To urge you to teach your children to be genuinely inclusive, not just polite?

[gingerginger2]

My kids are back at school this week (Scotland) and after a summer of seeing them without the context of their peers it’s a sadness again to see them interacting with other children.

On their own, they are sweet, silly, funny, kind, playful, interesting, creative, chatty. They are part of the world, full of wonder and learning and play.

But in the context of kids their age, they are different. They both have learning disabilities and dyspraxia.

They don’t know this though, they don’t quite realise they are “different” yet. They are little, they learn slowly, despite the constant lessons from society’s exclusions. They run up to their “friends” in such a carefree happy way, eager to talk, play, connect. It doesn’t seem to occur to them not to.

And when they do they mainly encounter silence. Uncomfortable polite looks. Or polite confused monosyllabic mumbles followed by eager escapes into actual easy friendships groups. Or at best a short conversation in a humouring tone, a tone learnt by imitating the tones adults take with small silly children.

There’s not really any unkindness. There’s just a refusal to actually engage, to get to know, to connect. An embarrassment and unwillingness to spend time with my children’s lack of social skills, messy clothes, an uncomfortableness at their invasion of their personal space. So a brief hello before getting on with actual friendships and relationships and life. An obvious desire to politely not engage. A smile with the lips not the eyes.

I’m amazed they don’t seem to realise that they’ve been snubbed again. But they din’t Mainly. Learning disability means everything is hard to learn I guess. But it’ heartbreaking to see they just carry on and continue to fling themselves at people, wide open, encountering boundaries wherever they go. I worry that soon they’ll start to realise and feel the pain of these rejections.

I worry too that maybe they do feel the pain. Maybe it goes somewhere deep, and maybe they are learning day by day that people don’t like them. That society isn’t for them.

I hate it.

Please can you teach your children to be more than polite and kind to their peers with disabilities? Please can you urge them to actually get to know them, to actually connect and include them? Even when they are messy, annoying, noisy and a bit weird. Even then?

The personal space again. Red herring. Some people with SN do that. Most don’t. So it’s not terribly relevant to the overall question, which is whether children should be encouraged in be open to kids with SN.

look out with their comfort zone when socialising, and to recognise that they require diffferent skills and amount of efforts when getting to know different kinds of people.

I was taught to do this and I did, and I made connections with people I wouldn't otherwise have engaged with. It was a really positive experience.

But, it left me vulnerable as an older teen and young adult. I had been taught to ignore my discomfort, to look beyond superficial behaviours. It got me in to trouble. I could no longer discern for my own safety.

This is what people are concerned about as parents, and it's a genuine and warranted concern. How do we, as parents, navigate this complex issue? Not by ignoring it or calling people names.

A few years ago there was a big issue in our town about one of the special schools being closed down and the kids moved to mainstream schools where possible.

As a physically disabled woman, I was chatting to one of the dads on the playground, who had a couple of lads with autism, saying I though integration was a really good thing.

I was surprised that he totally disagreed with me. He said his kids had an awful time socially and no mates, and he felt they would be much happier, and make more friends, in a school where more people were like them.

It’s incredibly vile the way learning disability is being caricatured as invading personal space, like that excuses leaving all children out .
There are some people on this thread with massive issues around disability, obviously. To the point of needing counselling for it.

“Now, it is my responsibility, as the OP says, to teach her that some people do require different forms of engagement and different levels of effort, but it doesn’t mean they are worth less. And I am happy to do that. What I am not going to do is call her “disablist” or force her to be friends when she doesn’t want to be.“

Hallelujah hercule, you do get it. I have not at any point in this thread said that anyone should force their child to be friends with mine.

I have asked for more than tolerance and politeness.

I have asked for active inclusion.

I don’t understand why you and others leapt to make it about forcing friendship

And I do feel berated by you. The sheer volume of your posts reiterating the same opinion as misconstrued opposition to my OP has ensured that. Especially as I don’t understand why you are so invested in a thread when you don’t seem to have any experience of the issues i’m talking about. Your empathy doesn’t feel comforting in these circumstances.

I do agree with you though, you shouldn’t and can’t force anyone to be friends with someone they don’t want to be friends with.

For me though, that is just obvious and not what i’m Talking about.

I think we have got to find the space between tolerance/politeness and forced friendship , because it is there! Posters on this thread have described it! I have experienced it! It is possible to make someone feel seen, make some feel respected, noticed, valued, understood, excluded and part of a society without forcing yourself to be there friend.

Teach your children it goes beyond tolerance and politeness. Please!

So why did you think they liked to sit on their own? Did it not occur to you that it might have been part of your role to try and make things different for them?

The thing is I don't think anyone, including the op, wants to force other children to befriend theirs.

The jist I got from the op is that doing the bare minimum to be polite is not enough.

Being open to friendship, giving others a chance and taking time to get to know people is what I think the op was getting at as being the important thing.

Is it not the same thing?? Being included? Being invited to play? Joining in certain games, conversations? Being asked to someone’s house for dinner?

No, it’s not. You can’t expect a child to treat a person they genuinely like in the same way as they a person to whom they are indifferent. If my DD comes out at break one day and someone suggests they kick a ball around and she says, “Actually, I’m going to juggle with X”, I will be more proud of her than I can say. But I will not be ashamed of her if she invites Y to dinner because she likes them more. Friendship and inclusion aren’t the same.

I'm only on page 4 I admit, and I understand the social model of disability.

I'm disturbed by the "be kind" message tbh

It oversimplifies an absolute minefield of social interaction which a hefty minority of older children and adults are I'll equipped to handle, let alone small children.

I work with young adults with mild to moderate learning disabilities, several of whom have been exploited because they were indoctrinated into believing that they had to be kind and lacked capacity to differentiate between being kind to those with more difficulties than themselves and pure motives, and being kind to peers with motives they shouldn't have had to accommodate. These people are disabled by society themselves, yes, but are harmed by the "be nice, be kind" simplification. Genuine inclusion is not kindness at all costs, it's ironically far, far more complex and I'm sad to say probably only an ideal. An ideal worth striving towards in many ways, but not with harmful blanket demands that the vulnerable (and all children and far more adults than people realise are vulnerable) are kind before all else. Telling vulnerable people that they must always be kind makes them still more vulnerable.

The WHO estimates that one fifth of the global population is disabled, and a quarter of the global population have mental health problems. There will be overlap, and of course people with purely physical disabilities are in a different situation to people with learning/ cognitive/ neurological disabilities, but obviously many of the people suffering mental illness are not disabled, so that's a lot of people between those two population subsets. Obviously still more are vulnerable due to other circumstances, there are a whole lot of people in the world I'll equipped to "get over themselves and be kind" and understand the difference between feeling uncomfortable because the person they are with is neurodiverse and feeling uncomfortable because their self preservation instinct has accurately kicked in and is telling them to get out of the situation.

I am afraid NT small children also lack this ability to differentiate, and should not be told to be kind at the expense of feeling uncomfortable.

I will read on and see if this has been addressed further after page 4.

DS has suffered far more invasion of personal space from NT kids than he’s ever been guilty of. He’s never done that ever. Very much not how he rolls.
They still exclude him.

So why did you think they liked to sit on their own? Did it not occur to you that it might have been part of your role to try and make things different for them?

Yes, it did. I think they preferred to sit alone because they found other people their age unpredictable. They liked to organise certain things and not have them moved. They had had lots of experience of people who had previously been placed next to them making them feel anxious. My role was to make them comfortable.

Do you think disablism is less serious and damaging than racism, tooold? If so, why?

I didn’t see anyone saying disablism is less serious than racism so much as their roots lie in different places. When you look at history, be that colonialism, slavery, the holocaust, more recent genocide it goes much deeper than a disabling society (as significant as that may be). Racism treats people as less than human and comes from a place of privilege and superiority - in some places the law literally categorised blacks people as not fully human.

I don’t think there’s the same comparison to be made, the discrimination against people with disabilities is often a combination of ignorance, normalisation, discomfort or lack of knowledge/understanding. Racism comes from a much more malevolent place.

There will always be people left out. It might be a disability, or a skin colour, or a personality or a social or financial reason. My dd was left out a lot because she was quiet and shy. I can see ds is more confident but may be left out because he is loud. My nephew is left out because he has autism. My niece because she may be autistic. My cousin left out because of her sexuality.

Lots of reasons why people struggle socially. It's heartbreaking but maybe we place too much emphasis on not being left out. As I get older and wiser I am happier in my own company and company of my family.

I can't force my 15 year old dd to be friends with anyone. I can encourage her to be friendly and kind and not exclude. Same with 5 year old ds. Friendship is formed naturally. I am friends with only a few people but that friendship developed naturally. Dh has tried to encourage me to be friends with his friends wives and partners. I am friendly but only properly friends with 1.

As a parent I try and encourage independence in my dcs. I don't force friendship on them. Look how many posts are on mn where mums make schoolgate friends and try and encourage a friendship between dcs which naturally drifts when the dcs get older.

You can't force friendship. It happens or it doesn't even in adults. I can't force myself to be friends with women who are perfectly nice and perfectly friendly and perfectly kind to me, and me them. I have known these women 14 years, been on many social occasions. Yet a new partner of one of dhs friends (have known her 18 months) is one of my closest friends.

You can't force friendship anymore than you can force a romantic relationship. No matter why the chemistry isn't there it isn't there. And it's better to teach our dcs independence and resilience.

Am so sorry your dcs are struggling .

And I do feel berated by you. The sheer volume of your posts reiterating the same opinion as misconstrued opposition to my OP has ensured that. Especially as I don’t understand why you are so invested in a thread when you don’t seem to have any experience of the issues i’m talking about. Your empathy doesn’t feel comforting in these circumstances.

It wasn’t my intention to berate you and I am sorry you feel that way. However, you asked if you were being unreasonable and, on balance, I think you were. The volume of my posts is a function of how many people directed their posts at me, rather than being any reflection on how I felt about your OP. I hope your DC find this coming year easier.

Children learn by example. I wonder how many people posting here have adult friends with significant learning disabilities? How many are actually practicing what they preach?

I disagree with you Hercule. How do you think friendships start? Grow? Someone initiates play, conversations, games etc. Inclusion is the main ingredient to how a friendship blossoms. Without it every child would be stood on their own in the playground, none of them would invite another child to play or for dinner etc.

I think that approach is sadly, very typical of the way most schools deal with these issues, hercule. I’m not actually blaming you - I think many teachers know no better way. That’s why we got additional expertise from outside to support ds in school. Thank god we had the means to do it.

jellycatdpyjamas so well put.

Racism treats people as less than human and comes from a place of privilege and superiority - in some places the law literally categorised blacks people as not fully human.

Oh come, you could substitute disablism for racism in that sentence and have it spot on.

Actually for kids like my DD who have absolutely everything, I think their choice to maybe play a game they don’t want for a playtime, or partner with someone they might not initially choose is such a small thing to ask.

OP, Surely your own friends have children? Do they not play with your children?
How many friends with LD do you yourself have? Do they come round for meals? What activities do you do with them?

I do think it’s unreasonable to expect children not to choose their companions - but understand that’s hard for you to see. What level of disability should they be required to ‘ be friends’ with? How would you expect them to maintain an equal relationship with a child with complex needs who was in a wheelchair, fed via a tube and non verbal?

In my book it’s perfectly acceptable for a child to not choose a friend who is always getting in to trouble regardless of skin colour, disability or other protected characteristic. That’s not discrimination; it’s a valid reason for avoidance.
It’s acceptable for a child not to want to spend time with someone who is unkind or punches them or pulls their hair. That’s not discrimination; it’s a valid reason to avoid.
What isn’t reasonable is being unkind, not answering direct questions or refusing to work with them in class.

But @JacquesHammer what does it teach your daughter overall?
One poster explained that that's exactly what she was taught and it had serious negative side affects on her later in life.

The holocaust actually started with the dehumanising of disabled people. They were the first to be eliminated.

Someone initiates play, conversations, games etc. Inclusion is the main ingredient to how a friendship blossoms.

Of course. If I ever hear that my DD failed to “include” another child in a group activity, knowing they wanted to participate, she will feel the sharp end of my tongue. But if that “activity” is a private discussion about which boy she fancies, then, no, she has the right to be “exclusive” in that case. It’s a complex issue.

“Racism treats people as less than human and comes from a place of privilege and superiority” and disablism doesn’t?
What troubles me is the suspicion that what underlies this view is an assumption that there’s a reasonableness to less favourable treatment of disabled people that almost, a little bit, kind of, makes it justified, which clearly isn’t present in the case of racial prejudice.