Services for children with developmental disabilities: Kids are Kids! Therapy and Education Centre, WA

Kids are Kids! Therapy and Education Centre was born out of an idea from committed therapists who were concerned that there were few comprehensive holistic service providers in the disability sector in Western Australia at that time. The founding members of the organisation envisioned a centre that provided wrap-around services to all families, with a particular passion for being affordable regardless of economic circumstances. Kids are Kids opened its doors in 1998, starting with a small team of speech pathologists and occupational therapists.

By the end of 2011, Kids are Kids had grown to include 12 speech pathologists, eight occupational therapists and two physiotherapists providing services across a range of publicly and privately-funded programs, to over 400 families. The existing team had a growing awareness that some of the complex behavioural and emotional needs of their client families were going unmet, and this had a resulting impact on the therapeutic gains of the children. Mindful of their commitment to provide holistic care, Kids are Kids recently decided to expand the team to include clinical psychology. Kids are Kids provides a range of services to families, including:

• A state-funded early intervention program (Kid Start)
• Fee-for-service assessment and intervention using FACHSIA funding (Helping Children with Autism; Better Start), or Medicare and health fund rebates
• Rural and remote services, including a mobile therapy van servicing the SouthWest; a satellite office in Rockingham; and telehealth assessment and intervention to distant regions
• Speech therapy through a Health Department contract (Child Development Services)
• Autism diagnostic assessments (State Government).

The psychologist’s work

At Kids are Kids, therapists are committed to empowering parents to be the agents of change in families, and the psychology program is committed to using a functional contextual approach to achieve this. The joy of working as a psychologist at Kids are Kids comes with the variety of work, which on any given day might include:

• Assisting a mother to understand and complete her own functional analyses of her daughter’s behaviour and empowering her with the understanding of how to effectively modify establishing operations, antecedents and consequences to bring about desirable changes.
• Teaching a dad how to be a guide and effective information source rather than just delivering consequences, so that his son may learn to efficiently track behaviour to outcomes.
• Supporting a couple through the grief and adjustment process as they come to realise they can raise a child they didn't dream about with the same love, passion and sense of meaning.
• Assisting parents to connect with their values around parenting in the context of having a child with complex needs, and taking values-driven action rather than seeking avoidance from painful thoughts and feelings.
• Improving communication skills between parents, so that they are better able to parent coherently and become more effective advocates for their children.
• Providing training to staff to apply principles of learning theory to ‘turbo-charge’ their therapy sessions.
• Providing consultations to team members to address undesired behaviours from both children and parents in the therapy room for improved outcomes.
• Finding innovative ways to provide access to psychology services, such as leading a mother 600kms away through experiential exercises via video-conference.
• Guiding parents in teaching social skills, developing perspective taking, managing tantrums, validating emotional expression, and improving toileting.
• Supervising master’s students and watching their growth and development as they see the application of behavioural principles to children and adults.

The author can be contacted at [email protected]