My parents always did their best to help me become independent and confident with my disability. I was taught that it wasn't an excuse to use to get out of doing chores and other things very early on. I was lucky enough to have a lot of close cousins near my age that I spent a lot of time with. They never saw me as different so that's how I saw myself. My family did an amazing job adapting to help me grow up. Things weren't and aren't perfect but I don't have a ton to complain about. My biggest advice would be from experiences with my mother. She's a bit of a neat freak and a perfectionist and there were many times when I would get screamed at for doing something wrong instead of taught how to do it properly. Most of it was about putting on makeup or doing my hair. I never wanted to wear makeup because she was pretty critical if I missed something or colors didn't look right. Same goes with clothing. Sometimes certain colors are rough for me and simply telling me that it doesn't match works better than calling me stupid or lazy.
I think another big piece of advice I can give to parents would be about what other kids might do/say to a child who is blind or visually impaired. School was rough for me and I'll just say that my district preferred 'verbal warnings' to actually doing anything about the people causing issues. I think that parents should be prepared to explain to their kids that other people might not be as comfortable with disabilities as the child's family or close friends are. That was a big thing for me to understand. My family always treated my disability as something that I lived with and never made a big deal about it to me. I've had to learn that this isn't always the case and it was a hard lesson. I think that education definitely goes both ways and that the non-disabled community could be better educated about different impairments in general. With that in mind though, I think parents need to know that a lot of people don't know what to make of disabled people and at least let their kids know that people may do some odd things when interacting with them because of their impairments

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clicked on this thinking you’d already written it. but your experience makes sense and sounds helpful.

Aw man I would have SO MUCH to say on this, and at the same time, I feel like I have no idea how to raise a blind kid, even though I've been doing it for 13 years.

Some stuff I have handled and I think I have good advice on it, and good things to give people to think about. Take EVERYTHING you can get. Its better to have too many services, too many opportunities than not enough. Reach out to people and ask for what you need. You will be surprised at the amount of resources available to you. You'll be surprised at the number of parents going through the same thing you are. When do you start braille? Do you want your kid to learn braille? Did you know there's summer camps for blind kids? Like, several of them? How to find outreach programs. Do you want your kid in mainstream school? All of these things are so important and I feel like there's not a lot of guidance on them.

But on the other hand I still have so many things I don't know how to deal with. When a couple weeks ago, my kid screamed at me that she didn't want to be blind anymore, she didn't want to be different, like. what do I say to that? I know middle school is TOUGH for being different, but man, I get so worried when she's not using her cane because it's genuinely not safe. She doesn't need to use it in the house or places she knows well, but its frustrating watching her walk into poles because she doesn't want to use her cane- or standing at the curb for 10 seconds so she can see how far the drop is with her foot (or if there's even a drop at all if its just a change in the ground/floor). And I have some conversations coming up I just have no idea how to handle. How do you teach a blind kid how to use a tampon? How do you deal with the disappointment when your kid's friends are all getting their driver's licenses but your kid cant?

Keep reminding them that they’re okay, they’re normal, they’re loved.

Find a support group for families with blind/VI kids. When I was in high school I felt so isolated because I was the only disabled person in my classes and the only one who had a support assistant. It helped to know that I wasnt alone and I’m not strange, I just sometimes need some help.

I'm a mom of a 19 month old blind baby, and I can honestly say that it's overwhelming. We knew zero people who have a blind child, nor did we know any blind people. So how do you raise your child? So many questions, but we just followed our instincts and common sense.

The first thing that comes to mind is to not overprotect your visually impaired child. I like to take my baby wherever we go and I let her explore on her own. We constantly talk to her and tell her what's going on and what we're hearing (birds, cars passing by, a very loud ambulance, etc.).

I've never put my baby in a stroller, but I choose to have her in a carrier, so she can feel the movements of walking and whatever I'm doing at the time. This teaches her how I move my body. She now wants me to hold her hands so she can walk up the stairs like we do. She's not interested in trying to crawl up them lol. But I do encourage her to learn to crawl up the stairs also.

Personally, I think it's important to let them help in the household with simple tasks at first, so they learn that they're a part of the family and they learn about chores. Sheltering is a killer, really.

The key is to be patient. Visually impaired people just need some more time to learn/do things.

I think, honestly, the best advice is not to hold your child back. There's a line between being over-pushy and being too protective, and I don't think most see it. Don't force your child to pick up things he's not going to, but don't shelter him from risk either. When you fall off a bike, you learn something about how not to fall off a bike. In the teenage years when you meet an incredible guy who turns out not to be incredible at all, you learn something about how to pick your boyfriends. The worst thing that a parent can do is to shelter their children, and parents with disabled kids, for obvious reasons are more prone to doing this than others. It really leads to dependency and an unhelpful level of risk-aversion that means that when time comes when they should be leaving the house, they're just not ready to. I've seen it in so many blind people and seriously it ruins lives.

I love this idea, there’s so much advice that can be given to parents and even siblings ‘cause it’s all within the family dynamic