In the Caregiving department of the October/November 2018 issue, we write about how families juggle caring for a child with special needs with caring for his or her other siblings. In this online exclusive, we offer support for siblings of children with special needs.
Cheryl Crick, 35, coordinator of family advocacy at The Arc of New Jersey in North Brunswick, grew up with an older brother, Adam, who has autism. As a child, when she told her parents Adam had ripped up her books to make paper airplanes, they said, “Oh, he can’t help it.” In many ways, she says, “I raised myself.”
“I feel as a child I was emotionally neglected,” says Crick. “I was fed, they never hit me, but at times my emotional needs were not met.”
As an adult, she’s found kinship and community in sibling support groups. She now promotes sibling programs as part of her work for The Arc of New Jersey. When her parents took her to a similar group as a child, she balked. Looking back, she says, she wasn’t ready to talk about her true feelings.
“Society says you have to be nice to people with disabilities. You can’t be mean. And if you are, you’re a horrible person. At the same time, you’re talking about your brother or sister, and sometimes you don’t like them,” she says. “When I first went to the group, I still thought that if I talked negatively about having a brother with a disability, I was a bad person.”
With age and experience, Crick learned that having negative feelings about her sibling was not only okay and normal, but also important to share.
The people she’s met through sibling support groups “truly understand the challenges and many joys of growing up with a sibling with special needs,” she says. “Adam is my only sibling. It's just the two of us. As a result, I think of my support group friends as my other brothers and sisters.”