Raising children is often a huge undertaking that can be incredibly challenging.
Not only do you have to ensure that you are meeting both their emotional and physical needs (which will obviously change over time, serving to only make parenting harder), you have to make sure that doing an alright job of raising them into becoming functional members of society.
The only problem is, you can’t exactly tell whether they are going to be well-adjusted young adults ready for independence until they are much, much older.
As you can imagine, when it comes to children with special needs, this worry becomes even more extreme.
While most children with special needs are able to develop healthy coping mechanisms that allow them to function relatively alright with plenty of love, attention, care, and support, it is always a struggle trying to raise them.
This is especially so when they are younger.
Children already have great difficulty learning how to understand and adjust to social norms and more is expected of them.
For children with special needs, this difficulty in learning is even more pronounced, since they do not perceive the world and environment around them the same way that other children otherwise would understand.
A firefighter by profession, David Burke from the UK is no stranger to this steeper learning curve in children with special needs.
After all, his son, Jay, has Down syndrome.
This is a genetics-based syndrome where the child was born with an extra chromosome in their DNA, a random mutation that leads to lifelong mental and physical health conditions.
Among these conditions includes how the child with Down syndrome learns things.
Unfortunately for most parents of special needs children, including Burke, a lot of people are often very unkind to such children.
Burke had taken his son to the nearby Tesco grocery store for some grocery shopping.
Conveniently, the store happens to be one of the places that Jay loves the most, due to how much love he has for the conveyor belt and the cash register found in such grocery stores.
In fact, his interest in the devices was so strong that he wanted to be able to scan in his dad’s groceries himself from behind the counter, just like one of the hired employees.
So when Burke spotted a closed counter on that day’s shopping trip, he did everything he could to keep his son away from it.
This, naturally, did not sit well with Jay. Soon, Burke found himself struggling to get Jay to move along and go home, an event which caught the eye of James, a manager and one of Tesco’s staff.
Now, Burke was familiar with most of the Tesco staff, but James was new to him, and he wasn’t sure how the manager would react.
To Jay’s glee and Burke’s relief, James responded with kindness and empathy.
Instead of treating Jay as a potential inconvenience, he opened up the closed counter to allow Jay to scan in his dad’s groceries by himself!
It is wonderful to see this boy being treated with such kindness!
