Sara Mauskopf
Sara Mauskopf is the co-founder and CEO of Winnie. She’s also the mom of three young children and vocal advocate for high quality child care and early education for all.
As difficult as it is to find high-quality, affordable childcare in the United States, it is even harder if you have a child with special needs*. Data from the Center for American Progress reveals that parents of young children with disabilities are three times more likely than other parents to experience job disruptions due to lack of adequate child care.
It can be challenging as a parent to secure child care for children with disabilities, who make up an estimated 17% of the country’s population. Today, Winnie is launching the ability for parents to search for child care providers who support children with a variety of needs. Parents can now go to winnie.com/special-needs to find providers who specialize in or have extra training around neurodiversity, ADHD, medical needs, or learning differences and can learn from their Winnie page about the specific type of care that is provided.
Winnie includes every licensed group child care provider, including smaller centers and home-based providers, who are able to care for children with special needs. For example, Sharon Baptist Head Start is a program in New York that supports children with special needs and is also free for qualifying low-income families
Many parents of children with special needs assume that they need to hire their own employee like a nanny, which can be expensive. In many cases though, group child care providers can support children with special needs and be more affordable than 1:1 care.
Finding a special needs child care provider is a win for all children involved. Children with special needs benefit from learning alongside their typically developing peers and vice versa.
Other support for special needs families
We’re proud to highlight the following organizations serving children with special needs.
- Parallel Learning's mission is to empower students who learn or think in different ways. Supportive care through Parallel gives a student the resources, training, and encouragement needed to succeed in the classroom and beyond.
- Songbird Therapy is a modern provider of in-home Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy for children with autism.
To check out Winnie’s new special needs child care search, visit winnie.com/special-needs. Child care centers who support children with special needs can add this information by visiting https://winnie.com/providers and claiming their free page on Winnie.
*Note: In the context of this post, we used identity-first and person-first language interchangeably. We know there are people in the special needs community that prefer one set of terms over another and we welcome your feedback.
