Disability Is Natural Books and Media

If you wanted your child to acquire positive social skills, self-respect, and other beneficial traits, while making new friends, you might enroll her in school or community sports, church groups, or similar activities. This action on your part would send your child a strong message about your expectations for her and your belief in her abilities. In addition, you would probably do everything possible to keep your child away from others who are “troublemakers.” These efforts would also send a powerful message to your child—that you don’t want her to adopt “troublemaking” traits.

It seems we recognize the power of peer group influence in general society, but it also seems we fail to recognize this power in the lives of people with disabilities. The results of this failure are mixed messages and less-than-desirable outcomes for children and adults with disabilities.

For example, a preschooler with a disability is not yet talking. Under today’s Conventional Wisdom, this child is enrolled in a special ed preschool, where he’s surrounded by other children with speech disabilities. What will he learn from this peer group where not talking, unintelligible speech, and/or grunts and screeches are common? What about students who are put in “emotional disorder classrooms” or children with autism who are placed in “autism classrooms”? How confusing this must be to a child, when the message he receives is: “We don’t want you to head-bang, hand-bite, perseverate, or have other inappropriate behaviors, but we’re going to put you in a class where these are the norm.” ​Click here to continue.

Mixed Messages

Be careful whom you associate with. It is human to imitate the habits of those with whom we interact…One of the best

ways to elevate

your character is

to find worthy role models to emulate.

Epictetus​

 DISABILITY IS NATURAL!

New Ways of Thinking and Revolutionary Common Sense