Going Solo While Raising Children with Disabilities

Book excerpt: It's a fact that children with disabilities are more likely than other children to be living in single-parent homes. If you're raising a child with disabilities on your own'solo parenting'whether by choice or circumstance, you'll find a wealth of support, affirmation, and practical ideas in this guide to living well. This is the first book for solo parents whose kids have a wide variety of disabilities (physical, neurodevelopmental, and psychiatric), and who are widowed, separated, divorced, single by choice, adoptive or foster parents, or military spouses with deployed partners. In Going Solo, Laura Marshak skillfully weaves together extensive interviews and survey results of solo mothers and fathers (and grandparents, too) with reliable coping strategies gleaned from 25 years as a practicing psychologist and specialist in disability adjustment. The book's insightful personal narratives and the author's deconstruction of these to offer universal lessons'from the basic (e.g., practice mindfulness to de-stress) to the profound (e.g., cultivate gratitude as the antidote to resentment)?can help readers assess and transform their own lives for the better. Agencies, extended family, and friends will want a copy of this book, too, to support the solos they care about.