“Oscar gets more unsolicited comments about how cute he is, more uninvited pinches on the cheek and ruffles of the hair and demands for affection from strangers, than anyone else I know. I made a point, from when he was very young, of teaching him to express his discomfort: he says ‘I want some space’; he says ‘I feel shy’; he says ‘I don’t want you to touch me’; he says ‘I don’t like that, please stop.’ These statements from him are almost always laughed at, and then ignored, until I step in on his behalf.”
Kids no matter how small are fully conscious people who can have a strong sense of being patronized and disrespected. I remember being barely two and furious at how adults would talk about me like I couldn’t understand or wasn’t listening, then talk to me like they might talk to an animal.
This is especially important to remember for disabled kids, as they may have greater difficulty expressing that they are uncomfortable in a given situation.
If any one even stood next to my eldest child and he didnt want them to he would tell me ,tell them or make an ungodly screech at them .He has autism and will let you know one way or another if you have disspleased him.if you talk about him or his brother he will ask you to stop or tell you to go to another room. He hates being talked at or talked down to he has always been like this even when he was non-verbal he would sign that he didnt like some thing or some one thrn scream at them .
More parents (and other adults) really need to take that kind of clear communication of discomfort seriously, and not decide it’s just a “behavior” in the infuriating sense.
I would tell people to leave me alone or put me down NOW (or cry and yell before I could), and my parents just said “fair enough, the kid doesn’t like it”. Shame more don’t respond that way
I wonder if one of the causes of animosity towards “entitled millennials” is that many millennials are poor people who look rich. There’s this growing class of people who wear nice clothes, have fancy new electronic gadgets, go out to eat nice food… and will never own a home or have a retirement fund or put a child through college.
It’s so easy to say “if you cut down on the avocado toast maybe you could save up”, and so hard to accept that a house these days is fifty thousand avocado toasts, and that’s why so many of us have just given up. We don’t treat ourselves because we think the world will take care of us when we get older; we treat ourselves because we know it won’t. Might as well feel and look good on the way down.
This is something I think about a lot.
American poverty is not like other kinds of poverty. We can have small luxuries and “frivolous” things but we can’t have the big, major things that we need the most. We can have fifty flavors of creamer for our coffee but not be able to pay our rent. I suspect in a lot of ways that’s uniquely Western, too?
But we’re all stuck on this outdated, almost Victorian idea of poor people, so people get all outraged when poor people have cell phones and fridges.
I actually like things like the Food Stamps challenge because, as important as numbers are in research, they’re still abstract to most people. Most people really do not understand the difference between two hundred and seven hundred dollars, or two hundred and two thousand, until they see for themselves. It’s important to give people concrete examples.
I wonder if there’s an info graph out there that demonstrates this thing?
“This amount of money can buy [presumably ‘luxury’ item]
This is one of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken. I think it captures the “personality” of Mountain Laurel very well. Like many other cliff loving trees, this one was growing over the edge of the cliff. Not a care in the world. Twisted by wind and time. Forever in love with these cliffy evergreens. ❤
We are acutely aware that many researchers work under different, more modular and brain-body dualistic paradigms that treat the brain as a bodiless organ and describe the emergent mental states in complete disconnect with physical states of the nervous systems. As a matter of fact one can see the classifications used in the DSM-5 as to a large extent simply assuming what the philosopher Susan Hurley has labeled the “Classical Sandwich of Cognition,” i.e., the idea that there are neat divisions between sensory and motor systems and that the central cognitive processes rely on a relatively modular neurological machinery that is independent of sensorimotor processes but also peripheral and autonomic systems more broadly. (Hurley 2001)
This is possibly the sickest burn I have ever read in an academic paper (which “Why Study Movement Variability in Autism?” by Maria Brincker and Elizabeth B. Torres)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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