Counseling

Counseling parents of Special needs child and Special Needs individuals is viewed as a personalized, intimate interview or dialogue between a person experiencing some emotional, social, educational, physical and vocational problems and a professional counsellor. It can also be seen as a service that helps individual to solve problems and learn to cope with these problems that are not easy to solve. This is why the special needs population can be focused so that they are assisted out of their needs. Counselling is designed to remove the emotional, psychological and personal social roadblocks placed in the way of an individual by the multidimensional problems of the day to day life. The involvement of counselling with special population & their parents therefore is to improve and possibly remedy the challenges, facing people with special needs. The educational challenges facing this category of people are quite obvious and they need new strategies in resolving through counselling.

This is because according to Ipaye (1981), the individual learns new ways if interacting, new ways of obtaining information, new ways of making decisions, and new ways of responding to the environment and new ways of interacting. The task of counseling therefore as seen by Ipaye (1981), Denga (2009), Mallum (1983), Okon (1983), Akinboye (1982) and Bulus (1990) is to give the individual the opportunity to define, explore, discover and adopt ways of living a more satisfying and resourceful life within the social, educational and vocational groupings within which he or she is identified or finds himself or herself. The challenges of life has made some people feeling as not existing well, but through education as a tool for moral, social, economic, political and technological development, has affected some changes in human lives and the society as well (Nweze and Okolie, 2014). Human communities have used education to improve their standard of living, develop new methods and skills of production, so is the need of counselling practices for special need populations. Counselling has been used to designate a wide range of procedures comprising advice giving, support in times of trouble or need, encouragement, information giving, and test interpretation. Counselling is a process by which a person is assisted to behave in a more rewarding manner. Often times, people with special needs are very difficult to handle and teach; the counselling strategies that can be employed for such people or groups should include the following: a) Confrontation b) Accurate education c) Assertiveness training d) Decision making strategies e) Peer cluster involvement

Reference: http://reifpsychservices.com/counseling-for-special-needs-parents/