Eric and Rebecca Scott are a married couple with the perfect combination of math and writing skills. Eric is a licensed CPA in Kentucky and is a Tax Senior Manager at Ernst & Young, focusing on a wide variety of technical topics. Rebecca, who was an autism behavioral intervention specialist before staying home to raise her two children, is now an accomplished author. Her book “Sensational Kids, Sensational Families: Hope For Sensory Processing Differences” chronicles the research, interventions, and mindset shifts that helped their family through their son’s sensory processing disorder diagnoses. She also directs a local homeschool cooperative organization in which she works hard to accommodate all special needs.
And when you think about it, choosing to adapt to an unexpected challenge is the embodiment of improv and creating a supportive community for special needs individuals requires great leadership — so there’s a lot to learn from Eric and Rebecca even if you don’t have any children at all.
When Rebecca and Eric’s youngest son was around two years old, they started to identify some concerning behaviors. Rebecca had experience working with children who had autism and could tell it wasn’t that, but she didn’t know what it was. After seeing a speech therapist and moving on to occupational therapy, he was diagnosed with sensory processing disorder. They took on seven years of medical intervention, diet changes, and occupational therapy, and he began to experience things he had never experienced before: pain and temperature. Today he’s ahead of the curve in a lot of school subjects and doing very well, which encouraged Rebecca to write “Sensational Kids, Sensational Families” to help other families who didn’t know what was going on with their own children.
As our understanding of neurodiversity and sensory processing differences grows, it becomes apparent that parts of society are not adequately set up to accommodate diversity of ability or experience. As a society, we have made wheelchair accessibility mandatory for most businesses, but we have not made sure that businesses and workplaces are accessible to people with various sensory impairments. Part of that could be due to technology and not understanding these disorders enough, but as we rapidly develop new technology and understanding, there are fewer and fewer excuses to not make the world more accessible to everyone. The way we have done things does not need to be the way we do things moving forward — nor should it be.
Businesses also need to be more accepting of people of neurodiversity in the workplace, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because, with the right support and understanding, these differences can become superpowers instead of handicaps.
If you have a kid going through the challenges associated with sensory processing differences, you will want to check out this book. It is packed full of tips and strategies for you to support your child in the best way possible, setting them up for a future that makes them truly sensational.
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