Eye-opening experience

In trying to find the latest tools, resources and support groups for parents like me who have children with learning disorders, I came upon a site last night that both broke my heart and made me thank my lucky stars that my son's only diagnoses is dyslexia and ADHD.

The site is called Empowering Parents. There are a lot of articles on parenting children with many difficulties. As frustrated as I feel sometimes with my son's learning differences, I cannot imagine what many of the parents commenting on this site must be going through. Many have children who are violent and they fear for their own safety in their homes. They talked about 4-year-olds wielding weapons against them and sometimes a parent taking his own life because he could no longer deal with the emotional strain. It was heart wrenching and brought me to tears.

When I first started on this mission to build a place for parents to go to get support and assistance for their learning disabled children, my focus was mainly on dyslexia and ADHD because that's all I knew. I've been doing my research and educating myself on other disorders in order to provide a well-rounded site for parents, and have had my eyes opened to a world of parenting I can't even fathom.

I know that my website can never be a help to parents who have children with ODD, bi-polar disorder or violent tendencies, so I want to bring to their attention the Empowering Parents website.

I became a member of the site because there are sections for working with ADHD children. It has a wonderful support group and I know that parents who go there are going to get some kind of assistance.

A lot of the information also helps to dispel myths about parents who have difficult children. One of my goals with my website is to help spread awareness that learning disorders are real and not the result of lazy children or parents. Empowering Parents also does a good job of informing the public that violent children are not the result of bad parenting. These parents are doing all they can to protect their children and themselves and do NOT deserve snide comments from perfect strangers who know nothing of what the parents are going through.

All I can say now is God bless the parents who have the courage to work through these difficulties with their children. And God bless the creators of Empowering Parents for providing a support system to those parents.