It’s time we saw the full picture of disability families

When Melanie Dimmitt's son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, her family was handed a DVD that showed them a grey-scaled future.

Ten years later, the Founding Director of Heart Out Media has developed a new video series that shows the whole, technicolour truth of life for disability families.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then at 24 frames per second, video footage does a heck of a lot of communicating.

This was true of a certain DVD which, in the weeks after my baby was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, was brought into our home by a well-meaning social worker. Once my partner and I had located and dusted off his derelict Xbox in order to hit play, we were met with a sombre scene.

It opened in grey suburbia before zooming into a bare-walled bedroom, where a boy lay on his bed while his mother did his daily stretches. Nothing much else happened. That was it. Our first sighting of life as a family in the disability community - and it told a grim tale.

I remember thinking at the time that this couldn't be the barrel we were staring down. This couldn't be the full picture of our future, could it?

Ten years later, I can tell you, hand on heart, that it's not. I can also show you, through a video series fresh out of my production company, Heart Out Media. It's called Full Picture - and it's what I wish I could have seen, back when we were new to this space, watching that DVD.

Sure, we now live in our own sometimes-grey suburbia. And our son, Arlo, has a regimen of stretches that his physio and occupational therapists gently encourage us to help him with daily (which I don't, but fortunately, Arlo's excellent support workers do).

Yes, our boy does his stretches in his bedroom on his hi-lo adjustable bed. But his walls - laden with paintings of blue whales, shelves rammed full of books and sweet notes from his classmates - are anything but bare.

Beyond his bedroom, Arlo loves going to school, cracking jokes on his eye-gaze device and, occasionally, he gets shirty with his younger sister. He laughs at his parents, lights up at Disney on Ice, knocks down pins at bowling alleys and travels in aeroplanes.

Arlo's life is as big, bright and busy as that of any other kid - as it was, I'll bet, for that boy in the drab DVD. And yet, resources made for disability families still don't tend to present us as we truly are: full-colour, socially connected beings with a sense of humour.

A clinical pamphlet won't present a child mucking about with their siblings. A wheelchair manual won't show off their artworks and school awards. A tube-feeding printout won't touch on their messy shared meals. But let me show you something that does.

Made in partnership with Abbott Australia, Full Picture spends time in the lives of people and families who rely on nutrition support and feeding tubes - as my son Arlo has since he was five. Like Arlo, Noah Stephenson - a country-music-loving six-year-old - has a gastrostomy (G) tube.

As you'll see in Noah's episode of Full Picture, days on his family farm in Crookwell, NSW, are spent quadbiking with his sisters, Harriet and Mabel, or helping bottle-feed their hungry herd of calves.

While in the Stephensons home, we took care to capture cute details in Noah's bedroom - his highland cow and Bluey plushies, the letters of his name spelled out proudly on his wall and his kindy graduation photo, where he dons a mini mortarboard and cape.

Viewers will see that Noah's tube-feeds are a family affair - one that his little sister, in particular, makes sure not to miss. While Noah relaxes to some country tunes, Mabel shakes up his snack and helps push it through his feeding tube. Never has a two-year-old had better mastery of a syringe plunge (I'm hoping Arlo's eight-year-old sister takes note).

Full Picture has launched with two episodes and will visit more people and families, shedding more light on what it's truly like to raise a disabled child, live with chronic illness and navigate medical complexity.

Every experience is different, each story is unique. All are far bigger than a single frame.

Watch Full Picture here - and stay tuned for more episodes.