Navigating Disney With Your Special Needs Child
Experiencing the wonder and magic of Disney world can provide families with precious memories that will stay with them for a very long time. When going to Disney with children with special needs, that wonder and magic might be a bit more tricky to find. Thankfully, Disney and their cast mates do a good job of accommodating families with special needs. These tips should hopefully help get families, especially those with special needs, ready for the House of Mouse.
While I can provide information on other accommodations, my experience comes from the dealing with the fact that our 11-year-old has an autism diagnosis. We often experience difficulties with crowds, waiting in line, loud noises, over stimulation and general excitement. These are all things that you will find at Disney world and can all hopefully be abated some with these tips.
When planning our trip to Disney, we wanted to go at a less busy time regardless, but this was especially important to us as the fewer crowds meant decreased chaos for us. You can find these calendars all over the internet and they already have one posted for 2025. Going during a less crowded time definitely helped with the enjoyment of our experience. Did our kids miss some school? Yes. Will they survive? Also, yes.
The main thing that helped us to enjoy our time at Disney more was taking advantage of the DAS program. The Disability Access Service program is designed to help families who because of a developmental delay, such as Autism, are unable to easily wait in traditional queues. Because this program had been over-utilized in the past, they have become more strict with it and more careful about who gets it. To see if your family is eligible for DAS, once you are 30 days out from your trip, you can request a live video chat in order to register for it. You will talk with someone through video chat, they will want to meet the person with the needs and will discuss the reasons you feel that your family could benefit from the program. Once approved, the DAS pass will show up in your app during your first morning in the park. And, thanks to the app, using the DAS pass has become easier than ever. Once you arrive to the park, you can go into the app and request a return time. If you arrive to Magic Kingdom at 8:30 and the wait for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train is 40 minutes, then you can request a return time for 9:10. You can go off and do the rides that have shorter waits and then go to the lightning lane at your return time. Some things to remember: you can only use the DAS on rides that your child is tall enough or is planning on actually going on. And, you can only request one return time at a time. Once you get off the Mine Train, you can request your next DAS return time.
One thing that we had to figure out is how does the DAS pass work with the virtual queues. As of the writing of this article, there are two rides at Disney World with virtual queues, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Magic Kingdom and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at Epcot. In order to get in the virtual queue, starting at 7am on the day you are visiting the park, you can go to the app and join the virtual queue for the morning group. If you miss the morning group, you can join the afternoon’s virtual queue at 1pm (you must be in the park to do so). If you also have a DAS pass, when it is your turn to show up at the ride, you will find the cast mate helping with rider switches. They will make it so that you can enter the lightning lane. We didn’t know about this for Tron: Lightcycle (which now doesn’t have a virtual queue) and so we still had to wait quite awhile. For Tiana’s Bayou, we had it figured out so we were able to go to the lightning lane. Standing in that long line for Tron: Lightcycle only confirmed for us that having the DAS pass was necessary, and we were very grateful for it.
A few other strategies that we used to help our kid cope with all of the craziness that comes with the amazement were making sure that we had the right things packed for each day in the park. In our packs that we each carried a few of what became our essentials for our time in the parks. We made sure to have sunscreen, because no one wants to get burned at Disney. We brought our kids’ headphones to muffle loud noises inside the buildings. We had his afternoon medicine packed, bottles for water and snacks to give our kids something to munch on (this also provided them with a crunchy output, which helps with overstimulation). We even packed an iPad if our guy needed a moment away from everything.
We by no means have all of this parenting thing figured out, especially when it comes to our special needs child. Just like most parents, we do the best that we can. Hopefully, other families can benefit from our experience and will be able to have a magical experience at Disney as well.
