goshparticle:

was thinking about this also: don’t hide your child’s disability from the child themself, or pretend it doesn’t exist

one of my best friends went to an autistic school for 7 years, but no one ever actually explained to him what autism actually was! parents never talked about it! so he thought that when he went to high school he’d ‘grown out of it,’ whatever it was.

we kept running into situations where, for example, we’re sitting together and someone asks me why I’m flapping and I say “I’m stimming, I’m autistic,” or this friend hears me explain accommodation stuff to a new teacher. and he kept responding with surprise: “that’s an autism thing? is autism the reason we do that?” “yeah!” “oh wow, I thought I was just weird!”

so i’ve been trying to convince my friend for most of this year now that all this ‘unusual’ stuff that we do and difficulties we have are just our natural way of being, because of our neurotype and disability… and the reaction has consistently been relief. like “oh, that’s why I’m like this! it’s not the wrong way, it’s just the autistic way!”

if you act like your child’s disability doesn’t exist, it won’t actually stop existing. they will still be a disabled child, only now they will have no understanding of what that means. they’re going to feel confused and out-of-place at best; have their needs ignored and most probably going to push themselves to able-bodied neurotypical standards of functioning when they just cannot handle that, which is extremely unhealthy!

disability is not a bad word! it is not shameful! you gain nothing from pretending a disabled person in your life is not disabled at all.