Off to a good start!

Little Y was found in a mountainous, rural area in a northern province just a few months ago.  The person who found her was quite surprised, as she was left in a rather isolated area with few passersby.  She appeared to be a perfectly healthy newborn, but when she arrived at the local orphanage they decided to have her admitted to the hospital for a thorough evaluation just in case.

Initially, the hospital did not find anything wrong with her, but her orphanage worried that she might need special care, so she came straight from the hospital to our home.    A few days later her bloodwork came back with a diagnosis of phenylketonuria (PKU). 

This is a serious metabolic disorder which, if left untreated, can cause seizures, intellectual impairment and life-long health problems.  The treatment for babies with PKU is a special formula, which is quite expensive and not readily available in your average supermarket or corner store.  We can only guess that her birth family received this diagnosis and felt hopeless to provide the care she needed.

We transferred her to our medical home in Beijing so that she could follow up with the top pediatric specialists, who were concerned that she might have additional medical problems.  Fortunately,  no other problems were found.

Little Y has a delightful personality and charms everyone she meets.  

We are grateful to all who support out work... because of you, we able to provide love, nurturing and life-saving medical treatment to children like little Y!

Launchpad - How do we get there?

 In our last post we shared the inspiration behind our newest program - Launchpad.  Now we'd like to tell you a little bit more about what our goals are and how we plan to achieve them.

As we shared in our last post, our goal is to perfect a model that will be successful in helping motivated young adults make the transition from passive recipients of institutional care to productive, capable members of society.  While that sounds simple enough, figuring out how to get from point A to point B is an intimidating challenge!  Starting out, we had so many questions... how long would this process take?  What knowledge and skills would these young adults need to acquire?  What kind of jobs are available to disabled people who may have had zero formal education?

The model we feel will work best is a model that has been tried and tested all over the world - a group home model headed by a dedicated set of house parents whose role is to guide these young adults along the path to independence. These house parents and young adults in our Launchpad program are supported in many ways by the rest of our team, and together we are focused on developing skills and competence in these 5 key areas:

***Education - most disabled/institutionalized children do not attend regular public schools.  They may have limited opportunities to attend orphanage run "schools" or receive some kind of special needs education.  This is better than nothing, but they end up lacking the comprehensive education and actual diploma that children attending a regular school receive.  We start with an evaluation of their reading, writing and math skills and work to help them attain a high school level of knowledge in these basic areas.   We encourage them to take standardized tests in subject areas that will increase their employability in the future.

***Daily life skills - growing up in an orphanage means that you don't have to learn to do the things that most kids in families grow up learning.  This includes things like shopping for groceries, learning to cook meals, how to scrub a bathroom, do your own laundry.  Always having these things done for you and then having to take the responsibility for them yourself is a big change!  Our Launchpad program helps them face the challenges of doing so, which for some of our young adults is complicated by a significant physical disability, such as being in a wheelchair.

*** Financial literacy and money management - most kids grow up learning these skills from their parents.  Older teens in an orphanage have no experience gradually learning to cover their own expenses and no one to model for them how to make wise financial decisions.  Our Launchpad program provides a stipend to each young adult, and expects them to contribute a portion of this to their own monthly expenses. We offer them guidance on how to plan for the future by budgeting and maintaining a savings account.

***Interpersonal skills - children who grow up in orphanages certainly do not grow up in isolation, but they experience a very limited range of interactions with others.  It's not uncommon for them to have experienced bullying or harassment, which can also affect their perception of others.  We work with them to help them understand their feelings, how to deal with conflict, and how to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with others, including family members, co-workers and those in authority - such as a boss or supervisor.

***Vocational skills - of course, the ultimate goal of Launchpad is to help each young adult discern what type of career is suitable for them, and then help them receive the personalized education and vocational training to acquire a job in that field.

If you think that sounds like a lot, you're right!   Making the decision to undertake great personal challenges while also taking responsibility for your own future is scary!  It's perfectly normal to have doubts and feel uncertain, and everyone has days when they wonder if they've made the wrong decision.  That's why our Launchpad program has one additional vitally important component - counselling!  Learning to manage stress, understanding turbulent feelings, coping with difficult emotions, identifying unhealthy behaviors, developing self esteem - all of these are reasons why we believe that counselling is necessary to the success of the Launchpad program.

Stay tuned for our next post, where we'll share a glimpse into our first Launchpad home!

Made for Love - Actively Engaged

We believe that children are not just passive recipients of environmental influences but are actively engaged with the environment with their own intentions and orientations, intellectual understandings, and emotions. In other words, children are active participants who contribute to their own development and understanding of the world. 

From a very young age, children show great curiosity about their environment. They actively seek out new experiences and explore their surroundings by observing, touching, manipulating, and, of course, putting objects in their mouth. Above all, they are interested in the primary caregivers and then later, other adults and children in their life. 

In addition, we often see children with physical disabilities demonstrate amazing adaptabilities. In spite of their physical limitations, they manage to find ways to communicate, to move around, to play, and to express themselves. Their desire to connect and communicate are made clear as they use gestures, sounds, eye contacts, etc. to engage with caregivers, peers, and toys. 

In general, children actively learn through social interactions. They enjoy engaging with caregivers, peers, and others around them. Educational research show that for children, cultural norms, language, and socially acceptable behaviors are all acquired through active participation in social life. 

Learning happens from children’s encounter with the social context mainly in the following three ways: First, children learn by observing and imitating what the others are doing. In our group homes, we often see older children voluntarily care for the younger siblings just as they have seen their group home parents do. 

Second, children learn through trial-and-error. Rather than passively waiting for instructions, they try to make sense of the environment by testing out new possibilities and see what the consequences are. For example, a young child sitting in a highchair may throw a toy and watch how it falls (and often what a caregiver responds). The child learns about gravity (and cause-and-effect, when the adult picks up the toy every time). 

Third, children learn from playing with others. This is especially true when children are involved in pretend play, where they recreate in play what they see, hear, and understand in their everyday reality.

Children do not just absorb whatever information is provided to them. Rather, they make sense of their everyday experiences based on their developmental levels and past experiences. This is why a similar situation may be interpreted and responded very differently by different children. 

An important implication is that children’s active engagement with the environment requires that people who work with the children be conscious of their different needs and preferences when trying to offer support. Our role as caregivers and educators is not to decide for children every aspect of their experience, but to prepare an environment that tailors to their individual differences in order to protect their natural curiosity, intellectual growth, and emotional development. 

The belief that “children are not passive recipients of environmental influences” helps us to rethink how we provide care, education, and emotional support in orphanage settings. Children are not merely shaped by their environment, but they actively reach out, interact, and make sense of the world around them with their abilities, preferences, and emotions.