Hello
As some of you will remember, we started this thread a few months back to get your input about a possible campaign around children with additional needs.
The thread was hugely informative - thanks very much to everyone who gave their views. Many of you were asking for a broadly-focused campaign encompassing visible and non-visible disabilities among children, teenagers and adults, and across many platforms (poster advertisements, television campaigns and so on). Much as we'd like to do this sort of thing in an ideal world, realistically we're bound by the resources that are available to us. We've also found, over the years, that campaigns with a very specific focus can do much better than those with more general messages. In addition, we're mindful that many of the big campaigning organisations in this space have already undertaken more general awareness-raising campaigns to do with capacities and needs of people with disabilities, and we try not to re-invent the wheel (although we're always happy to add our voice to such campaigns when asked).
So we've decided to go with an awareness-raising campaign focused on the ways in which caring for a child with additional needs can change a family's life, and the myths about disability that can have negative impacts on such children and their carers. We're going to call it This Is My Child (again, thanks for all the input) as we think it's simple, arresting and suits the aims of the campaign best.
We're going to be addressing myths like:
MYTH: children with behavioural disabilities are just naughty and need a firm hand
MYTH: people in receipt of disability-related payments are likely to be 'scroungers'
MYTH: children with additional needs in mainstream schooling are drawing resources and attention away from other children
MYTH: it's easy to get a Blue Badge and mobility vehicles
MYTH: a non-expert can accurately judge the capacities and potential of a child with additional needs
We're going to be putting up a myth-busting page (similar to our We Believe You myth-buster here) which will be heavily featured across the site and promoted from our social media accounts, hopefully with some mainstream press coverage. We're also going to be featuring guest blogs on the topic and holding an event on Twitter using the hashtag #thisismychild; watch this space for details.
There are a few things we'd really like your help with:
- Do let us have suggestions for myths you'd like busted (there's a limit to how many we can do, but it would be great to hear your thoughts).
- Do you have any Top Tips for how to deal with situations in which you - particularly as a parent or carer - have been subject to ignorant or hostile responses from members of the public when out and about with your child? We'd love to put together a list of ninja ways to defuse, inform or simply get rid.
- To go with the 'This Is My Child' theme, we're asking for MNers who are parents of or carers for children with additional needs to send in pictures of their child, which we will use for a photo gallery on the site. These can be completely anonymous and needn't be linked to your RL or MN name if you'd rather not; the idea is to personalise the issue for members of the public. If you'd be up for doing this, do please send in a digital photo (a roughly 500-pixel-sized image in a jpg, gif or png format) along with a caption (which can be pretty much anything you please: 'This is my child. He's eight and he loves Star Wars' - that sort of thing) to [email protected], with the subject heading 'This Is My Child, FAO Campaigns Team'.
Thanks for reading this far - as ever, do please let us know what you think.
and 
for HQ.
- never known how to answer that one, usually I just smile