What does your child play with? It isn’t easy to find engaging, and appropriate, toys for kids with certain kinds of special needs. Organizations like Jack’s Helping Hand are making things a bit easier for parents, by creating a toy lending library. This is just one of the ways that Jack’s Helping Hand can offer assistance to parents of kids who have special needs.
Jack’s Helping Hand is an organization that was created by Paul and Bridget Ready, in memory of their son, Jack. He had a rare form of brain cancer, and lived to be three years old. He was the kind of child who could play and laugh joyfully even while coping with repeated brain surgeries and intense physical rehabilitation.
The Ready’s created Jacks’ Helping Hand to serve the unmet needs of families with disabled children. It is an organization that is local to San Luis Obispo, California. This organization helps families who have children with special needs to get their unmet physical, mental, and medical needs taken care of.
One of the things that can be difficult for parents of children who have special needs is finding appropriate, interesting, engaging toys that their child can play with, learn from, and use to increase and improve certain skills. Toy stores might have things organized based upon the age that a child should be in order to safely play with a certain toy. For example, there is usually an area where parents can find toys that are safe for infants or toddlers to use.
Parents of kids who have special needs are unlikely to find an area that contains toys that will be perfectly appropriate for their child to play with. This means that these parents must put extra effort into doing research about what toys would best help their child. Sometimes, the toys that are best for a child who has a specific special need are too expensive for a parent to purchase.
This is where Jack’s Helping Hand steps in. They have put together some Adaptive Toy Lending Libraries in three different locations in San Luis Obispo County. These libraries offer traditional and adaptive toys that families can borrow in the same way that a traditional library allows people to check out books and movies. It doesn’t cost a family any money to borrow from the Adaptive Toy Lending Libraries.
There are twelve different categories of adaptive toys to choose from. What does your child need to work on? There are toys to help develop fine motor skills, and ones that help with gross motor skills. Other categories include: balance, music, imaginative play, auditory, sensory, puzzles, tactile, visual perception, switch toys and switches.
Image by grannatot on Flickr
