Any number or level of intellectual disabilities can be a game changer in the course of how a household is run.
Kimberly Adams has first-hand experience. Of the four children she’s raised, a good amount of attention has been focused on one who has autism. While she held talking about her own family’s experiences to a minimum, she said children with autism and similar conditions present different needs that can be more demanding and more persistent. In a way, the kind of day a child with autism is having can dictate what the rest of the family does.
“A lot of attention gets focused on those siblings,” she said, “so the other kids’ needs are met—just differently than under normal circumstances.”
Adams knows she’s not the only parent who has seen the effects of an intellectual disability. “A family I know had their whole day changed today because a child decided to do a lot of refusal on a lot of things. What was a normal day became a high-crisis day,” she said.
It was those kinds of experiences as a mom that led her to explore Sibshops, a national support project providing siblings of children with disabilities a safe space to learn about each other and what needs exist in each household. It’s a program centered on them rather than their brothers or sisters, but it also gives them support in taking care of themselves and their disabled siblings.
Training for Adams to become a Sibshops facilitator was done in 2019 when she first got an inside look into the other siblings. “As I watched the different kids interact, I went home as a parent going, ‘What was I thinking? Thinking of my kids, I know I put things upon them that I should not have.”
Since that training, Adams has continued to be involved with Sibshops and is serving as a helping parent coordinator for the program at Bethany Lutheran Church in Port Orchard this year. The first session kicked off Sept. 14 and is set to run on the second Thursday of each month.
Parents dropping their kids off said it was important to find a program that offered something unique to the siblings, that opened their eyes to the fact that they are not alone in what is admittedly a hard situation.
Jennifer Brozovic said she hopes her daughter can find some friends in this group of similar backgrounds and stories. “For especially the past couple of years, it’s been kind of hard for Hannah to understand why her brother has therapists coming over or why he is seeing so many doctors,” she said about her 9-year-old daughter. “Sometimes, it just doesn’t feel even for her.”
The monthly meetings, Adams said, are designed to bring the group together as friends, but will also offer an opportunity for them to understand different perspectives and gain knowledge that could benefit their relationships with their siblings.
“We train our kids to be more sensitive, more inclusive, more resilient in the way of honoring the disability community,” she said. “They’re given this space to say, ‘We’re walking the same walk here.’”
