as small as a world and as large as alone, What also annoys me is when people say things like...

10:40pm June 30, 2014

Anonymous asked: What also annoys me is when people say things like "I just can't wait to hear my child say 'I love you!'" about their non-verbal child. What if that's not what the kid wants to say? What if she's got a million other things she's trying to get out, and expressing love isn't on the list? What if she genuinely dislikes you? Does the therapy become meaningless then? Some parents can't get over the idea that their kid is not them.

Yes that annoys me too. I understand the impulse to want to hear that from your child. I even, despite severe speech problems, told my dad out loud that I loved him, because I knew that, even if I’ll never understand it, he has a sentimental attachment to my voice that is very real, and at that moment, when we weren’t sure how long he had left to live, that was the best gift I could give him. But that was my choice, because I do love him, and because I could say that, that one day, after practicing all day the day before, when all my abilities lined up right. That has to be a choice.

Many times, that is one of the first things a child wants to tell their parent when they get AAC. But many times, it is not. And children don’t always love their parents. And children shouldn’t be made to do this. I’ve seen really really really horrible videos where parents trained their children to echolalically, robotically say “I love you”, just so they could hear them say it. It turned my stomach. If it’s not something the child chooses to say, it’s not real. They chose form over function and it made me feel so sick I could barely keep watching.

I think one of the most sickening ones to me was this video, it was the same video where the mother talks about wanting to kill her autistic daughter, in front of the daughter. Well throughout the video, her daughter is snuggling with her, pulling her face towards hers and making eye contact, asking her questions about her feelings (most people think her daughter is nonverbal after watching the video, but she asked very astute questions like “Mommy why are you crying?”), and showing every sign that she cared and loved her mother.

And then her mother said, “Say ‘I love you mommy’.” And in a robotic voice she echoed, “I love you mommy.” And her mom said “I’ll take that.” And I wanted to slap her. She’d been sitting there literally ignoring her girl’s loving beautiful spontaneous verbal and nonverbal advances towards her for the entire video, and what she’ll “take” is a robotic repetition of a few words. She wrote elsewhere that she couldn’t her daughter as differently abled because she couldn’t see her daughter as abled in any area at all. In the video, her daughter showed all kinds of impressive abilities, and the whole while, her mother was ignoring most of them. Like actively turning away, like her love was a nuisance until it could be packaged into language and echolated back to her. It was very disturbing.

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