Blogging For Kids With Disabilities

juniperus asked, thus, I did.

The blonde is my 11 year old daughter. For my sanity, she is known only by that moniker online. Actually, we call her that at home, too. She's not actually blonde anymore, but it still works.

Vicki and The BlondeVicki was weird.

I’d only heard about her from my daughter’s rambling tales of summer day care, but with the blonde girl’s stories, I figured that Vicki was an odd bird. Vicki got to day care late and left early and from what the blonde said, the other kids weren’t very nice to Vicki. Sometimes Vicki wasn’t very nice to them. The blonde and I chatted in the vaguest of terms about treating one’s friends with love and respect – and what to do if one’s friends weren’t respectful back. The rule in our house is that if someone’s mean, talk about it and if the situation doesn’t change, end the friendship.

Except that the blonde never would end that friendship. The blonde said she couldn’t end the friendship, because if she did, “Vicki didn’t always get it and if I wasn’t her friend she wouldn’t have any more friends.” Man, that annoyed the hell out of me. My thought was to teach the little brat a lesson in manners but the blonde was insistent. Thus, we worked on problem solving and communication skills. Vicki would always apologize when a teacher forced her to and the blonde, being that kind of kid, always kept at the friendship. I talked to the teachers about it and Vicki’s mom was always told about what happened. She still kept at it, though, and so did the blonde.

Sometimes the blonde would mention that it was hard to understand what Vicki wanted. It frustrated the blonde so we talked about how to find different ways to communicate. We talked about needing to use different words that mean the same thing, so we can get our friends to understand. That led to talking about how some people use different languages – and some people not using words like we did at all. That, in the way of conversations I have with the blonde, led to a long discussion on sign language and why people couldn’t hear and why some kids sounded kinda funny when they talked. The blonde got it and mentioned the book her class read about Helen Keller. I, of course, broke down into tears when we talked about her amazing teacher and how it can be so difficult to be patient and loving and how some people just never did understand that Helen Keller was still a person who deserved to BE. The blonde’s reply was, “Yeah, like some people don’t get Vicki.”

Oh.

Wait.

The blonde mind makes connections where I didn’t see them. Using the always beloved cop-out euphemism, I asked if Vicki was “special”. My answer was a hearty, “duh”. Of course Vicki was special; she was the blonde’s friend and all of the blonde’s friends were special. Determined, I asked if there was anything that made Vicki different than the other kids at day care. There was. Vicki used arm braces and she talked kinda funny.

Oh.

Vicki wasn’t weird, she was different. The other kids didn’t play with her because she was different. Trying to be delicate and a touch unsure of how to address Vicki’s differences, I asked the blonde what she thought of it all. She just shrugged. “Nothing,” was her answer. “I still like her but I have to listen a little better to understand what she says. I still like playing with her."
Well okie dokie. Since our family philosophy is “kids are kids – go play”, the blonde’s decision to keep hanging out with her friend was fine with us. We worked even harder at problem solving and communication skills – and patience. Lots of patience.

I never really addressed the specific subject of Vicki anymore and we soon moved, but those talks we had always made me think about how we as adults handle folks who weren’t put together quite the same way that I was.

My friend Deb Smith pointed out that if children are exposed to kids that have disabilities, they don’t care later on but if it’s, “at an older age, it's ‘different’, and who wants to be seen with ‘different’? The possibility of being ostracized along with the weird kid,” is just huge and grows as kids get older.

Isn’t it a parent’s responsibility to teach their kids about understanding and patience and to just BE? I kind of thought it was, but apparently, I’m in the minority. From what I understand, there are some parents who think that having a kid with disabilities in class or as a friend is going to somehow be contagious or slow their own child down. Really? Last time I looked, arm braces aren’t catching. Stupidity sure is, though. Aversion is darned contagious. Discomfort is worse than the common cold.

Not to my kid, though. Her friendship with Vicki was more important than my growlings about not letting someone be mean to her. As a young child, the blonde understood that she had to make a stand and be a friend, even if it was sometimes hard – even if she had to learn new ways of being a friend to do so.

For more information and links to other blogs about kids, living with kids with disabilities, juniperus is your gal.