21 May 2024• byLaura Hellfeld
A live webinar series for parents and carers to feel more confident in supporting their young person’s sleep, toileting, eating and overall well-being.
Event Date:
May 21 at 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Webinar 4 of 4 for Hull Parent Carer Forum
April 30th, 6 – 8 pm GMT, online via Zoom
Webinar Series Description:
A live webinar series for parents and carers to feel more confident in supporting their young person’s sleep, toileting, eating and overall well-being.
Emotional well-being, distress behaviour and self-care tasks like sleep, toileting and eating all tend to be at the top of concerns that we have for our young people. And to be honest, for ourselves as well. While we often see and address these areas as separate, this webinar series will have us learn how they are all inter-connected via our nervous system and stress response system.
The overall aim of the webinar series is that the information gained will help you feel more confident with in-the-moment and ongoing decision making. In particular, we’ll conclude together why slow and gentle approaches and focusing on our relationship with our kiddos really is the way forward.
Further Information about Each Webinar:
- Foundations of Care & Sleep in Neurodivergent Young People: Neurodivergent people are a unique community of people and so it makes sense that our sleep and sleep priorities may differ from other people. This webinar will look at common neurodivergent traits and how these are our foundation blocks to creating sleep support. Attendants will be encouraged to help answer the question ‘what should sleep look like’ and ‘do ND kiddos have bedtime routines?’. We will also look at the most commonly reported sleep challenges and how our tailored support will address regulation and mental health needs.
- Let’s Chat about Toileting (not toilet training): In this webinar we will take our knowledge of the nervous system from the first webinar to help understand why we might be struggling to support someone with toileting. We’ll start out with a ‘science class’ to see how the digestive system works which then helps us to better understand what happens when someone is holding their bladder and/or bowels. Importantly we’ll discuss what really is constipation and what are the first steps in addressing this health issue. Throughout the webinar, we will be discussing ideas to help your young person better accept toileting opportunities, completely void and reduce anxiety or power struggles associated with toileting.
- Supporting Your Young Person with Food & Eating: ‘Eat this…eat during these hours…eat these kinds of foods…they should be eating here…definitely don’t let them eat like that…’ There is so much information and social media influence telling us how we and our kids should be eating. But what really are the priorities here? How can the priorities be different for Autistic and Neurodivergent young people? How does my decision making in this moment affect the next food opportunity for this young person?
This webinar will aim to clarify common neurodivergent traits that impact food and eating choices so that you can support your young person’s eating in a way that validates their needs. Our foundations of care will be to help remove anxiety and power struggles associated with eating and meal times in order to improve your and your young person’s mental health. This way we can increase your young person’s sense of trust around food and begin building long-term self-care skills.
- Series Wrap Up and Q&A: Our last session together in this series provides a time to clarify any remaining questions from the previous webinars. In addition, attendants will have been provided a Contemplation Sheet at sign up. This sheet is to help guide you in exploring an area or multiple areas that you would like to support your young person in. There is no pressure to complete it but it may help guide you during the webinar series in making changes that are needed. During this session, we can review if you have made changes, if that change helped or not and what else we can try.
Last modified: 13 May 2024