Wendy J.

“ I am a mother of three who are grown, two with disabilities, and a grandson just 3 months old. I was the neighborhood mom all the neighbor kids came to regularly. I love children, and because of my son have taken behavior modification classes on how to handle disabled children so that I might better understand how to handle my son. I feel this training is good for regular children also. I don't believe in spanking...

I am a mother of three who are grown, two with disabilities, and a grandson just 3 months old. I was the neighborhood mom all the neighbor kids came to regularly. I love children, and because of my son have taken behavior modification classes on how to handle disabled children so that I might better understand how to handle my son. I feel this training is good for regular children also. I don't believe in spanking a child, I feel that grounding and other measures work just fine and violence is not needed. I never spanked my kids and my son just graduated from the U of U in accounting (he is mildly autistic), my daughter has her masters in Occupational Therapy and gave me my first grandson. I love watching him when they go out dancing, etc. My youngest has velo-cardial-facial syndrome, which is long and involved- basically mental retardation. I worked at the Autism Society as Executive Director for a couple of years, working with parents of Autistic children and running the program. I went into my youngster's special school when she was younger and lead music sing-a-longs for an hour with the children. We had a lot of fun. The school also asked me to put out a tape of the nursery songs we sang to help the parents learn the songs. We sold over a 100 tapes which went into buying equipment for the school. I also went into my daughter's classroom in grade school for a couple of years and led sing-a-longs for an hour when they took music out of the schools. I also taught karate for a couple of years as an assistant instructor from children to adults and really enjoyed teaching them. I was an apprentice. I wasn't paid for these jobs, but they gave me a lot of great experience dealing with children. I am tutoring grade school kids through work study at the University of Utah where I am attending, finishing up my degree. I am paid for this and have about two years left. Work study, isn't enough to get me through school and I am only allowed up to 20 hours a week & don't always get that, plus I need to work full time summers to make extra money to survive on. I need a supplemental income that will help make ends meet while in school and possibly out of school after I graduate. Since I love children, this seemed like a good fit. I did babysit when I was a teenager and enjoyed doing that, I was always busy.

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