Saturday, August 1, 2009

from Sunny Rose's mom

Sunny amazes us every day with her very, very creative means of communications. She knows she does not communicate like the rest of us, but man, she sure is creative! I always wonder, how many children back in the "old" days were locked up, put away, abandoned or neglected because by the age of two or three, the child was visibly autistic, mute, cross-eyed, engaged in meaningless repetitive behaviors (or worse, no "behaviors" at all), and the children were deemed useless and "feeble-minded". We must have lost some amazing people back then, just because those children could not communicate in a way that made sense to the people in charge. Wow.

2 comments:

  1. It is scary to think that children were treated the way they were before autism became more known. My son is completely nonverbal, but we have figured out how to communicate. We have discovered a very intelligent boy and now, when I hear someone say an autistic child is not intelligent just because he or she can not communicate, I cringe. For so long, that is how people saw my son and they would ignore my insistence that he was extremely intelligent. Now, he can communicate with others and it is being accepted that I was correct and they were wrong.

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  2. If we can just accept that a disability is not a call to change or "mainstream" --- it's a different way to live, and requires nothing other than the usual approach such as "bloom where you are planted". Would any of us demand that a tall child please try to learn to be a little shorter, in order to be more "mainstream"? Of course not. We steer that child to utilize their life potential with (i hope) no regard for the difference in height. The same is all that is needed for children with different skills and abilities. We all have souls, and our souls are not affected by our bodies, they are affected only by our lives.

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