If parents can try to figure out why autistic children have the urges to break things, and then accommodate them as much as they can, everyone can have a much easier time. Not always, but in many cases.
Tag: violence
Source: Focus Features [image: Poster for the movie Harriet. A glowing orange-brown background features three Black people, one man and two women, in 19th century clothing. The woman in the center is wearing a wide-brimmed hat and has an unapologetic expression. Below them is a smaller photo of the center woman, in profile holding up at pistol. All-caps white text below her reads, “Harriet”] Maxfield Sparrow unstrangemind.com The movie Harriet (2019) is 125 minutes (two hours and five minutes) long. www.focusfeatures.com/harriet —- The first thing I noticed about the film Harriet was that the showing was sold out. I was eager to see the film and was simultaneously irritated and grateful that I couldn’t get a ticket. Irritated, because it meant buying a ticket for a later showing and finding a way to kill time for a couple of hours. Grateful because Harriet’s story is one everyone should know. Harriet…
One of the families featured in A Dangerous Son (Source: HBO) [image: A white family of four, with two young kids, on a couch together.] Kit Mead kpagination.wordpress.com Content note: Discusses violence and abuse regarding children with mental illness and disability, and the Newtown shootings. I’m not going to watch “A Dangerous Son,” the HBO documentary that tells “a story about families with children who have psychiatric disorders that lead to violent behavior.” I’m going to avoid it mostly because I have already read all of those stories. Again. And again. And again. And I have found them incredibly disturbing each time—on behalf of the children who are being written off and exploited. Especially because, as Mel Baggs points out: Across violent and abusive sets of environments, we—the kids—are the only ones seen as having a violence problem. And those environments are so very often the context for “violent outbursts.” Like…
Shannon Des Roches Rosa Senior Editor Behaviorist Charles Kinsey trying to comply with police while protecting and reassuring his autistic charge Arnaldo Rios photo via The Advocate [image: Black man lying on his back with his hands in the air, in the middle of the street, next to a seated Latino man.] Here is what we are hearing right now, in the wake of Black autistic caregiver Charles Kinsey being shot by a North Miami police officer while trying to protect and support Arnaldo Rios, a Latino autistic man who had wandered from the group home where Kinsey worked: Black people are not safe. Latino people are not safe. People of color are not safe. Autistic people are not safe. People with Disabilities are not safe. And heaven help you if you fall into more than one of those categories, or are also LGBTQ+ or otherwise a member of a…
Vigil for George Hodgins, Sunnyvale, CA Photo © Steve Silberman The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, Not Dead Yet, and the National Council on Independent Living have set aside this Friday, March 1, to remember the lives of people with disabilities who lost those lives at the hands of their family members or caregivers. We understand that this is difficult statement to comprehend and that many people’s first reaction may be to assume that such events are extremely rare. Unfortunately, such domestic violence is not unusual at all, even its most extreme form, the killing of a disabled people at the hands of their caregivers. In its latest statistics from 1999, the FBI reported that children under the age of five in the United States are more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else; parents were responsible for 57 percent of these murders. But while the murder of…
Today, December 14, 2012, I got a text about four minutes before I walked into my son’s school to play the piano for a winter program. The text said that 18 (then up to 20) children had been killed at an elementary school, not unlike my son’s. Children the age of the children I would be making music with in a few minutes. I was in shock. The texts I was receiving came from my dear brother, who has small children of his own. Since I was not online or near any media sources, he wrote to me what I was seeing on breaking news, and we texted together, as parents, about how horrible, how unthinkable, this heinous act was. His children were with him; mine was in school, and I had to resist an overwhelming impulse to sign him out and leave. Then I had to go into the…