12:43am June 4, 2014

can we also talk about…

chavisory:

dendriforming:

patternsmaybe:

The kind of ~acceptance~ where parents don’t try to teach their kids anything or plan for their adulthood and think of that as loving them the way they are?

I was talking to a friend who does respite care recently. She’s disabled herself, and was involved in disability rights and neurodiversity communities before she ever started doing respite care.

She told me that her experiences with the kids she worked with were making her rethink a lot of things. She was learning that “just let them do whatever they want” wouldn’t prepare them for adulthood. She was realizing that they had to spend time learning things that were hard for them, even if they didn’t want to.

I was really baffled, because I didn’t think this view was remotely new or controversial. But apparently she thought that the general consensus in the disability rights community was “Don’t make kids do things they don’t want to.”

Back in the early 2000s, when I was first getting familiar with the autistic community, there were a lot of parents going on about how autistic adults just wanted them to “let their kids fester.” I think that a majority of that was probably an intentional misinterpretation. The people they were targeting were decidedly not saying that autistic kids didn’t have to learn anything. More often, they were objecting to the fact that teaching autistic kids is treated as something entirely different from teaching neurotypical kids (i.e. turning the kids into an entirely different type of person rather than developing skills).

I think that my friend’s conclusion was in part a misinterpretation. But I’m certain it wasn’t intentional. I don’t agree with her on everything, to be clear. Not remotely. I don’t know which particular conversations led to her conclusions about consensus, so I can’t say to what extent I think she misinterpreted. But what I am certain of is that she’s not the only one taking away the message that acceptance means not teaching your kids or preparing them for adulthood. And I’m equally certain that there are people who apply this idea in their parenting.

I wish I knew how to make it clearer that this isn’t remotely what I’m saying when I’m talking about how therapy can be harmful, I guess? Because kids absolutely do need to learn things and do things they don’t want to. But there are just as certainly dangerous patterns in what and how people regularly teach disabled kids. It’s really important to keep both these things in mind. But somehow it’s really hard to communicate about this so that people get both of these messages. And I want to figure out how to do it better.

I think it also comes, in huge part, from the misperception of autism as some variation of being “trapped” in an internal world, total developmental stagnation, or global, complete inability.

If that’s what you think autism is, then “acceptance” of your kids as autistic would sound a whole lot like what those parents accuse us of saying.

I used to think that was pretty much all of it. I still agree that it’s a huge part.

What startled me so much was hearing that impression from someone who I know knows very well that autism isn’t that.

Unfortunately every time a parent neglects their kids in such a horrible way, and then calls it ‘acceptance’, our job gets harder. The kid is going to be damaged by this. And people will think this is what we all mean.

It’s hard to explain that what we want is the way every kid is raised when they’re raised well: We want them raised to be the type of person they are, not the type of person they’re not. And either way, it involves raising, which involves sometimes making kids do what they don’t want to do. But just not in the service of turning them into a phony nonautistic person.

Notes: