Max & Hank (and Adam & Kristina)

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Silhouette of parents and two small children
Liane Kupferberg Carter, The Mighty - January 10, 2015

In the almost two years since I started disability blogging, I have seen many excellent articles and blog posts, like the one above, offering advice to parents of disabled kids. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap on these lists, since a lot of the best advice is really just common sense. Occasionally, I’ll see a suggestion I actually disagree with, but that’s fairly rare.

There is one bit of advice for “special needs parents” that I don’t think I have ever seen on a list like this:

Get to know an adult with your child’s disability.

I included this in a collaborative blog post I did last year with Kerith Stull, of the Brielle & Me blog, but other than that, I don’t think I have ever seen the idea or anything like it in any other advice article targeted to parents of disabled kids. Not that I think I’m so brilliant, but this surprises me. As I always try to say when I write about parenting, I am not a parent myself, but it seems to me like meeting an adult or two with a disability similar to your child’s would be a pretty obvious item for any parent’s to-do list. The relative absence of this idea on “special needs parenting” blogs suggests two possible explanations:

1. It’s just not occurring to parents, or

2. Parents do give this a try and for some reason don’t find it helpful or satisfying.

It’s the second possibility that has me most curious. I would be interested in hearing from parents of disabled kids who have come to know some adults with disabilities. Do you find that connection helpful, or not? If not, is there anything we, as disabled adults, could do differently to be more supportive of you and your child? You can post replies in the comments below.

Now that I think about it, I have seen this idea indirectly suggested on the TV show Parenthood. In one of the earlier seasons, Adam and Kristina Braverman, (whose son Max has Aperger Syndrome), meet a man living successfully with Asperger's. Later in the series, Max gets to know a photographer who discovers, through Max, that he may have Asperger's too. In both cases, Max's parents gain some perspective on Max's disability, and added hope for his future. It's well worth watching.
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Disability Blogging Link-Up

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The word

It's Friday. Time for another Disability Blogging Link-Up!

Use the 

thingamajig below to post a favorite blog post or article on something related to disability. You can post something you've written, or someone else's work you really like.

Here's how it works. In the "Your name" blank, type the name of the person or website, and the title of the article or post. For instance:

Disability Thinking: Best Disability Post Ever!

In the "Your URL" blank, paste the whole website address of the article you are posting.

Then click the "Enter" button. That's it!

Note: If your post doesn't appear immediately, try "refreshing" the page a few times. Sometimes it takes a little while to show up. Also, feel free to post more than one item. Finally, you might want to add a comment at the bottom of this post, to identify yourself or add an explanation or comment about the items you are posting.

Have fun posting and reading! This Link-Up will close at Midnight Eastern on Sunday.

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Dog Video Of The Day

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Bonnie Burton, C-Net - January 28, 2015

I’m not feeling very chatty today, so I figured I’d share this story and embed one of the videos.

Notice that the reporter doesn’t call the dog “wheelchair bound”, usually a go-to journalistic term for human beings who use wheelchairs.



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Language, Privilege, And Stuff ...

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word cloud around the word IDEAS
Sometimes it’s helpful when people write ridiculous things, because in response, other people write non-ridiculous things that actually move the discussion along:

Jonathan Chait says he's worried about “Political Correctness” and “Social Justice Warriors”.

On the bright side:


John Hodgman responds.

Andrea Shettle doesn’t directly respond, but her comments about ableist language do seem to relate in several ways.

In addition to liking the three responses above, here’s what I think:

The ultimate “privilege” is to be a “regular person”.

“Regular people” who are mean make jokes about other kinds of people, and use whatever words they want to describe them.

“Regular people” who are nice analyze and explain other kinds of people to other regular people … and to those other kinds of people, too.

“Regular people” become uncomfortable when the concept of “regular” seems to be dissolving, and when other groups express opinions of their own … especially when those opinions differ from those of “regular people”.

“Regular people” should probably just relax a bit. It’s very unlikely that they will truly lose much status in the end … apart from maybe the right to have all their jokes duly laughed at, and their ideas automatically taken seriously, always.

 All this is quite applicable in the disability sphere. In one sense, disabled people are not “regular people” ... we are one of those “other kinds of people."

 At the same time, there are a lot of disabled people who are, in every other respect, “regular people”. I’m pretty close to being “regular people” myself. One way you can tell is that I have a blog where I pontificate about my sensible, serious opinions every day.
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Disability.TV Ep. 19 - American Horror Story: Freak Show

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Disability.tv logo and AHS Freak Show poster

"Don’t you get it? This place is as good as it gets for folks like us … but we take care of each other.”

“The way they look at us. The way they treat us. It ain’t right!”
“That’s showbiz."

American Horror Story: Freak Show … Is it a degrading abomination or an exhilarating walk on the wilder side of disability? I’ll explore this and other related questions with disabled activist, artist, and podcaster Jane Hash.



Use the links below to subscribe, comment, and read more about topics mentioned in this episode.


Hear More and Subscribe:


If you are so inclined, please leave an iTunes or Stitcher review. Positive reviews help more people discover the Disability.TV Podcast.

Comment:

More Thoughts On Education

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3-D stick figure of person with graduation cap, seated on top of a stack of books

As I think back over all of the interactions I have had with disabled students and their families, I realize that most of the complaints and traumas the students, themselves talked about were about how they were treated by people … teachers, counselors, and fellow students … and relatively little about the curriculum itself being too hard. I mean, I’m sure that most of them also experienced a lot of frustration over the content, too, but most of even those complaints were about botched or denied accommodations, not about the material being “above” their cognitive ability.

Quite a few parents, and a lot of teachers, worried about whether it was cruel to hold more disabled students to “higher standards”. There was this very prevalent idea that it was somehow self-evident that some unspecified percentage of Special Education students were simply incapable of getting a regular diploma … and the percentage was aways inching upward.

I almost never heard students, themselves, complain about higher standards. One might argue that perhaps they didn’t have the vocabulary or conceptual understanding to make complaints that specific, but in my experience they had little trouble being specific about their other complaints.

Also, I can’t think of a single disabled student who ended up worse off or more unhappy because they took more tests or were more fully integrated in more demanding classes. But I can think of scores of kids and young adults I met who were definitely worse off than they needed to be, in part because teachers, counselors, and families thought school should be “easier” for them.

This is all anecdotal of course, based only on my personal memories which may also be faulty. Still the pattern is striking.

So although I’m still ambivalent about stuff like “high stakes” testing, and I don't necessarily trust schools to make good decisions about accommodations, I generally feel an instinct to stick up for more rigor, not less, in education of kids with disabilities.

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Weekly Wrap-Up

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Illustration of a weekly calendar with a red pin
Monday, January 19, 2015
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Friday, January 23, 2015
Saturday, January 24, 2015

Caught Between Sides

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Michelle Diament, Disability Scoop - January 23, 2015

I am only superficially familiar with the basic outlines of current debates over Education. It seems like one side wants to make K-12 education a bit more rigorous, supposedly because some sort of slack has crept into the system. Another side worries that the “higher standards” people are mostly interested in lots and lots of standardized testing and in de-clawing teacher’s unions, not so much about actually educating kids better.

Kids are caught in the middle, and if anything it’s worse and more confusing for kids with disabilities. It seems like the “special education” debate is shifting a bit, in time with the larger conflict.

Special Education debates used to be all about self-contained, segregated placement vs. “mainstreaming”. Sadly, these are still active issues, fought underneath the surface with all sorts of euphemisms. Now, though things have shifted a bit so that there are two other camps, too. One says that by and large, disabled kids are much smarter and more capable than schools and even parents realize. More disabled kids should be taking tests, passing regular classes, and getting real diplomas.

The other says that disabled kids, of all kids, should be spared the humiliation of being pushed through the test-taking wringer like everyone else. It’s easy for ivory-tower reformers to simply assert that 90% of disabled kids can get regular diplomas … can that really really true? Or is it just something they say to keep everyone on their toes, or because it fits with their preconception that “today’s education” stinks?

Whatever you think about tests specifically, isn’t it possible that most disabled kids can achieve more than is typically asked of them in school? Shouldn’t we err on the side of competence? How many generations of kids have we let slip though without gaining skills they might really have gained, if we’d pushed them a bit harder and been a bit more creative? At the same time, will "higher standards" just mean shoving disabled kids willy-nilly through the same system, without disability-specific supports or accommodations?

I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions.
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Refutations

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It’s good to see a variety of outlets coming out to defend Social Security Disability and refute Rand Paul’s nonsense:



Disability Blogging Link-Up

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The word

I have been 

toying

 with the idea of starting a weekly 

“

link-up

”

 for some time now 

…

 and now is the time!

A link-up is a special type of blog post that allows visitors to post links to any blog post they 

like, from any blog or website. To see a working example,

visit this link-up at Love That Max

.

Like Ellen at Love That Max, I plan on making this a weekly 

“

weekend

”

 link-up. I

’

ll post a new one every Friday, and leave it open for posts until late Sunday. As per the title, 

“

Disability Blogging Link-Up

”, I invite everyone to post their favorite recent blog posts about disability, broadly defined. There is no practical limit on how many items you can post, but I’ll ask everyone to limit themselves to 3 posts per weekend. Also, posting your own work is definitely encouraged!

I hope these link-ups will become another reliable place to see all the best stuff on disability each week.

Where it says "Your name" type the name of the blog followed by the title of the post you want to share (or just the name of the post, if there's no room—you get 80 characters). 

Where it says "Your URL" put the direct link to the post. Click 

“

Enter

”

, and that

’

s it.

You might also want to add a Comment below, (using the regular comment link) if you have any explanatory notes about the items you post.

Of course, the best part is checking out the links to what other disability bloggers have posted. The more people contribute, the more there will be for us to read each weekend.

Have

 fun!

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