I’ve been thinking lately about the Just People. And the Should People. And especially the Should Just People.
You know them. You may have even been them. I sure was!
“Why don’t you JUST make him do it?”
“You SHOULD go GFCF because it helps all kids with autism.”
“You SHOULD JUST ignore him when he does things like that because he’s only pretending that it bothers him.”
There are the My Child People, the In My Day People, and the All Kids People.
“MY CHILD would never be allowed to act like that.”
“Well, IN MY DAY, parents actually parented instead of this “make sure his needs are met” stuff they do now.”
and my favorite:
“ALL KIDS are (insert some small issue compared to all the other issues) at this age so why do you think it’s any different for you?”
Well, I’ll tell you what…
If you JUST listened to parents or to people with autism, you might understand better. You SHOULD do some research on your own and not believe everything Jenny McCarthy says. You SHOULD JUST ignore people who go on TV and make blanket statements about people with autism. MY CHILD is acting in a way that makes sense to him at this point. IN MY DAY, we parent by making sure his needs are met. ALL KIDS are special in their own ways, no matter what you think.
Maybe if we all remembered all of that, we would in fact realize that people with autism? Are Just People too.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- What Blogging for a Year Has Taught Us
- …because you never know what their story is.
- Autism, Meltdowns, and Sherlock Holmes
- Learning How Not to Say “I’m Sorry.”
- One of the Best and Quickest Ways I Know to Improve Your Perspective
- What My Hero Taught Me About Parenting an Autistic Child
- And Now We Will Hold You To It
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Thank you for this post.
Mary,
This blog entry SPEAKS to me today.
THANK YOU for writing it!
I am sharing it with many I know who have children with special needs.
MELISSA
Blake and Melissa,
you know what’s funny? I was reading other autism blogs after I wrote this, and SEVERAL had something along the same lines. There must have been something in the air!
Great post. I agree and wanted to click on a link to share this on twitter and facebook, but dont see that option. I dont know how to get that on a blog myself. Are you on twitter?
Bonnie – quick reply. I had disabled the sharing feature a while back because the service I was using was making it infinitely too complicated (at least for me).
But now, you should see a “Share this post!” link (next to a little green button with a sideways ‘V’ in it) near the end of the post, after the list of related posts and before the comments start. Click it and it gives you numerous options for how to share the post with various services.
Caveat – I haven’t tested this as I just turned it on. Let me know if it fails and I’ll look into it more.
Bonnie sent me over here, so I could giggle knowingly about the JUST people, and snort coffee up my nose about the adulterated Wocket/Butt illustration. Yaaar, says I! Nice work. Keep on it. And thank you.
Bonnie – forgot to answer this part. We’re (more like me, really) on Twitter, but the automated feed from Twitter to our site kept dying and I’ve temporarily given up on it. I have a better idea for what I want to do with Twitter. Hopefully I’ll get around to doing that sooner than later.
Bonnie sent me along, too. Guess the share button worked b/c I saw this on her FB page!
This is awesome. I think I need to send this to my MIL!