From birth to age 5, your child should reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, act and move.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides developmental milestones checklists to help track your child’s development and act early if you have a concern.

The CDC also has a free Milestone Tracker App with photos and videos that illustrate each developmental milestone. You can use the app to track your child’s development and find out what to do if you have concerns.

The Self Advocacy Resource and Technical Assistance Center (SARTAC) provides ten tip sheets written by self-advocates to help people understand self-advocacy and provide self-advocacy groups tips to keep things running smoothly.

The topics for the self-advocacy groups tip sheets include:

• What is self-advocacy?
• Ways of working on issues
• Good leaders and officers
• How do you find an advisor?

Each tip sheet is one-page. Each tip sheet is available in English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

The Self Advocacy Resource and Technical Assistance Center (SARTAC) provides a wide variety of information, videos, fellowship opportunities and events to support and strengthen self-advocacy.

SARTAC resources for individuals and self-advocacy groups include:

• Help for navigating social, economic and personal issues
• Self-advocacy Zoom meetings
• Tip sheets for self-advocacy groups
• A history of self-advocacy

Hands & Voices provides a variety of resources specific to children who are deaf/hard of hearing plus – the combination of being deaf or hard of hearing and having additional medical complexities or other needs.

Information includes the “Connecting Families of Children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing Plus (DHH Plus) with Resources and Support” guide, an Educational Plan Checklist for D/HH-Plus Students and presentations, articles and other guides for families of children who are D/HH plus.

Seattle Children’s Center for Children with Special Needs’ emergency preparedness information helps you prepare for an emergency or disaster with your child’s special health care needs or disability in mind.

Information is provided in an easy-to-follow format.

The American Red Cross provides information and inclusive tools for creating an emergency plan tailored to your family’s specific needs regarding mobility, hearing, learning or seeing disabilities.

The step-by-step tools are designed to help individuals be informed, prepare for and respond to disasters or other urgent situations.

My Heart Visit is a program from Mended Hearts that allows heart patients and their families to connect with trained volunteers who are patients themselves, a parent of a child with a heart condition or a caregiver of a loved one with heart disease.

You can connect with someone by phone, text, email or video. It includes the Heartline Hotline at (844) 432-7887 (1-844-HEART87).

Conquering CHD provides awareness, knowledge, community and research to conquer the most common birth defect, congenital heart disease/defects (CHDs).

The Conquering CHD website includes resources to help patients and caregivers understand CHDs from childhood through the teen years and adulthood.

The Mended Hearts program is a national peer-support program for patients who have cardiovascular disease, their caregivers and their families. Mended Hearts provides support and education, bringing awareness to issues that those living with heart disease face, and advocating to improve quality of life across the lifespan.

It includes Mended Little Hearts, which provides support to families of children with congenital heart defects (CHDs) or other heart conditions, and Young Mended Hearts, which supports young adults ages 18 to 55 who have heart disease, including CHDs.

 

The Illinois Guardianship and Advocacy Commission protects the rights and promotes the welfare of persons with disabilities.

Contact (866) 274-8023 or (866) 333-3362 (TTY).