity to help save another child? What a magnificent experience for the well child, not to mention the hurt one!

What shall you say to your well daughter?

Tell her that for over thirty years the well brothers and sisters of our brain-injured kids, aged three to twenty-three, have been fighting the battle to fix their hurt brothers and sisters right beside Mom and Dad.

Smart mothers and fathers have always recognized that the program is a family program. It is not only to save the hurt child, but to save all the luckier ones who didn't get the cord wrapped around their necks in utero, who didn't get hit by a car. Our mothers and fathers have respected and honored all their children enough to include them. Why should they be deprived of the glory of helping to get a blind kid to see, or a deaf kid to hear, or a paralyzed kid to move?

What shall you say to your well daughter? Tell her she just graduated from being a kid to being an adult. Tell her she is second in command to you. Tell her that her family is fighting a real battle where a real human life is at stake. Tell her that your family is going to be the best fighting team in the whole world.

Tell her you need her.

What shall you say to your well daughter? Teach her how to pattern by saying, "This is how you turn the head." And if you teach her well, she will teach her friends how to turn the head too. And the ones who come back to help again will be her true friends, and the ones who'd rather not, she will understand were not real friends at all.

Ask her to help you.

And when you do, do you know what she will say?

I do.

I believe she will say what I said when I was first asked to pattern one of our very hurt kids. I was nine years old and our in-patient clinic did not have enough patterners, so they asked me to turn the head.

I was stunned.

"Who in the history of the world ever got to help fix a brain-injured child at age nine?" I wondered.

What will she say when you tell her she's on the team? She will know it is the most important thing that has ever happened to her, and maybe ever will happen to her, and she'll say, "I thought you'd never ask."