Become your child's expert
A parent's guide to addressing social, emotional and sensory differences
Have a feeling that something is not quite right in your child's development?
Waiting for an appointment with a child development specialist or for a diagnosis?
Received a diagnosis but let down by the system or just given a leaflet and told to speak with the school and join a support group?
Told to take a "wait and see" approach but need help now?
Feel like you are on your own to figure out how to support a child with sensory and/or social communication differences?
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For parents and children who need help now, the wait times and lack of support are unacceptable. In this website, you can educate yourself and follow a step by step process to create a plan that you can put into place immediately and that is tailored to your child's needs.
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Ironically, there is a huge amount of research, proven strategies and support available, but knowing what to do and where to access it is difficult. More and more children are being diagnosed with sensory and social communication conditions. With this comes more therapies, products, groups, books and resources. However, these conditions are complex and knowing how to navigate the resources available can be challenging. As each child's needs are different support needs to be personalised to the child.
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You're first step is to create your child's "Keep Calm & Play" Profile
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Why Keep Calm & Play? In trying to find a common framework, two objectives stand out: 1) keeping the individual calm and therefore able to engage and 2) the amount of play in therapies. More specifically:
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Keep Calm represents supporting your child in sensory & emotional regulation.
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Play represents both physical playing and social interaction, which are both essential for a child's healthy growth. Social interaction supports the development of communication, social-emotional and more complex social skills.
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Together, Keep Calm & Play provide a simple concept for structuring your child's development needs.
Creating your Plan
Explore "Keep Calm and Play"
From learning about the theory, to a focus on your child to therapies & strategies, you can find it here...
Learn more about how our brain and nervous system works. Delve into the world of social neuroscience, the importance of feeling safe and our senses.
Learn about SCERTS, a comprehensive evidence based framework for supporting children with social communication challenges. Its framework is based on the social brain & latest research into social neuroscience.
Skip here for ideas, questionnaires and tools for understanding your child's needs across key dimensions. Namely, social communication, emotional & sensory.
Need help finding the therapy or strategy that is right for your child? Click here for an overview of what's available and what they are for.
Click here for a summary on how this all fits together, including a downloadable quick guide and simple tree visualisation
My Experience
The collections of resources, tips and ideas presented in this website are the culmination of five years of searching for answers and ways to support my child. The plan and framework I've put together include perspectives of different professionals we consulted along the way, trainings (the most useful of which was SCERTS) I attended as well as the most useful books and websites.
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Despite the abundance of resources, I felt there was something missing that explains how it all fits together. And that's what I've tried to do here.