We know first hand how difficult it can be to navigate your way around disability. It may seem like a long and lonely road with many challenges and choices to make along the way. But, you are not alone. BDCPS are here to make your journey easier. We offer support for the whole family. From supporting parent carers at meetings; offering advice and assistance; helping at home in times of need, to sibling activities and adventures and of course youth clubs and playschemes for children and young people aged 0-25. We’re here to help!
“We have been treated with love and kindness by everyone we have met. Having a child with complex needs made me feel so isolated at first, but now I have a group of people that I can trust with my daughter, and she trusts back”
Hannah S – Parent Carer
Register today!
To access our services, all you have to do is register which you can do right here on the website. You can let us know which services you are interested in using, including the parent carer support and wellbeing groups, as well as activities for your child/children.
“They [BDCPS] provide amazing opportunities for Lois to take part in, which for neurotypical children would be easy to access, wouldn’t cost as much money, wouldn’t need as much support; whereas for Lois and her friends they provide opportunities as well as support to allow her, and enable her to do the most wonderful things, that she deserves to do. Just as importantly, BDCPS help me & my family, as well as others just like us”.
Karen R – Parent carer
Welcome to Holland
Written by Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987
“I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this…
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!” you say. “What do you mean, Holland?” I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.
But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.”