Online Workshop: Let’s Start the Conversation: Sexuality and Developmental Disability: How to Partner with Parents to Support Their Children

Workshop Summary

Parents want their kids to be happy, safe, and to find someone to love. That’s the same thing you want for them. If we don’t teach healthy sexuality, someone else will teach unhealthy sexuality — and that’s a conversation parents and educators need to have together.

Note: This is a pre-recorded, 90-minute, online workshop. You’ll receive Instant access upon purchase — including downloadable resources.

Why This Workshop Exists

Katherine McLaughlin has been training educators, DSPs, and agency staff on sexuality education for people with developmental disabilities for over 25 years. And in almost every training she has ever led, the same dynamic shows up: when parents are in the room, everything gets richer. Their knowledge of their own children, their honesty about the barriers, their willingness to name what they actually need from the professionals in their lives — it changes the conversation in ways that no curriculum can.

So she decided to make that conversation the focus of the whole workshop. Three parents of adults and young adults with developmental disabilities joined Katherine to speak directly about what it is like to navigate this terrain — the discomfort of not knowing where to start, the worry that talking about it will backfire, the isolation of feeling like no one else is dealing with the same thing, and the moments when it actually works.

“If you talk with most parents, what do they want most for their kids to be happy, safe, and to find someone to love. So that’s, I think, why we’re all here.”

— Elizabeth Solá, workshop presenter

That is the starting point. And it turns out educators want the same thing. The question this workshop addresses is how you build the partnership that gets you both there.

What Parents Are Up Against

The parents in this workshop are candid about what makes this hard. Most of them did not receive good sexuality education themselves, which means they are trying to give their children something they were never given. They worry that having the conversation will give their child ideas. They sometimes struggle to think of their son or daughter as a sexual being at all. They default to cognitive age rather than biological age, telling themselves that their 25-year-old needs the same conversation as a 6-year-old, when in reality the opposite is true.

Laura Pace, a health educator who works with teens and young adults with intellectual disabilities — and is also the parent of a young man with an intellectual disability — describes what she found when she started looking for resources for her son:

“I found a real discrepancy between what was available or what was being offered in the school district versus what I found his needs to be.”

— Laura H. Pace, MS, LMT, workshop presenter

For parents of nonverbal individuals, the challenge is even more specific. Wanda Douglas, a nationally certified family support provider who adopted her son at age four — he now has severe autism and is 23 — describes looking for someone who could help her understand what her son was experiencing in his body and finding almost no one in her area working on that question.

And yet the work keeps going. Elizabeth Solá has been at this for years, navigating her own comfort level, learning new frameworks, adjusting her approach as her son — now in his mid-twenties — continues to grow. She describes it this way:

“Just like yoga, it’s a practice. Some days you’re right on, other days you’re not and you need a little readjusting and then you readjust and you figure out what works for you.”

— Elizabeth Solá, workshop presenter

What parents need from educators and DSPs is not someone who has all the answers. It is someone willing to stay in the conversation, adjust as needed, and treat the parent as the expert on their own child.

What Partnership Actually Looks Like

The three parents in this workshop are clear about what helps and what does not. The single most consistent message is that the parent — and the person with the disability themselves — holds the expertise that makes any professional more effective:

“The expert is the parent or the child themselves. They know themselves better than anyone.”

— Wanda Douglas, CPSP, workshop presenter

That means starting by asking, not assuming. What is working? What is not? What are this person’s goals, interests, and preferences? What is the parent already teaching, and how can staff reinforce that rather than contradict it? Partnership begins with that conversation — and it is often the conversation that never happens.

Wanda draws on her years in foster care and family systems work to describe what real partnership requires:

“Partnership is a process. And each participant in the partnership has a role and the roles have to be clearly defined. And sometimes they have to change.”

— Wanda Douglas

The workshop also addresses something harder: what to do when parents are resistant. Katherine, Laura, Wanda, and Elizabeth spend real time on this — not to judge resistant parents, but to understand them. Parents who seem reluctant to engage often have very good reasons. They may carry their own history with the topic. They may have been pushed too hard by professionals before and learned to protect themselves. Wanda frames it directly:

“Sometimes what appears to be resistance may be a safety mechanism for that parent.”

— Wanda Douglas

Meeting a resistant parent means listening before educating, and understanding that the goal is not to get them to agree with you — it is to stay in a relationship long enough that they feel safe enough to keep talking. The workshop gives you concrete tools for doing that.

And when it works — when a parent has had the support and information they needed, when a young person has had good sexuality education, when the partnership is real — the results are remarkable. Elizabeth Solá describes a young man in his mid-twenties, with a developmental disability and a strong foundation in sexuality education, who came to his parents to tell them he and his girlfriend wanted to get to know each other better. He asked for a family meeting so everyone could talk about it together. That is what self-advocacy and consent education actually look like in practice.

Who This Workshop Is For

This workshop is for self-advocates who want to understand how to communicate their own needs and questions to the parents and professionals in their lives. It is also for parents of people with I/DD who want tools for having these conversations with their own children, and for educators, direct support professionals, school staff, agency trainers, and therapists who work with families and want to build stronger partnerships around sexuality education. If you have ever felt stuck on one side of this conversation — unable to reach a parent, or unsure how to ask for what you need as a parent — this workshop is for you.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

Identify the most common barriers parents face in talking to their children with I/DD about sexuality — including discomfort, the myth that talking about it encourages sexual behavior, and the difficulty of seeing an adult child as a sexual being

Explain why sexuality education is a lifelong conversation, not a single talk, and why starting early — regardless of cognitive level — matters

Apply the strategies parents say actually work when a professional is trying to partner with them, including how to position yourself as a supporter of the parent’s goals rather than an authority replacing them

Recognize when parental resistance is actually a protective response, and respond in a way that builds trust instead of pushing harder

Use concrete tips for talking with your own children or the people you support about sexuality, consent, and healthy relationships — including how to teach consent at any age and how to handle the question you weren’t expecting

Build communication frameworks between parents and direct support professionals so that the messages families and staff give are consistent and reinforcing

Workshop Presenters

Katherine McLaughlin, M.Ed., AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator, is the Founder, CEO, and Lead Trainer for Elevatus Training. She has been a sexuality educator and trainer for over 30 years. As a national expert on sexuality and intellectual and developmental disabilities, she trains professionals and parents, as well as people with I/DD, to become sexual self-advocates and peer sexuality educators.⁠

Elizabeth Solá has 25 years of experience working with individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities as a bilingual special educator, from early intervention through preschool, and, more recently, collaborating on grassroots efforts to create inclusive opportunities for self-determined adults. She is also the parent of a young adult on the autism spectrum. She understands the importance of partnering with other parents to ‘start the conversation’ about healthy relationships and sexuality education.

Laura H. Pace, MS, LMT, is a Health Educator, Wellness Specialist, and Licensed Massage Therapist. Over the last decade, she has taught several college courses in NH, MA, and NY, and currently teaches Healthy Relationships and Human Sexuality for people with intellectual disabilities. Laura is the owner of All Ability Wellness, LLC in East Setauket, NY, where she provides individual and small-group health education classes. As the parent of a child with special needs, Laura is devoted to health promotion and disease prevention by educating and supporting all of the families she works with.

Wanda Douglas, CPSP, is a Nationally Certified Trainer and a Nationally Certified Family Support Provider. She currently works with North Carolina Families United, a Statewide Family-Run Organization, as a Family Partner Coordinator and Trainer. As a part of her work with System of Care, she partners with the local MCO and various Child-Serving Organizations. Her passion for advocacy began as a result of working with youth with special health care needs (I/DD; Autism) and youth who were displaced from their home of origin and placed into Foster Care. To build on the foundation of trauma-focused care in our local community, she partners and delivers multiple Evidence-based and Promising Practice Trainings (Mental Health First Aid, QPR, CRM, Trauma/Resilience/ACEs, Intimacy and Healthy Sexuality, etc) to various child-serving agencies and individuals including schools, child welfare, Juvenile justice, mental health professionals, law enforcement, social workers, foster parents, youth and families. Wanda attended Tuskegee Institute and More Than Conqueror’s College and has a degree in Christian Ministry. She is married with three children.