Meg Evans megevans.com I met you last weekend when I was leaving a crowded shopping center. Your son, who might have been about ten years old, suddenly did a cartwheel in front of me while I was walking to my car. You took hold of your son’s hand and then glanced toward me and apologized by saying, “He’s retarded, sorry.” I didn’t say anything to you before you went on your way. No doubt your attention was focused on keeping your son safe, and rightly so. You wouldn’t have wanted a nosy stranger to lecture you on how your son might feel about your choice of words. Indeed, you probably believed that your apology was the best way to protect your son’s feelings, by letting me know that there was a reason for his behavior. I’m sure there must have been many times when ignorant, judgmental people yelled at your…
Tag: R-word
Sunday Stillwell Adventures in Extreme Parenthood This week hundreds of thousands will stand up and ask our family, friends, and coworkers to Spread The Word To End The Word. This means I am asking you to stop using the words “retard” and “retarded” because when you do, even if you’re joking, even if you don’t mean it as a slur, even if you’re talking about yourself what you are doing is disrespecting people with intellectual disabilities… people like my sons, Sam and Noah. Would you call my sons retards? Would you say that the ways they stim or perseverate on things is retarded? Of course you wouldn’t, but I have heard it said to them by kids on the playground who think the way Sam jumps up and down and flaps his hands looks strange, or because Noah likes to make loud screeching noises and run in circles. So I…
Emily Willingham biologyfiles.fieldofscience.com daisymayfattypants.blogspot.com For background on this post, see the coverage and update at LoveThatMax.com. -The Editors When I was young, I lived a somewhat sheltered life. My parents never used racial or ethnic slurs around me or not around me, and even though I grew up in a small-ish, very southern town, the only slur I ever learned before middle school was the N-word, which I am myself to blame for having learned. At age five, rapt with the poetry of rhyme, I was working my way through the alphabet, rhyming with the word “Tigger.” When I reached N, my parents became rather dramatic and, let us say, instilled in me a permanent repulsion for the word. I was in Texas, so naturally, I did manage to hear that term again here and there. But it wasn’t until high school that I came across other slurs, mostly having…
Brian R. King, LCSW spectrummentor.com Recent headlines about the epidemic of bullying, unfortunately, point to school systems overall that appear either indifferent to bullying, referring to it in some cases as “a right of passage that children must endure as a means of building character” (one school administrator actually said this in an IEP meeting I attended), or they minimize it as a misunderstanding. Others exercise willful ignorance under the guise that “We didn’t see it”– as though the bully is supposed to say, “Teacher, looky here! I’m going to treat Johnny like crap now.” Give me a break! If a child bullies another student out of the view of a teacher, it’s still bullying and not an opportunity to evade responsibility because the bully is savvy enough to know when you aren’t looking. Let me be clear, bullying is not a simple problem of the playground tough guy establishing…