To think a lot of MN are ableist?

[Sweetlifeofyours]

So I wasn’t going to post but as a mum with a disabled child myself I feel like I have to get things off my chest. I have read a couple of threads over the past week or so regarding mothers who are looking for advice and support for their disabled child/children (2 that stick out to me)

I was very sad to see that there were only a few posters who actually gave support and advice to the OP’s. The rest were in my opinion, downright rude and nasty and clearly just wanted to upset the OP’s even more for whatever reason.

As a mum with a SEN child, it is incredibly difficult and I myself don’t always get the correct help and support I need so to come on here and see that other women/parents show their (somewhat) true opinions of disabled children upset me.

I am completely 100% on board that autism shouldn’t be an excuse for everything, but surely some compassion wouldn’t go amiss to a struggling parent.

One of the worst things I read was a poster saying to the OP that they should make sure their child doesn’t turn into a sex offender because he enjoys hugs. Says more to me about the poster rather than the OP and their child.

I guess my AIBU is, do you think people (maybe especially on here) should have more compassion for the disabled community or have you read threads where you agree with the majority of comments (especially where we are talking about young children)?

Well yes, of course.

Instilling appropriate social norms around sexual behaviour as well as all other aspects of behaviour is our job as parents.

It’s especially necessary when we are pushing against a tide of social media, influencers etc who push an unacceptable misogynistic narrative onto our sons - so it is far too important to ‘leave to chance’.

Sorry managed to catch up now. Well apparently I am BU according to the poll! Most of them are probably the ones who enjoy slagging off disabled people.

Anyhow, this has turned into a great discussion and it’s nice to see that some people are able to have fair, balanced and actual adult discussions unlike a lot of the threads on here recently

I still hit all the prior 6 criteria when i was assessed aged 40. I also had evidence from school reports of the behaviour being present right from the get go, and peer reports from parents/people who knew me growing up that used to literally refer to me as motormouth because i never shut up... my school reports from both primary and secondary are full of comments about needing to stop daydreaming and concentrate, less talking to friends and more attention on the lesson needed...etc.

People don't seem to realise, that yes, they changed the criteria to open up for adult diagnosis, but a lot of us BEING diagnosed as adults would have met the old criteria anyway had they realised how it presented in girls and we had been assessed back then.

Most of us with both asd/adhd that are diagnosed as adults have a lifetime of failure, addiction, and mental health problems behind us.. and our medical records are often tainted with depression/anxiety/personality disorder diagnoses that were instead being ND.. and that taint goes on to affect us every time we visit the GP.

My recent reports of increased pain due to my physically disability were judged as me being anxious and i was punted towards the Pain Management clinic for CBT instead of it actually being seen as very real pain caused by arthritis and undiagnosed hypermobility... all because i have 'GAD' on my drs records... it isn't GAD.. or an obsessive personality disorder, which was another thing they pinned on me in my 20s.. its Autism & ADHD.

i think that is something every mother of a child needs to address, not just the mothers of the disabled ones, or mothers of sons.

The disabled folk need teaching it sometimes not just for everyone elses sake, but for their own, because a lot of them are vulnerable/at risk adults.

Sometimes you have to look at it from both POV.

Of course they are.

Confirmation bias is never the best foundation for a poll.

Im not sure it is abelist to think that everybody's needs should be considered. It is abelist to assume able-bodied in attitudes, institutions, processes, social interactions etc. But by not being abelist society would mop up people just below the threshold or finding specific things harder which is you main concern..

i also dont think who has it hardest is the main point of the equalities act.

The act isn't measuring is life hardest for this person versus that person. Its covers is this disabiled person being discriminated against due to thier disability or is there a barrier to access caused by their disability that can be removed by a reasonable adjustment. Its meant more as a shield as people were discriminating against the disabled or refusing simple adjustments.

@Kreepture
It depends how old you are as to whether you would have been given an ADHD or ADD diagnosis in the past as a child. Inattentive ADHD was first recognised in 1980 and as this is the more common form of ADHD in girls. it was significantly harder in the 90s to get an ADHD diagnosis than it is now because the condition was defined more narrowly.

I obviously can't comment on your case specifically but I don't think anyone thinks it's easier to get a diagnosis now as an adult than it would be for a child to get a diagnosis. It's more an argument about diagnosis creep that applies to both groups due to a widening of the criteria. The adult criteria may have widened more recently but over the previous decades the criteria widened significantly for children too.

No, I disagree because that's just not how it works at the moment. For example, RAs in a workplace can lead to one a disabled person requesting greater flexibility in their working patterns or to avoid specific activities. An organisation still needs to function so inevitably these adjustments will impact colleagues if implemented. All of a sudden they may find their flexibility decreases to facilitate the disabled person's flexibility. They may find they have to do more a duty they also find difficult because their colleague can't do their share. If you deny the RA request then you could be accused of being ableist but by accepting them you are adversely impacting the working conditions of other colleagues who may have very similar struggles to the disabled person but not have a diagnosis.

I know that's the purpose of the legislation but the consequences of the act is that it does effectively create a rather two tier, binary system. One where you are either disabled or not.

i'm 44, so likely ADD, i know it was thrown around by my drs at some point without any real interest because i was 'gifted' and not struggling academically.. instead i got to 17, had a massive meltdown/breakdown in the middle of my A levels and became one of the stereotypical 'gifted to burned out' girls of the late 90s that started to push some of these changes as they began to realise WHY so many of us were burning out post GCSE.

It hasn't got any easier to get girls diagnosed now tbh, for my son it was.. 3 years from my first 'something isn't right' to referral/diagnosis, and he's collected them like pokemon cards with relative ease (he is almost the poster child for the DSM-5 Criteria). my daughter its taken 11 years (with covid delay impacting too) just to get ASD diagnosed and we're still in the pipeline for ADHD because the waiting list is ridiculous, even though the team who did her ASD assessment have said its clearly AuDHD, they can't tick the official box for the ADHD side.

@Overthemhills I'm so sorry you have to put up with appalling attitudes like that. My DD spent a year working in a school for children and young people with profound disabilities and we were shocked by the number of people who expressed sentiments like this. It is inexcusable in this day and age. I am a great believer that the level of civilisation in a country can be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable members, and we are falling so far short - the sort of facilities offered by the school my daughter worked in (which were excellent and world-leading) are so few and far between.

I think the difficulty with it, is that yes there are a lot of people who have absolutely no sympathy, but there are also a lot of people who have SEN or disabled children who are unreasonable with their demands/expectations, and I think alot of Mumsnetters react to that (sometimes very unkindly).

I haven’t seen the threads you are referring to, but quite often the thing that sticks out to me, is that parents want their children to be treated equally and with understanding until it doesn’t work in their favour, and some parents expect their children to be treated preferentially because of the additional needs they may have.

Take school for example, if there was a SEN child who provoked another child, and the other child ended up hitting them, they would quite rightly want that other child punished. But if it was the other way round and their SEN child was the one who hit another kid, their child can’t get punished because they are SEN.

I know this isn’t the case for all parents so I’m not trying to generalise, but I do see it a lot on here and as soon as someone says something they don’t agree with they get called ableist when really it’s not the case.

This is a whole area of case law. But case law does allow for difficulty to implement and/or impact on colleagues to be grounds to say no. You could be accused of being ablist, but you could also evidence why it was unreasonable.

If you dont have a definition of disability, and the one in the act is very inclusive, you cant really protect people from discrimination on grounds of disability, or give them the right to a braille version of an important form, or thier guide dog, or a hearing induction loop. It has to have a definition and it will exclude people.

I think an equalities act that listed 'Finding things really hard' as a protected characteristic wouldnt work.

I think the bottom line of it is that all children deserve an education and to feel safe at school whether SEN or not, but most of the time the system fails the SEN children and they (and the parents) are slagged off to death on here. The thread I am talking about really was a hard read and I really felt for both children in the situation.

There’s just not enough resources for children with SEN and unfortunately the ones who can’t access special provision are stuck in mainstream schools where it isn’t right for them and that’s when these problems start to occur.

Take school for example, if there was a SEN child who provoked another child, and the other child ended up hitting them, they would quite rightly want that other child punished. But if it was the other way round and their SEN child was the one who hit another kid, their child can’t get punished because they are SEN.

I understand what you mean and have seen similar myself. But there needs to be nuance here: a DC with sensory issues may react to noise or anxiety or crowding by hitting out. It’s not (always) voluntary behaviour and will typically cease when the detrimental sensory impact is removed. OTOH some DC (who may be ND or NT - it’s not mutually exclusive) may hit others because they want to hurt them, or for shits and giggles. To my mind, those are two different things and need addressing/disciplining differently. FWIW my autistic DS has been in both camps, but mainly the first. He’s always been more distressed to find out that he has hit others, than he is when others have hit him.

The root of the entire problem is that a large number of ND children who cannot and will never cope in MS classes of 30 are expected to remain there, and muddle through, as are their teachers. It’s cheap for the LA, but a disaster for the rest of us and leads to an increase in ableist comments, and their normalization.

Yes, as I said above, ablism is most rife when there is a scarcity of resources, which leads to conflict about how the insufficient money / materials / support / accommodation/ healthcare / social care should be allocated - and the vitriol against those who seem to get ‘more’.

There was a lot of this from the SENCO at our adopted DD1’s (16) former high school. She regularly told us about the fact that she had the same hearing loss, i.e. they both wore hearing aids.

It sounded very much like ‘I managed, therefore so should she.’ Thus ignoring the fact that hearing loss isn’t DD1’s only disability, she has probable FASD and possibly also ADHD/autism (she’s waiting for a neurodevelopmental assessment). She’s also been diagnosed with epilepsy.

Thankfully, DD1 is now at a specialist college where she’s getting the support she needs.

100% agree. A child who is close to me is severely autistic was kept in a mainstream primary school up until year 2. Thankfully he moved to a specialist school and the difference was amazing.

Him being at the mainstream school was hard for him, his parents, his peers and the teachers but the only people who got the stick were him and his parents. His parents had their hands tied. They fought and fought for him yet nobody noticed that, they just labelled him as “nasty” “naughty etc” And that’s why it was upsetting to read the awful comments an OP received the other day. I just wish there were more understanding

I would argue that the Equality Act is doing exactly what you suggest and seeking to protect those that find things really hard. Disability covers a wide range of disparate conditions that have very little in common other than they substantially impair your life and they should be long term. Within this definition you then have a bunch of quite arbitrary thresholds for conditions as an attempt to give some false certainty and pretend that we aren't actually just attempting to protect people who find things really hard due to their conditions when this is exactly what we are trying to do.

The false certainty leads people then to believe disability is binary. You either are or aren't disabled. A disabled person must be in greater need of protection than a non disabled person. To dispute this is ableist.

We know this isn't right. We know that the world is grey and how disabled someone is in a situation is often as much to do with the environment they find themselves than severity of the condition they are suffering from.

So in short, I agree we need to define those most in need of help and this will through necessity be exclusionary. We need to be sensible though and limit how many people are included in this category. We then need to accept that there are a hell of a lot of people in the grey. Those that aren't way over thresholds or those that just sit under them. Through necessity we need to support these people in cost effective and practical ways.

I have been completely blind since birth. My workplace has to provide me with adaptive technology and equipment, without which I would be utterly unable to do my job, my reasonable adjustments are not 'nice to haves', they are essentials. Your argument that everyone should be treated exactly the same might sound reasonable enough on the surface but it completely ignores the fact that many disabled people just cannot function without accommodations. Should my sighted colleagues be given the same speech-reading software I use, for example? It wouldn't much use to them but it would stop people like you crying 'special treatment' I suppose.
What is particularly frustrating is that the same posters complaining about reasonable adjustments for disabled employees are usually the same people moaning about work-shy disabled scroungers, disabled people just can't seem to win either way.

they're also often people who've never needed RA for themselves.

There are loads of accessible things that businesses could do that would mean less RA would be needed.. like flexible hours, hybrid WFH models, allowing workers to listen to music, or wear caps in the office, regular breaks honoured for staff to get up and move about, quiet break rooms..etc, ground floor offices with no stairs, accessible bathrooms, different types of headsets, or radios.

Those are easy to do, and wouldn't impact much on everyone elses ability to do their job... which would leave the arguing and extra cost for the adjustments that people with disabilities like you would need that would not be of use to able bodied/less impaired folk.

Tbf, everybody and everyone in that situation suffers and gets stick.

Peers may be scared (disregulated children can be scary to be around) but may also be conflicted because the school values emphasise kindness and inclusivity. Their education is impacted through disruption and reduced adult attention. Their parents are concerned, but are not able to do anything directly.

Teachers will be frustrated, sometimes physically hurt, and get stick from all sides - from the parents of the autistic child who (rightly) want more support; from the parents of other children who (rightly) want their children to be safe; from senior leaders who (rightly) want full coverage of the curriculum and for all children to make progress; from the SENCo who (rightly) wants every provision on the EHCP to be implemented - and, in all too many schools, stick from SLT who may blame the teacher’s behaviour management for the child’s behaviour.

Parents and child also get stick, as you describe.

Those with actual power to change the situation- local authority, government, those funding and rationing special school places - often don’t get any blame at all.

i am of the thought that by the time a child has reached meltdown point in class, they have been failed multiple times already.

Unless you have a child that explodes with zero warnings, which is rarer, there will have been multiple points where it could have been seen as brewing headed off at the pass/diverted, and the child helped with distraction/regulation.

Yes, I agree (though I have also taught more than one ‘zero warning’ child).

The difficulty is scarce resource. With 30-32 children per class, increasingly with at least 3 children per class with the possibility of meltdown (and at least 4 others with SEN of other types) and a single adult to deliver the full curriculum and manage the needs of all children, missing the small cues is inevitable.

The needs of NONE of the children in the class are being properly met, purely due to insufficient resource. And nobody knows that better than the teacher, who will beat themselves up every day for every failure.

Telling the teacher what they already know - that the child who becomes disregulated is being failed - is just rubbing salt into the gaping wound. We know. If we had more resource, fewer children, more space, other adults, a less prescriptive curriculum, supportive LA, genuinely expert and realistic experts - we would do better. We know.

I don’t think anybody would grumble at a blind person being provided flexibility to do their job. Or a wheelchair user with little to no use of their legs etc.

But should we really be putting ADHD/ASD into that same category of disabled when their issues might be something such as “can’t cope with the smell of coffee in the office” or “needs 15minutes longer lunch to decompress”?

I think we will reach the stage where different categories need to be used and not everything should be classed as disabled. I have Asperger’s and a couple of chronic health problems that I am medicated for and will be for life. One may well kill me at some point. I find areas of life challenging and I am frequently unwell. But I wouldn’t class myself as disabled. Frankly I feel that would be a massive insult to people like yourself.
A non-verbal, extremely autistic child would be what I would consider disabled. My high-functioning level of Autism is nowhere near what that child has and as a result I wouldn’t consider it a disability. Sure, it has disabling elements that have affected me and my life, but is that not the same for everyone in some way?

Are we not getting to the point where everyone can then claim to be disabled? The person with the old leg injury who is on a lot of pain relief, the woman with migraines. Are these disabled people? If so, I don’t know anyone who isn’t disabled.

Disability as a term needs to be protected for the sake of those who need people to take it seriously. We are at risk of it losing its meaning because every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks they belong there.