The Cerebral Palsy Life Care Plan – Goals

Fact Checked

A child diagnosed with cerebral palsy should have a complete cerebral palsy life care plan. This plan includes a diagnosis, a team of experts and specialists, a thorough and ongoing evaluation, and a set of goals.[1]

The Purpose of Care Plan Goals

What do you want for your child’s current life and future? The goals should answer this critical question. Without goals, a life care plan will have a lot of details but no direction. Rely on your trusted experts and your family to help you develop the goals to give your child the best life possible.

The life care plan for a child with cerebral palsy has several purposes and is essential for several reasons. The main reason to have a care plan is to have something that acts as a roadmap for your child’s best life.

It includes everything you need to give them the best life, from a complete diagnosis and evaluation of their condition, limitations, and abilities, to an assessment of how much care will cost over a lifetime.

The primary purpose of having goals as part of the life care plan is to fuel the efforts you and your care team are making to give your child a great life and enable them to live their best life.

Goals may be short-term and health-related, such as changing the diet to make sure your child has no nutritional deficits. They may also be long-term, like achieving living independence or finding a job.

Experts Help You Develop Goals

Your child’s care plan will include a diagnosis, evaluation, and the establishment of a care team.

The team of specialists, caregivers, and supportive family and friends will help you decide on the goals for your child.

Once you have those goals lined up—and these will change and adapt over time—you can start making a plan for achieving them, the actual roadmap for your child’s care.

Developing goals will seem overwhelming, especially when the only goal you can think about is a healthy child. Rely on the expertise of your care team.

People such as educational experts, neurologists, nutritionists, and therapists can help you understand what is possible for your child and their future and will guide you as you create the goals.

Goal Categories

As you develop your care plan and start to think about the goals you have for your child, it can help to break them down into categories. Your child’s condition is complex, and organizing it in this way makes a complicated situation a little easier to understand.

• Managing the primary disability. Cerebral palsy is complicated, but the first goal you should consider is how to manage the prime condition. This is an overreaching kind of objective and one that your neurologist and pediatrician can help you develop.
• Managing complications. Cerebral palsy often comes along with co-existing conditions like seizure disorders and cognitive impairment. Setting goals for managing these is the next important step.
• Improving mobility. Mobility is a significant issue for most children with cerebral palsy.[2] Some will be severely impaired and unable to walk. In contrast, others may have more minor disabilities. Goals that address how well your child moves are essential for making them comfortable and giving them access to more opportunities throughout their life.
• Managing pain. Pain is also a standard component of cerebral palsy.[3] Stiff and jerky muscles, spastic muscles, and other pain will likely affect your child, and setting goals for managing that pain will help them be more comfortable and be better able to achieve different goals.
• Working on communication. A child with cerebral palsy may have limitations that prevent them from communicating fully. This is especially true for a child whose vocal cords are affected by the condition. If your child struggles with speech and language, you will want to make goals that will lead to a greater ability to communicate, either through speech or alternative methods.
• Encouraging socialization. A child with any disability may struggle to socialize with peers. Connecting with others is essential, though, so set goals that will help your child interact positively with family, friends, and peers.
• Educational goals. Education is crucial for all children. Still, if your child faces cognitive impairments, learning disabilities, or physical impairments that make learning challenging, knowledge is not as simple as it is for other children. Setting goals for learning, special education, and the future are important.
• Self-care and independence. An important all-around goal for a child with a disability is to achieve as much freedom as possible. This may mean setting small goals—taking a bath without assistance—that lead up to bigger goals, like living entirely independently.
• Maximizing quality of life. The goal is to give the child the best quality of life possible despite any disabilities. Always keep this in the back of your mind while making other goals.

The life care plan you develop for your child is an important road map for how he will live their life and how fulfilling and satisfying that life will be. It is a complicated set of documents, but the goals should be simple.

Goals should also be changeable. As your child grows older, you will meet and surpass goals and develop new ones. You will also be able to involve your child in setting those goals. He should be able to contribute and decide what he wants for their future.

Goal setting is vital for everyone to achieve success, but for a child born with a disability, they take on new importance. Take goals seriously for your child, and you give them the best chance at living a great life.