“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it…” – Ken Robinson

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”-  Arthur Koestler

 Post #1 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.

Children and their families deserve better.If you’re a parent of a child with developmental disabilities, chances are you have been exhausted, even overwhelmed. You’re told to find the best doctors, the right schools, the most experienced therapists, the perfect programs. You worry about the child’s safety, their health, their education, their caregivers, their behavior, communication, their playmates, their future. You worry about costs and finances. You worry about the wellbeing of your whole family. Every step feels urgent and overwhelming. Every decision feels like it might make or break your child or break you and your family.

It’s tempting to search for a diagnosis, a program, a guru, a strategy, a checklist, a clear answer that makes everything better, sooner, easier.

But that’s not what we are offering. Organizing Minds blog posts are not how-to guidelines or collections of bite-sized parenting hacks. This is not a blog of top ten lists of quick and easy solutions. The lives of children with developmental disabilities and the lives of their families are far too precious and complex to be reduced to ineffective and insufficient shortcuts. Organizing Minds blogposts are meant to challenge assumptions, to open a conversation, to help deepen mutual understanding, and to help clear a path toward a better future.

Children deserve more than checklists and one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter programs. Each unique child deserves to be truly understood. They have a right to connect with dedicated, sincere, competent, prepared adult mediators. They have a right to learn how to learn, to connect with adults who know them, and value and respect them, and know what the child is thinking and feeling and want to learn how to help them, support them, encourage them.

I’ve known too many children and families who have been burned by superficial, clichéd, offhand advice, by overly structured, personally distant “McDonaldizationed” therapists and teacher-centered programs. Or by laissez-faire, nothing-happening, overly “child-centered” programs, or by chaotic, too much, too soon overloaded sensory stimulation environments, or by ineffective, non-meaningful and unproductive “behavioral learning experiences.”

Children and families fill out questionnaire after questionnaire, have gone through one evaluation after another, only to receive labels that don’t translate into specific, meaningful support for their individual child. Parents have tried therapy after therapy, special program after special program, only to discover after many months that their child is being trained and conditioned, or being babysat and managed, rather than learning how to communicate, to connect and to learn how to learn so they can live safer, more self-reliant and more fulfilling lives.

Children and their families deserve better. We can do better. Parents need to believe in the child and in themselves. Physicians, teachers and therapists need to ask deeper questions and to design better solutions. We need a new and better way of seeing, thinking, planning, building and responding. And it starts with three fundamental recommendations.

1. We can’t meaningfully support a child’s learning and progress until we connect with them and genuinely and deeply get to know them.

 Children are not their diagnosis. They are not the sum of their test scores, or checklist of their delays and deficits. Each child has a distinct way of thinking, feeling, sensing, moving, learning and loving.

To help a child advance, we need to know that child, not just on paper, but from within a personal, collaborative, communicative and problem-solving learning relationship. We need to understand the world around them, their family, teachers, peers, community. No child exists in isolation. Their development is woven into the lives of the people who care for them, teach them, mentor them. We gradually learn the conditions under which each child can thrive.

2. Too many systems are unintentionally deceiving or even harming the children and families they want to serve.

Our current educational, medical and behavioral systems too often miss the point. Their development plan slice the child into parts, speech here, behaviors there, caregiving at home, academics at school, sensory here, emotions there, play over there, work over here, learning here, movement there, without ever understanding the child and integrating the child and their lives into a meaningful whole.

Too many systems prioritize performance over progress, compliance over connection. They rarely validate and support the parent’s voice, intuition and lived experience with the child. Either because they feel they are the professionals and know best, or because their procedures, methods, institutions and bureaucracies do not know who the child is or how to make the necessary contributions.

Many systems are broken not because they lack resources or good intentions, or effort, but because they too often lack understanding, imagination, humility and integration. Too often, we are failing our children. We need to redesign unhelpful beliefs, goals, strategies, programs and methodologies from the ground up.

3. Real change takes conviction, confidence, time, enjoyment, daily effort, coordination and collaboration

Quick fixes rarely last. Children don’t develop in a straight line. Learning for practical, expandable developmental skills, deeper understanding and continual platform development, practical growth and life fulfillment can’t be measured, organized, initiated or evaluated by irrelevant and often invalid standardized testing.

We need support and development systems that are flexible, evolving and grounded in real-life contexts. Learning experiences that offer useful feedback and explanations, which lead to deeper understandings, that allow newly acquired skills and learning to be applied in real-life situations. Learning needs to be enjoyable, practical and generalizable to other real-life problem-solving situations.

We don’t separate evaluation from intervention. Assessment is not something we do to a child, but something we do with them every time we interact. Every activity, every moment of connection, becomes part of relationship-building, of mutual understanding, and an opportunity for learning. Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development are part of the same overall development process. Parallel Assessment and Parallel Development align with each other and help adult mediators and the child to support each other’s development.

Children and their families deserve better, and we can all do better.

Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim

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