Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.Squidalicious.com “Stress is involved in almost every incident of serious child abuse, but it should not be seen as a mitigating factor more than any other source of stress should be seen as a mitigating factor. By and large, parents of people with disabilities are able to take care of their children without trying to kill them.” –Samantha Crane Whenever a news story breaks about a parent killing (or trying to murder) a disabled child, reactions to the story are almost as disturbing as the story itself — because media and blog accounts tend to empathize with the parents, not the child victims. In fact the children in these cases are almost universally depicted as trigger for their parents’ acts, rather than human beings with feelings, friends, interests, and rights. We need to change those conversations. Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa [image: white teen boy…
Month: October 2015
Shannon Des Roches Rosa www.squidalicious.com Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes is a large, densely packed book about autism’s past, present, and future. I found myself overwhelmed by the amount of information contained in each individual paragraph, in considering how much research and synthesis it took to create those paragraphs — and in knowing that NeuroTribes’s information matters so much, while acknowledging my kind of brain can’t possibly retain it all. It doesn’t surprise me, then, when other people have trouble remembering every important point in NeuroTribes, because the book is an 500-page information tsunami. Due to those info overload risks, however, some of NeuroTribes’s themes need to be repeated more than once or twice for people to get them right. One theme that needs more emphasis is NeuroTribes’ clarification about neurodiversity: The term is not limited to autistic people who communicate independently, or indeed only to autistic people. Neurodiversity is the full…