Child-centred and family-focused practice with children with disability

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This free short online course introduces family-centred practice strategies to support the wellbeing of children with disability and their families.

Building on the knowledge introduced in Emerging Minds’ foundation course, Understanding child mental health and disability, this course outlines strategies for supporting the important relationships in a child’s life. It adopts a child-centred and family-focused approach to practice, which is about valuing and supporting the child’s connection to their parents and siblings and recognising the expertise of their family members.

Child-centred and family-focused practice with children with disability introduces the ART approach to working with children with disability:

• Acknowledgment, which prioritises a contextual understanding and curiosity of a child with disability, and their family members
• Relationships, which examines the most important connections in a child’s life and encourages important adults to help children to express themselves using appropriate social and communication methods; and
• Time, which is about helping families to both recognise and acknowledge their challenges, while planning ways to best support each other through difficult times.

Keeping the values, preferences, needs and views of all family members in mind will help you to effectively support the child with disability you’re working with.

This family-centred practice course is suited to all professionals working with children with disability and their families. It will help you to better incorporate approaches to your work that promote the social and emotional development and wellbeing of children with disability.

Core learning

This course will take you approximately 90 minutes to complete. This includes reading the written content, watching the videos and completing the reflection activities.

Further reading

Additional time can be spent reviewing the supporting resources included throughout the course.

You can undertake the course across multiple sessions at your own pace. The last screen you visit before logging off will be bookmarked and you will have the option of returning to that screen when you next log in.