
This has been a difficult year. COVID-19 has caused, and continues to cause, anxiety and stress to our global community and in the country. It has had a significant impact on our disabled children, too. When lockdown hit in March, like so many others, we at Watoto Ciao worked at pace, adapting every single service and resource we had to meet the demands for support from our children. At that time, our team worked remotely to ensure continuity of service and to support as many disabled children as possible.
For many of them, Christmas can also be a difficult and lonely time. To feel like we belong is a fundamental need. We instinctively seek out social connections and most of us have natural networks of support: we belong to a family, a workplace, various groups of friends, social groups and activities, volunteering or community groups and so on.
We take so many of these social connections for granted. Sometimes we forget how crucial they are to our sense of identity, our sense of belonging and well-being.
We also tend to forget how isolating it can be for a disabled child who doesn’t have natural networks of support in the same way. Physical, attitudinal and social barriers can often prevent a disabled child from belonging to their community or participating in society.
However, it can be fairly easy to support disabled children to belong and we can plan how to facilitate that belonging not being scared to help, because the worst attitude of all is to do nothing.
We can start small by thinking about the disabled children we know and considering how they manage to access basic needs we may take for granted- like food, therapy, education and play. We can join disabled children in challenging small injustices- for example, to use accessible toilets in the community. Standing alongside disabled children and politely challenging poor access or attitudes is one way to help. Another is that we can make health and education services more accessible. And we can talk or play with disabled children who are neighbours or even sons and daughters of friends to hear their voice and check out other ways we might be able to help.
By being more aware of the barriers and working together to tackle these, we can better include disabled children in our communities and society.