Empowering kids with disabilities is essential for their present and future well-being. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the first post in this series, empowering our kids is rarely our first priority as parents when our medically fragile kids are fighting for their lives, and our kids with a host of other conditions are failing to meet milestones or struggling at school.

Even so, we need to make empowering kids with disabilities a priority. But how?

As a parent and a teacher, I have found the 5 basic needs of all humans as described by William Glasser to be a useful framework for empowering kids.

In the first post in this series, I stated that according to Glasser the five basic needs of all humans are survival, love and belonging, power, fun, and freedom. The rest of that post examined our physical need to survive, which encompasses sleep, food, water, comfort, and warmth.

The four other basic needs are psychological rather than physical. Let’s take a look at love and belonging, the first and strongest of those needs. Love and belonging is all about our innate desire to form relationships, to make social connections, to give and receive affection, and to feel like we’re part of the group.

Side note: Jesus knew about this basic human need long before William Glasser. Jesus created us to love him and belong to him. This is one way we are created in the image of God who is and has ever been in relationship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Click here to read the rest of Empowering Kids with Disabilities, Part Two: The Need for Love and Belonging at Key Ministry.

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Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash