“Mom, if we didn’t have dyslexia, would we be rich?” Now there’s a question for you! (Read it on an online support group today.) The truth of the matter is that children with special needs often put a true, intense financial burden on their families. Parents scramble to find funding for the many therapies and interventions their child needs. Sometime insurance will cover pieces of it. Sometimes not. Sometimes schools will provide therapies; sometimes not. Sometimes the child qualifies for government assistance; sometimes not.

Parents of children with special challenges are more likely to be worried about the financial aspects of raising their special children than the actual disabilities or obtaining the therapies. This is because finding ways to pay for the needed interventions is so blasted HARD.

First off, many parents find the child’s disability so overwhelming to the family unit that changes in their work schedule and careers are necessary. One parent may quit their job to stay home. Single parents may move in with family members to reduce their own work hours or to have other family members available to help with the child’s care. All “extras” the family may have previously enjoyed…such as vacations, second cars, newer appliances or entertainment gadgets, or even eating out and seeing movies, are the first things to be cut from the family’s budget.

So, right off you have families who are in need of respite and breaks from their stressful lives of caring for their children with no financial ability to take vacations OR even go out on dates. It’s no wonder marriages begin to suffer.

Then you have parents who are so busy caring for their special needs child that have to take on addition “fights” to help fund services their child desperately needs. Two of those fights will often be with the insurance company (if the family is “lucky” enough to have private insurance) and with the school system (if the school decides not to provide services that would help remediate the child’s disability as it relates to educating the child). Some families take on the additional fight of qualifying the child for Social Security/Medicaid, often through a program called Deeming Waiver/Katie Beckett. Some parents win that fight; others do not.

So, back to this son’s question: “Mom, if we didn’t have dyslexia, would we be rich?” Our first inclination upon reading this is “Shame on that parent for making the child feel guilty for their disability!” or for even allowing the child to think their disability has such a negative impact on the family. PLEEZ…children of normal IQs don’t take long to figure out how their disability is impacting the family. LuLu “gets it”, regardless of what we express to her or around her. She knows that my work is non-existent and that I’ve been skipping off to court dates, and that she’s no longer in school. She knows that Mommy has to have some quiet time now so she can place a phone call to the insurance company, attorney or therapist or that we’ve said “no” to a purchase one of the other children has asked for because we can’t afford it. It is part of living in this family.