Education and counselling support to families and children with intellectual disabilities

Despite 31 million people being affected by intellectual disabilities, the needs of these people and their families are largely ignored. This situation is further exacerbated in smaller towns where there is a dearth of trained professionals, lack of support, and language & accessibility barriers.

Due to lack of information, families end up running pillar to post trying to find the right support. Trained therapists and teachers are a scarce resource and costs forbid most families from accessing their support. Many families opt for non-evidence-based interventions, which are ineffective and potentially harmful. This not only causes wastage of time and money but can also harm the child and take away crucial years of development.

Additionally, COVID has caused special schools and NGOs working for intellectual disabilities(ID) to close. Families are struggling to help their children in-home set-up. Children with intellectual disabilities have compromised immune systems which means that families will be reluctant to send them until they are vaccinated. However, this is also an opportunity for families to understand the interests and abilities of their children and provide home-based intervention so they can gainfully progress and participate in the society in future.

Nayi Disha proposes to provide educational training and learning resources to parents of children with Autism and other intellectual disabilities.  These trainings will be provided in Hindi, Marathi and Telugu.

We plan to conduct training sessions with the objective of educating parents on self-help skills to help their child. Our sessions for families will be based on common concern areas to improve their care-giving abilities at home. At the same time, we will also train families with digital literacy to improve their ability to search and find verified resources.

Some of the training topics:

• Parenting children with developmental delays: Understanding developmental disabilities, working as a family together, every interaction is a learning opportunity for the child
• Nutrition: Common nutrition challenges in children with IDD and how to tackle them
• Know Your rights and available schemes/benefits: Disability Certificate, Insurance, Guardianship, Financial planning
• Activities of Daily Living: How to teach children independence in daily activities such as brushing, bathing, etc
• Adolescent challenge: How to change parenting approach as child hits puberty. Importance of engaging individuals with IDD in meaningful activities on everyday basis.

• To impact 7500 families of children with intellectual disabilities through educational trainings and counselling support. 
• These trainings and learning resources will equip them to handle difficult period such as covid pandemic and associated lockdowns. Families can focus on building basic communication and daily living skills in their children and learn more about child’s likes and abilities so they have a strength-based approach.  
• Our trainings and learning resources complemented with access to free counselling support will significantly help families to navigate through stress, anxiety and care-giver burn-out. Nayi Disha already has an outreach program and accessible Helpline to provide guidance to families and partners with grassroot NGOs in smaller towns and provides them with critical resources from rich knowledge library created by Nayi Disha.  The training programs will cover critical and much requested topics shared by families of children with intellectual disabilities in smaller towns in Hindi,Marathi and Telugu over zoom to break language barriers. This will enable the families to maintain positive frame of mind, find support  and bring positive outcomes in their child’s development.