Attending worship service, regardless of the type of service, often presents numerous obstacles to parents of special needs children. Yet, as any person of faith will tell you, attending worship services is a much-needed thing. So, what’s a struggling parent to do?

Terri Mauro over on About Parenting Special Needs explores the idea of attending church with your special needs child. We have struggled for years with taking LuLu to church. We have an awesome church family who welcome her with open arms, despite all her obvious challenges. There is still much she can not do to participate like other children do, yet the sideways glances (and dirty looks) from disapproving worshippers do not happen to us the way I’m sure they happen to others.

Still we struggle. It is very difficult for her to sit through a church service. One, her attention span isn’t an hour long. Second, her auditory processing deficits make understanding what is going on very difficult. She “gets it” when we praise sing and say the Lord’s Prayer. But she has no earthly idea what the sermon is about. Her noise sensitivity (and subsequent meltdowns) is difficult because crowd laughter or applause are huge triggers and because she often doesn’t understand what’s going on, she isn’t prepared for the laughter (especially) or the applause, which makes her reaction worse.

Yet, LuLu loves to go to church. She eagerly prepares for worship every Sunday morning. She also can’t handle Sunday School, so we rarely give that a try.

Over the years what has happened to me is that I’ve adjusted my expectations of workshop services and realized, as I should have done long ago, that it doesn’t matter whether I attend the service, attend only half the service, or leave with a child tucked under my arm shouting cuss words, God is with me all the time. There were months when I didn’t even bother to get dressed for church service because I knew LuLu wasn’t up to the task. Instead, I’d crank up the praise music on the radio and together we’d clean house. We’d pray and clean house some more. Sometimes I’d turn on a TV church service.

Our other tactic is to play musical church services. This is played by my husband going to the early morning service and me going to the later service…passing LuLu off to him in the church parking lot. That works effectively as well, once you get over the hang up of family worship time. And keep your focus on God being with you, regardless of where you are.

But it’s the perseverance that has made the real difference, I think. We just kept finding a way to go, or trying to make it through the service. For a couple of years the efforts seemed really futile. Now LuLu not only anticipates going, but is very disappointed in herself if she doesn’t make it through. And the routine of knowing what to expect in the service has helped too.


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