What's Wrong With This Picture?
My autistic son doesn't need to be fixed.
by Kerry Cohen
March 31, 2008
At the end of the day, I don't blame these people. I really don't. They're under the same spell as everyone else when it comes to children's atypical development. Studies suggest it can help to get early intervention. They also suggest the brain is plastic enough to continue to change and adapt as we grow, but our society has latched on to this other idea that we have to do something, and we have to do it fast. Organizations push for earlier and earlier detection. Pediatricians have been given new guidelines for screening children as young as twelve months for developmental delays. The suggestion is clear: A child with delays is unacceptable. Just like how Ezra gets uncomfortable and anxious when he has to face a situation he doesn't intrinsically understand, other people get nervous when a person doesn't fit their expectations.
For a long time, I struggled with the pain I felt at being told my son wasn't good enough. It is hard to describe how painful it is to read the evaluation reports: your son — your beautiful, chubby, funny little boy, the one with the Horshack laugh, the one who uses stuffed animals to act out scenes from his favorite video — is not doing x, y and z. He is doing w, but only about as well as ten percent of the other kids his age. He is in the bottom percentile for this, and doesn't even get on the charts for that.
For a long time, I struggled with the pain I felt at being told my son wasn't good enough.
He doesn't do v when we ask him to, which must mean he can't do v at all. He is no good. He is no good at all. When I picked him up from our first stab at a regular preschool, one where special needs kids were supposed to be welcome, I always had to brace myself for their day's account. He didn't listen. He cried and cried and they didn't know why. He wouldn't sit with the other children during story time. I appreciated why so many other parents rushed their children into treatment. Why they were so desperate to make the children "normal," more like other kids.
©2008 Kerry Cohen and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Kerry Cohen is the author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (coming in June) and the author of the young adult novel Easy. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. |
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