Last Monday when meeting my new support worker, Arda talked about the two different “faces” to my behavior. She said that, sometimes, I behave like an adult – which I am -, yet sometimes I behave like a little child. She continued to instruct the new support worker on how to respond when I behaved like a little child. What she really meant was that he wouldn’t need to accept to be insulted by me so he would have to set clear limits on that. However, that was not what she said. No, she said that if I act like a little child, I should be treated like I’m one. This, besides not taking me seriously one bit, poses another problem: it means that you compare a 21-year-old woman with disabilities to someone of another age who doesn’t have disabilities, which is essentially comparing apples and oranges.
It seems that, for the sake of conceptualizing life with developmental disabilities for people who don’t have these disabilities, they need to assign an age group to that person’s skills or behavior, that is the age at which non-disabled children acquire this particular skill or display this behavior. People then get to generalize into such things as “mental age”. The problem is, an adult isn’t like a little child, even if that adult has a developmental disability. Adults with developmental disabilities, in many respects, display behaviors that are normal for adults. Most adults with mental retardation, at some point, become interested in sexuality, for example. This is exactly why support workers often struggle with how to handle this. If those adults had been like children, they wouldn’t have been interested in sex. The thing is, they’re adults and, like most adults, they develop sexual feelings.
Then, okay, we decide that adults with developmental disabilities have a sex drive cause their physical development is normal. So they only have the skills and intellectual understading of a child. Not true, either: many developmentally disabled adults have a disharmonious profile of abilities and difficulties. Some can read and write, but not do simple calculus. Others have some skills only in certain contexts, so that they may be able to do very difficult calculation but not pay for their own things, for example. So, what age do we assign to them? It’s not for no reason that IQ results have no age equivalent anymore.
When behavior is concerned, the situation becomes even more complex. I challenge people who say that I behave like a little child by asking them whether they’ve ever seen a little child act like I do. Many say they have, but have they really? No little child will say the things I say when I insult someone. No little child misinterprets what others say like I do. When a little child gets physically aggressive, this is considered a problem no matter the child’s age. Frankly, the only thing that makes my behavior “childlike”, is that it’s not normal for an adult. But that is not the same.
I don’t quite exactly care whether support workers treat me the same as they would a little child, because I don’t care how they treat a little child. However, I do care how they treat me. While this treatment may differ depending on my behavior, this is not the same as simply comparing me to a child of whatever age and treating me like that. I’m not comparable to a little child, simply cause I ain’t a little child: I’m a 21-year-old woman who happens to have disabilities.
I’m not comparable to a little child, simply cause I ain’t a little child: I’m a 21-year-old woman who happens to have disabilities.
Amen
I can really relate to this. Though I don’t have a developemental disability, I don’t always behave like a ‘normal’ 22 year old person would/should. Because of this my parents seem to still see me as simply a child, rather than, like you said, an adult with disabilities. And whatever I seem to do that doesn’t fit with their image of an adult, they call it childish.
Astrid, I know this is an older post but I’ve been way behind on my reading. This really resonated with me, as the comparison of PWD to children has been coming up a lot in my life. (I also don’t like how the comparison implies that people with disabilities cannot also be children.)
Like Anna, I realize I’m posting on an older post, but it was on FWD’s recomended reading for the day and I hadn’t started following you in 07, so I decided to comment now.
The whole identifying disabilities by age-level has always seemed strange to me because I am what my district used to call “doubly speical.” When I look at my old IEPs, I see that they labled everything by age delvopment. I realize that this is slightly more appropiate for someone under 19, but it still came across as strange. In my case some of my “ages” were years older than my chronological age and others were years younger. For example, I started kindergarden with the vocbulary “of an elven year old,” and the articulation skills “of a two and a half year old.” Although I have reached a point where I seldom hear these labels in refernce to myself, the memory of such labels have lead me to be specious of similar labels applied to other. It seems to me that we would be better off if we learned to refer to adults with delays, not as children, but as adults with certain skill areas which deviate from normal.
this is an awesome post, thank you