Parents of children with additional needs often feel isolated and frustrated that ‘standard parenting advice’ sometimes doesn’t work.
The course provides an opportunity for you to support and encourage each other, helping you share feelings and experiences, and come up with solutions to problems on the basis of what works – not what’s meant to work!
The six sessions are written with input from many different families of children with additional needs. They aim to help support you in meeting your child’s needs, focusing on children aged between 3 to 11 years with a variety of disabilities or additional needs, especially those relating to learning, development or behaviour.
How does it work?
Sharing ideas with other parents and carers is a key element. Discussions are based around real-life scenarios. Each session includes space to plan any changes you want to make in your parenting and from week two, an opportunity to discuss how that’s working.
What’s in the course?
We start by looking at your experience of living with your child who has additional needs, how you can help them reach their potential and how to keep going.
We consider the importance of children’s well-being by looking at how to boost self-esteem through play, learning, and responding with good listening, and how our parenting style affects our children’s responses.
We explore how you can talk to your child about their condition, other people’s reactions to your child and understanding the feelings you might have as you journey with your child.
Why do our children act the way they do? We begin by looking at how our parenting style affects our children’s responses and the many reasons behind behaviour. We also explore the vital subject of setting boundaries, why children need them and why they can be hard to set. Following on from this is the value of routines, praise, and consistency and exploring a toolkit of discipline strategies.
We look at how school might support your child’s development and learning, how you can play a part in this and where to look for further support. Finally, there’s a chance to recognise the impact on the wider family and to review what the course has meant to you.
Session titles:
- Session 1 – The additional needs experience
- Session 2 – Raising emotionally healthy children
- Session 3 – Understanding feelings
- Session 4 – Boundaries and battles
- Session 5 – A behaviour toolkit
- Session 6 – The wider circle of care
Have a look at sample pages from the Children with Additional Needs Parent handbook and Facilitator manual by clicking on the images above.
If you have a passion to support families, why not train with us to become a licenced facilitator to deliver our popular range of courses to parents in your community? Find out more by visiting our training pages here.
Our Time Out for Parents courses are run by trained independent Facilitators. If you want to attend a Time Out for Parents course, click on the button below to see if a Facilitator is running courses near you.
Please note, some Facilitators may continue to run the previous seven-session version of this course until summer 2026.
