Academic literature on the topic 'Single parents self-help'

This chapter provides general guidelines for helping a child with a specific learning difficulty. Advice on providing help in particular areas of learning is given in Part 2 of the book. Parents of children with specific learning difficulties need information on how to teach their child and how to build up his self-esteem. In addition, they need help in coping with their own feelings and those of their other children. Let us look first at parents’ concerns. Parents of a child with specific learning difficulties often feel great anxiety about their child. They worry about how their child will cope at school, both academically and socially. They worry about how he will manage if teased, and if made to feel inadequate. When he gets home from school, they are sensitive to his feelings, saddened by his disappointments, and made anxious about his concerns. Parents often feel guilty about their child’s difficulties, wrongly imagining that they are somehow to blame. They may feel angry much of the time too: angry with teachers who fail to understand their child’s problems, and angry with doctors who cannot explain their child’s difficulties. Many parents feel confused by the wide range of opinions about their child’s condition and the variety of treatments that people suggest. They often wonder whether they are doing enough for their child, and whether there is something more they should be doing. They may feel many other emotions as well. They may be embarrassed by their child’s difficulties, hurt by other people’s insensitive remarks, and overwhelmed by the task of teaching their child to overcome his difficulties. There is no one right way to cope with these feelings; no single prescription that will work for all parents. Most parents do cope and do find that things become easier with time. Many find it helpful to have someone to share their feelings with: a friend, a spouse, or a professional; someone who will listen sympathetically and not be judgemental, or too quick to offer advice. Some parents obtain this support from meeting other parents of a child with a similar difficulty.

“I’ve never heard a political opinion from a Chinaman,” African American civil rights activist and Mississippi Delta entrepreneur Amzie Moore recounted in a 1967 interview. Although Congress passed and enacted major pieces of legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moore understood that there was still a long way to go on the road to equality and was more than a bit flustered over what he identified as Asian Americans’ lack of participation in the civil rights movement. A native of the Mississippi Delta born to sharecropping parents on a plantation near the small town of Grenada and later a store owner in Cleveland, Mississippi, Moore became a leader in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, an organization that encouraged self-help and entrepreneurship among African Americans in Mississippi. While the 1955 murder of Emmett Till spurred Moore to action in the search for Till’s body (where Moore and others learned that there were hundreds of unknown Emmett Tills whom whites had murdered and dumped in the swamps, bayous, and murky, slow-winding rivers of the Delta for decades and probably centuries), Moore was most comfortable in the economic arena of civil rights. Moore believed deeply in the value of small business and property ownership in uplifting black southerners and placing them on the path to equality. This was often difficult to accomplish in the Delta, the “most southern place on earth,” as journalists described the flat, cotton-bespeckled landscape of the area. Since the immediate post–Civil War years, however, Chinese migrating to the region from the West Coast in search of business opportunities or to join other family members who lingered after brief stints as plantation workers during the early days of Reconstruction had a strong foothold in the small business scene in the Delta. ...