When your kid is DXed as autistic, almost all of the professional advice you get from education and healthcare is steeped in deficit ideology. The unhealthiness, unhelpfulness, and disconnectedness of this worldview leads some to consult autistic adults. Then, you discover neurodiversity and the social model of disability. And then, maybe, intersectionality, design for real life, and equity literate education. And then you find yourself in the healthier framing of structural ideology that is better for your kid and better for the systems and institutions that you’re now trying to improve.
I used to tell my students that ideology never announces itself as ideology. It naturalizes itself like the air we breath. It doesn’t acknowledge that it is a way of looking at the word; it proceeds as if it is the only way of looking at the world. At its most effective, it renders itself unassailable: just the way things are. Not an opinion, not the result of centuries of implicit and explicit messaging, not a means of upholding a power structure. It just is.
Source: the shame is ours
In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.
When we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.
Source: The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
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Diagram for anyone whose child was just diagnosed as autistic or might be autistic. #ActuallyAutistic #AllAutistics
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Learn about sensory supports:
Headphones
Ear defenders
Earplugs
Sunglasses
Tinted glasses
Weighted blankets
Compression vests
Learn about autistic communication differences
Learn about autism from autistic adults. 1/1
https://autisticscienceperson.com/why-aba-therapy-is-harmful-to-autistic-people/
Originally tweeted by AutisticSciencePerson (They/Them) (@AutSciPerson) on June 17, 2021.
The deficit model prevented me from getting the supports I needed earlier in life that would have helped me with navigating the workplace before I even found a job. I was doing well in school, and then okay in college, so no one caught on that I didn’t actually know how to ask questions and that my executive function was just awful.
That describes my journey as well.
Related:
https://childmind.org/article/twice-exceptional-kids-both-gifted-and-challenged/