Special Needs Children: Telling All Their Stories

If you've been online for more than five minutes you've probably received one of these emails. It comes from a friend. It's often gaudy with overly bright backgrounds, huge text and animated smiley faces. Can you picture it yet? It probably bears the traces of the ten times it's been forwarded to someone's entire address book. Maybe it even instructs you to do the same.

One such message comes to my inbox every now and again. I don't read it anymore - perhaps because I'm so familiar with the story by now, perhaps I just got tired of reading through the tears that well up in my eyes.

It's a story they say was told by the father of a disabled child who asked some boys at the ballpark if his son could join their game. Yes, you're nodding your heads now, because you've read it too. Maybe you even forwarded it to someone you thought it would touch.

The thing is, I wonder if that story hasn't been turned into a cliche now, because we just keep sending it around in circles and people have now begun to forward it mindlessly because they can't bring themselves to read it one more time - but they don't like to think what people will think of them if they don't pass it on, if they don't keep it alive.

Who knows if that little boy is alive anymore, or if he's all grown up. Or if he ever really existed. Maybe he was just the invention of a really talented writer. It doesn't matter though, because the whole world seems obsessed with passing this story on lest some one among us be the weak link that allows the chain of his continued existence in our consciousness to break.

If he ever really existed, outside of a poignant story.

I read another poignant story today. It wasn't all pumped full of testosterone and adrenaline, and there was no miraculous moment in which a kid who shouldn't be able to, did the thing no one expected of him. It was just a story about a boy who likes to play with cars and trucks, to roll around on the ground and get dirty, and to eat chocolate ice cream.

What made the tears well up in my eyes this time wasn't an extraordinary moment when an exceptional kid was given a chance, and did an extraordinary thing. It was the fact that a very ordinary Mom of an exceptional child was telling a very ordinary story - the story of how her kid just is, and wants to be like every other kid.

He drools, she said, and he doesn't walk like the other kids. Maybe he can't talk quite like the other kids, but he wants to play with them. And he likes chocolate ice cream.

Don't shush your child if he points or asks why my boy is like this, she said. you can explain it to him the best way you know, because he'll understand better if it comes from his Mom. But I'll step in to help if you need me.

Like Ellen, I sometimes find myself wondering how you would treat my special needs son if you came upon him playing in the park. I know lots of the kids at school are fond of him, in fact there have been times when his classmates actually fought over who would be allowed to sit by him and help him in school. I know a lot of these kids' parents know him too, and call him by name when we meet on the street. They notice how tall my boy is growing.

I know that he would be treated kindly by these people, were we to meet on the playground. But those children are growing up now, and I wonder how much longer it will please them to feel special because they have done something for him.

I wonder what will happen when his classmates stop coming to the playground, when they trade the swings and seesaws for more grown-up amusements, and he can no longer follow along behind them. When he is the biggest child on the playground, and the younger kids don't know him. Or know what to think of him. I wonder if everyone will still think he's cute when his voice changes. When he is twenty, then thirty, and still in his mind he remains a child.

How will you treat my child if you meet him on the playground then?

He'll still be my baby then, you know. As much as he was on the day I gave birth to him and discovered that the only place he could sleep was in my arms. As much as the years when the only sounds he made were humming and unrecognizable jargoning. And the long-awaited time when he first said, "I love you, Mama."

Will he live in a society that realizes we are all someone's little boy or girl, no matter what we seem to be on the outside? Or will you turn away from him, will he make you uncomfortable, will you think he's a freak?

Please, if you have been touched by the beautiful story of the little boy who won the baseball game everyone had given up as lost, would you try to think about that little boy all grown up?

And please, if you have a special little boy or girl in your life, would you share that child's story? Not just that one iconic moment, you know, but the whole thing. Good moments and bad. Give the story depth, so it doesn't rely on a hundred people pressing that forward button every so often in order to stay alive.

We're none of us made from posterboard. All of us, no matter our abilities or our disabilities, we all have more than the two dimensions of a pink and purple email with animated bees and ladybugs flying around the same flower over and over again.

So let's not just tell one story, but many. Because it's not just that one little boy whose father's speech has been immortalized that we need to think of. We need to think of my boy, and my friend's boy, and the little boys who live down the street, and the daughter of the lady with that cool scrapbooking web site, and the grandchild of the woman who reads to the children in the library. Each one of these beautiful children is someone's baby, with at least a dozen different stories to be told by friends, family, teachers and even casual passersby.

If telling all their stories makes them somehow less exceptional, then my plea to you will have accomplished its goal. For although there really are times when we need to remember what makes these children exceptional, if only because we must adapt the world so they can live in it, what's important about them isn't the exceptional part.

It's the part that likes shiny red firetrucks, swinging in the park, rolling in the dirt. And eating chocolate ice cream.

More offerings from this author:
"ADHD: Overdiagnosed & Unnecessarily Treated or Undetected?"
"Understanding your child's IEP"
"Parental Involvement in Educating Children"
"Reading at home for school success"
"H1N1 vaccine costly for Montreal school children"

Source:

How you should treat my child with special needs Ellen (PhD in Parenting, 10 September 2009)