Month: November 2017

neurodiversitysci:

jumpingjacktrash:

chitarra10:

So this was on the local news tonight.  A mother in a city about 20 minutes south of me has a 10y/o autistic son, and she said that because he’s autistic, she’s afraid he’s going to get hit by a car on the street because he “can’t think” and might just run out into the street without looking.  So she called some city officials and requested that they put up this sign in front of her home to warn drivers that there’s an autistic child in the area.  Within 3 days, they put this sign up just for her.

As an autistic person myself, this is just rubbing me an enormously wrong way.  I don’t like this.  At all.  In fact, I kinda hate it.  It just strikes me as one of those sympathy-addicted Autism Mom™ things that doesn’t take into account the humanity of their autistic kid.  Like she needs to announce to the world that she has no idea how to communicate with her own child, and rather than learning what kind of communication methods he needs as an autistic person, she just assumes that he’s just this unreachable burden she’s forced to bear, and is calling on the community to “help” her deal with this creature she can’t “control.”  And that lowers this poor boy to sub-human status.  Like she thinks they need their own personal “Deer Crossing” sign, but in her cause “Autistic Crossing.”  It just strikes me as so wrong.

What do you think?

i’m autistic and i think someone needs to sit this self-involved human disaster of a mom down and give her a good firm talking to about a great many things. she may also need to be smacked upside the head with a salmon once or twice.

jesus fucking christ. where is this sign. i need to go edit it so it reads “[momname]’s attention seeking behavior area”.

Some autistic kids and kids with other disabilities do run out into the street without looking, may not think beforehand about the danger, may not be able to perceive whether cars are coming, etc. Some wander, meaning that they walk sometimes quite far with no specific destination in mind. I’ve seen autistic adults on We Are Like Your Child and similar communities talking about why they did this and how parents can handle it. This mom picked the most self-involved, stigmatizing possible way. Poor kid is going to be known to all his neighbors as “that autism kid,” “that kid who’s so dumb he can’t even cross the street,” and “the reason they put up that road sign.”

(It’s not even a good sign. WTF does “autism area even mean? It’s not even like those street signs warning drivers that blind people may be crossing, where you can at least tell you’re being asked not to run people over. The same words could be used to warn you an Autism could attack you, or run headlong into your car like a deer. Or  to inform you that the entire town is autistic people who’ve been banished and quarantined here, like you might see in a dystopian novel. Or maybe it’s an “autism area” because anyone who enters becomes autistic).

Confession time: I was one of those kids who didn’t really get that streets were dangerous when I was, oh, about 3 to six or so years old. Certainly past the age when most kids know not to run into the street because something they were holding blew away or they saw a pretty rock. As late as college, I found it hard to tell how fast cars were coming and when they were going to stop, so I was overly cautious crossing the street. In between, I hated being bored so much that I would literally read books while crossing the street with my parents (knowing that they were watching for cars, and I could just follow them without having to look).

My parents were scared for me, even though we lived in a safe suburban neighborhood then. If I lived in a city with a lot of traffic, or where an oblivious small child could get caught in the crossfire of gang wars, I could have died very young.

Did my parents pester the town government to put up a creepy sign? No. They would hold my hand while crossing the street. They would yell at me to come back if it looked like I were heading into danger (the way you’d yell at someone to stop if they’re about to touch a hot stove). This scared me and I instantly obeyed. They would constantly remind me not to cross the street without an adult, and continually explain why. They still let me walk around the immediate neighborhood on my own, just like the other neighborhood parents did. They told me extremely clearly where I was allowed to go and where I was not. In other words, they acted like parents. Why isn’t that more common?

On top of everything else, there are already the “Careful! Children Playing” type of road warning signs. Children maybe not behaving so safely around roads is a well-known hazard, regardless of any additional factors. The city probably already has a supply of those signs on hand, and maybe putting one of those up in the area would have been appropriate.

As it is, they chose to warn about an Autism and not Children. Says too much about how that poor kid is getting viewed.

When I was little my biodad got pissed off and briefly installed his own speed bump in front of our house, with the way drivers kept whizzing around a curve. The adults of course tried to keep me out of the street, but my 4-year-old autistic ass really was pretty bad about it. The cops made him remove the unauthorized bump, but the city did indeed put up some general purpose “watch out for kids” and extra speed limit signs on the street after that.

As a normal and reasonable response to little kids and careless drivers. Which also sounds like the actual legitimate concern in this other case.