Let’s not go overboard, here. Not every parent of a disabled child is a stoic paragon of patience, the guiding light to which we should all strive. Sometimes shit gets to people and everybody deals with that differently. That could have been the thousandth time that woman had to deal with a situation like that that week, and it all just got to her, and it bubbled up into tears.
I once got on the wrong side of one of those parents. The issue was not that the girl was screeching. It’s that the mother was strongly encouraging her to screech as loudly as possible.
The scene was a ball pit in one of those multi-sport recreation places. My son was attending a birthday party and some of the kids were in the ball pit. Some other kids were also in the ball pit too, including loud girl. I was outside watching through the netting along with various other parents. As the girl started playing and having fun, she started making a loud, shrill, screeching noise. Okay, no problem with that. It was apparent that she was not neurotypical and so what if she was a little loud? It was a noisy place anyway.
But then the mother went up to the netting, got the girl’s attention and screeched back at her in an even louder voice. So the girl screeched back, more loudly. And the mother looked excited and thrilled and screeched even louder. And the girl screeched even louder back. And so on. By the time the mom had wound her up, she was emitting an unearthly shriek the likes of which I had never heard before. The other kids were covering their ears and leaving the ball pit and I couldn’t take it any more.
I don’t remember exactly what I said to the mother, but I made sure to address what she was doing (winding the girl up) rather than what the girl was doing. The result was the mother screaming at me that her daughter had a DISABILITY! and couldn’t SPEAK! and this was how she COMMUNICATES!!! and did I think that people should just keep their children at home if they weren’t PERFECT! and people like me were the PROBLEM!!! and on and on. I tried to politely re-explain, but there was no stopping this lady. I ended up just walking away while she was yelling at me.
I’m sure she crucified me on a message board somewhere.
nm
I’m sure everyone’s already seen this story, but I’ll post a link here anyway for the benefit of those who haven’t.
I was censured on another board for saying, “The world does not revolve around you because you have an autistic child. That is all.” And the behaviors this girl has sound perfectly normal to me, for a 3-year-old. There’s a big difference between a girl like the one in the story, and one who genuinely cannot go out in public, and yes, such people do exist. 
BTW, when I worked with the public, disabled people of all types rarely caused problems. The problems were from other people, usually other adults, who had an issue with “those people” being out in public.
I once waited on a couple who had a severely disabled daughter who was about 12 years old, and she was in a wheelchair with her head strapped in place. The girl sat there quietly, and her parents fed her off their own plates when the food arrived and she wasn’t disturbing anybody, but an elderly couple at the next table kept saying things like, “That’s sickening. That’s disgraceful. People like that used to be put away.” :mad: I wanted to say to them, “She isn’t bothering you. If you don’t want to look at her, YOU leave” but I couldn’t.
??? LOL LOL!!
Yeah, that’s a GREAT idea. Let me know how that goes over.
Be prepared for some more “insight”. :eek:
Gosh, I hope you didn’t think I was saying that loud girl shouldn’t have been out in public! It’s her mother that shouldn’t have been out in public.
If the only was the girl can communicate is by wordless shrieks that’s unfortunate for her… but her mother is capable of speech and should use it.
It probably isn’t this one incident, it is incident on top of incident on top of incident until one just pushes you over the edge into tears or anger.
My son is three and non-verbal, he is silent so he doesn’t annoy anyone with noise but there are still endless incidents where his odd behavior that isn’t hurting anyone just bugs the shit out of people to where they just must comment. I don’t like telling people anything so I just deflect their comments, which just makes them angrier and it is like a vicious cycle. Stuff like laying down in a fat food booth, or playing with a toy car on our table.
One goddamn woman was so insistent on talking to him on a bus that when I finally broke down and told her he doesn’t talk, she then spent the remaining time haranguing me with how I needed to pray to jesus for my son.:smack: Lady I just want to fucking get to my destination, leave us alone!
It is fairly annoying but I deal with things 10 times as annoying on a *constant *basis at work. The shoes wouldn’t even register. I would take 100 toddlers in squeaky shoes before one Middle Eastern man of any age or old man of any ethnicity shouting into his cell phone for an hour.
That sounds like pretty normal three-year-old stuff to me, so I’m confused about why people would say anything negative. I can see people making conversation with him about what’s going on–people tend to like talking to little kids, and the toy the kid’s playing with is a typical topic. Assuming, of course, that the fast food booth he’s lying down in is your booth and he’s driving his car on the table rather than through people’s food. If he was lying down in my booth, I would indeed say something.
The trouble with annoying behavior is that it annoys people.
That does not reflect the cause of the behavior, and it is not at odds with compassion. But at the same time, it is not mitigated by the cause of the behavior. Certain causes may affect how the annoying behavior is addressed, but it does not make it not annoying.
My 6 years younger sister was very difficult to take out in public when we were growing up. At any given moment she was liable to jump on a table and start screaming, throw things, or lay down in an aisle and bang her head. Maybe kick people, maybe not. We never knew what she was going to do, but we knew that 15 minutes anywhere was likely our limit. I can’t recall ever sitting through a meal with my entire family until I was well into adulthood. It would never have occurred to any of us to insist that she be allowed to carry on like this because she’s disabled.
That was 30 years ago, and times have changed. Now people act like you want their child banned for quietly drooling or being unattractive. Night before last I witnessed a child climbing over the booth back and putting things on another persons table, touching the mans hair, jabbering in his ear, etc. He took it for a bit, then asked the parents to please intervene. TWICE. I became concerned that it was going to escalate, as both men were turning red. I some to our waitress and she said ‘oh, I’m sure they can work it out on their own’. We left before the drama ended.
I don’t know if this kid has a disability. I don’t need to know. Because disabled or not, his rights end where that guy’s start.
Be glad you don’t have a non verbal child, jus’ sayin’…
I don’t expect the generic you to understand. I sure as hell didn’t 10 years ago. As a special needs parent, generally speaking we try the best we can to cope and impact you as minimally as possible while still trying to have some kind of a semblance of a “normal” life for our family and child.
FYI, Communication is good and can help a non verbal child figure out speech. That was something we were encouraged to do with our daughter, who had about 20 words of speech at age 5.5. She’s better now but I wouldn’t call her conversational. Interactive “screaming” is a form of communication. And I get that may not make sense to the generic you and certainly in public you don’t have context for it.
The last special needs music class before Christmas had one of my daughters classmates “wave Merry Christmas to your friend” because he was completely non verbal. It’s heartbreaking.
Oh gimme a break. I’m not a moron. I understood why the mother was encouraging the daughter to scream louder and louder. That doesn’t change the fact that it was an inappropriate activity for that venue.
Funny how a child’s disability so often results in a related disability in the parent: Insufferable condescension towards others.
Can I offer an anecdote? It isn’t screaming but I get so few chances to interact or share joy with my non-verbal son that if one comes up I’ll take it and not give a rats ass how odd or strange I look if it comes up in public. 
And keep in mind this didn’t happen in a French restaurant but a PLAYGROUND, intended for use by young children. There are plenty of non-special needs children screaming their lungs out there too I bet.
Yeah, I like China Guy and I am sympathetic towards anyone caring for a special-needs kid. But the “you just don’t understand!” stuff is exactly what makes dealing with this topic so hard.
Fortunately, because I don’t have children perhaps, I am rarely in situations where I’m inconvenienced by disabled children. However, I do have a thing about ambient noise in public. Squealing children and squeaky shoes would be the kinds of sounds that would make me rush out of a room with my hands over my ears. Other sounds are fine, but I’m super sensitive to high pitches.
My annoyance can’t be helped. I can help how I respond to it. But being bothered is a reaction stemming from processes beyond my control, so I refuse to feel guilt over it.
The one reason I think people get het up over disabled children “getting away” with excursions of social etiquette is because they are afraid it will result in the deterioration of said etiquette across the board. If it’s impolite to cut one’s eyes at a kid who is shrieking hysterically in the ball pit because the kid may be disabled, then doesn’t this give all kids license to shriek and holler? I know that for myself, if I’m ever in an eating establishment and a little kid with squeaky shoes comes in, I’m not going to bother complaining about it, for fear that I’ll cause a shitstorm if I do. Even if that sound is driving me nuts. Even if it seems like the kid is “typical”. I’ll just pick up my food and exit.
No and no.
It was not a playground. It was an enclosed indoor space. I could have made that more clear, but you assumed facts not in evidence.
The other children were not screaming at the top of their lungs. They weren’t screaming at all. Just whooping it up a bit.
Please re-read what I said. I said that her regular louder-than-the-others screeching was NOT a problem. The issue occurred when her mother encouraged her to scream as loudly as she could. I also said that some the other kids left the area because of it.
It didn’t just “look odd or strange.” Did you not read the OP either? The OP said
You’re doing exactly that.
Some parents are just assholes and if they didn’t have kids with disabilities, they’d find some other thing to be assholes about. I know you’re not an asshole and I know you wouldn’t have done what this mother did in that situation. but you are knee-jerking in the way the OP describes.
Reminds me of something a family friend said once of a woman he knew. “Everyone gives her a pass because she’s in a wheelchair, but you know what? She’s a bitch. She just happens to be a bitch in a wheelchair.”
I like China Guy too, and I remember well when his twins were born and when Serena’s problems were coming to light. It kind of hurt my feelings to get lumped in the “people who don’t understand” category by him, but he probably has no idea that people remember stuff like that and genuinely care about it too. Then again, I just called him insufferably condescending, even though I haven’t seen that anywhere else. Sorry about that, China Guy, and please give Serena and Audrey hugs from some lady in NJ they don’t know.
Actually, it bugs me because I feel these parents are doing their children a huge disservice. By refusing to teach their children how to function to the best of their abilities in polite society, they are damaging their children’s chances at future success. These kids won’t be kids forever. I don’t mean the squeaky shoes people, here, obviously. I mean the parents who are teaching their daughters that it is okay to scream as loudly as possible in close quarters or their sons that it is okay to just sit on people’s laps without permission, or worse, directly encouraging these behaviors.
The lap-sitting is actually a real-life counter-example. A family friend’s son is severely autistic, and is generally quiet and keeps to himself. At one family gathering, though, he just went and sat on someone’s lap. It was a person that he did not know well. He was 15 at the time, but fortunately kinda skinny because she was not a younger lady. She was not at all upset about it–she laughed and gave him a little hug. The parents gently asked him to get up and took him aside and explained that it was not okay to do that. What they did not do is expect that people will just tolerate this inappropriate behavior. This becomes more and more important as these kids grow up. A 200 lb adult male who sits on female senior citizens is not a person anybody wants around. The incident did lead to some amusing speculation on why on earth he did that, given that he normally doesn’t want to get near anybody but his immediate family. The woman he sat on actually felt a bit honored. The parents aren’t perfect, but they’re doing the best they can for him. They know he’s never going to give anybody a warm hello, but they’ve taught him to at least nod in acknowledgement if someone greets him.