As a special needs parent, words cannot express how important of roll I play in my children’s life. One of the things I like to do is use every opportunity to be their teacher. As their parents, my wife and I are the most important teachers. As their father I do my very best to lead by example and give them as much real-life, hands-on experience as possible. I have discovered over the many years that I have been a special needs parent, that my children seem to learn better by doing. 

Basically, this means that I need to let them do things for themselves as much as possible and under safe and supervised conditions.

Don’t get me wrong, school is extremely important as well. However, the reality is that my kids need to learn life skills. Often times, these aren’t learned in the classroom at school and can be best learned by using the world as their classroom.

For example, when I make repairs around the house or do yard work outside, I always try to include the boys whenever possible. My Dad, their grandfather, does the same thing with them as well. The boys like to help do things that would be so much easier and more efficiently done, if done by myself. However, these are the times that I know I will miss as they get older and I can’t explain the feeling of teaching your child something for the first time.

So I thought that I would lead by example and not only focus on doing this more on my end, but also encourage you to do the same. I will be sharing short videos with you all, demonstrating what I mean and the types of things I do with my kids. I hope this helps someone out there. These video will all fall under the title: #Autism: Being their teacher (episode xxx). 

The first video in this series was shot today. It’s really short but it shows me working with Emmett, my 3 year old, on some basic repairs to the house.

[youtube width=”720″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYRDjJ0hU64[/youtube]