Care

Previous (Part C)

❁

helping someone shouldn’t be about ‘skill’, it should be about respecting them

Amanda Forest Vivian

.

❁

People shouldn’t have to give up power […] in seeking whatever they’ve defined for themselves as help. People should get to define what help means to them. People should not have to subject themselves to the assumption that they are wrong and that the helper is always right.

Megan Wildhood

.

❁

They described the ways in which they are ‘not allowed to love’ […]

While love is often commonly associated with ideas of desire and of wanting, it can be as much about giving to others as receiving. When regarded as passive recipients of care, they are not allowed to give, not allowed to love.

Esther Ignagni, Ann Fudge Schormans, Kirsty Liddiard, Katherine Runswick-Cole

.

Hand-over-hand

Previous (Part B)

❁

Always, always remember that a student has a right to say no.

There are still times when we use physical prompting in our class, primarily when teaching a new motor skill.

Please remember that many – most – students do not need that physical support even with these skills. But some students struggle significantly with apraxia or other motor difficulties that benefit from some support.

But we do so cautiously.

We ask – “Can I help you?” […] give them the chance to give consent, or to say no.

Even if they cannot verbalize consent, I hold my hand out without grabbing them.

Do they put their hand on mine? Do they pull away? And they always should be allowed to pull away.

I think of it as if I was taking lessons to swing a golf club. The trainer may assist me by providing physical support to feel what a swing should be. But notice: the trainer is going to ask me if they can support me. And if I decide, mid-swing, this isn’t working for me and walk away – they are going to let me. The trainer is not going to chase me around the golf course, trying to grab my hands and arms. It sounds ridiculous, yet so often we do exactly that.

ms. a

.

❁

I interfere because, for me, hand-over-hand (I would like to draw a line at this point between “helping someone, with their consent, to move their hand/body through a motion so they get the feel for it,” and “hand-over-hand” as used in my therapy, which was always “grab the kid, forcibly restrain them, and then force their body to do what you want it to do, when they are actively not consenting or willing, and when they have no idea what is happening or why.” The first is something that I will do, always with consent, with kinesthetic learners. The second is something that was done to me, and it was called hand-over-hand) was uniformly traumatic.

It hurt, it took away my autonomy, it was frightening, it made me helpless. I screamed and cried during hand-over-hand, not because I was being willful or defiant as my parents and teachers and therapists thought, but because I was terrified and hurting.

And my parents, my teachers, my therapists – they were the ones causing the terror and pain. And they thought they were helping, but they weren’t.

I interfere because what I learned from hand-over-hand was not how to do the skills they were trying to teach properly (I am 27 and I still can’t write my name in cursive or sew a button or etc, obviously their occupational therapy to try to teach me cursive and other fine-motor skills failed abysmally), but rather that my pain didn’t matter, that my fear didn’t matter, that my body was not mine, and that might makes right.

ischemgeek

.

Next (Part D)

Neutrality

Previous (Part A)

❁

The mother comments that if they relented at this point and took the child out of the store, her daughter would be rewarded for behaving this way.

That is probably true.  If you are in pain, and you scream “Ouch!”  and someone comes running and relieves your pain, you’ll probably yell “Ouch” again the next time something hurts you.

Is that… bad?

C. L. Lynch

.

❁

Um…ok. [The ideas of] ‘neutrality’ […] and ‘consequences are supposed to be neutral’

we were trained to be as neutral as possible when “administering/”following through with” consequences.” This is so the kid could derive minimal pleasure out of it, in case they wanted to make the therapist frustrated. The whole idea of negative attention reinforcing bad behavior.

Like the whole process was discussed non emotionally during training. You were “administering.” It was a “procedure.” You would just grab the bottle and do it and look like you weren’t even thinking about it, that this was just naturally what happens when you change the subject when you’re supposed to be talking about your reading assignment.

So. I don’t understand why neutrality is brought up as a defense here. Is spraying water in a kids face less abusive when you look stone cold or something?

Meredith K Ultra

.

❁

Errorless learning is not actually a good or kind way to teach someone. It is profoundly disrespectful.

When you ignore responses that deviate from prompts, that means that you’re ignoring a human being whenever they did something unexpected or different from what you wanted them to do. It means you’re treating their unscripted responses as meaningless, and unworthy of any acknowledgment.

That’s not a good thing to do, even with actual errors. When people make mistakes, they’re still people, and they still need to be acknowledged as thinking people who are making choices and doing things.

Ruti Regan

.

Next (Part C)

Compliance

❁

People who can’t say no, can’t say yes meaningfully. […] Making the best of a bad situation isn’t consent.

Ruti Regan

.

❁

when you’re working for rewards, not getting them is a punishment

Birdmad Girl

.

❁

Successfully modifying a behavior is not the same as understanding why someone was doing something, and it is not the same as meeting their needs.

Ruti Regan

.

✧

[…] ‘compliance’ as if it were the answer.

Just follow this beautifully laid out plan replete with measurable goals with neat little timeframes and clearly named people assigned to each intervention, and all will be right with the world!

what must someone give up of their own desires, wants and most intimate beliefs in order to give in?

While non-compliance isn’t an easy answer anymore than compliance is […]  Non-compliance saved my life.  And not because I did brilliant things instead of what people were instructing me to do.  I absolutely did quite the opposite of that.

But I got to keep my fire and my sense of self while doing an array of stupid and risky things, and what that meant was that when it came time for me to get a little smarter about living, I had the energy and drive left to do something about it.

Out of context, Sera Davidow

.

❁

[…] It relies on continuous extrinsic motivation, which means conditioning the person it’s being done to to comply with a lot of things that they’re actively unwilling to do for several hours a week over and over. It means making them do things that make no sense to them, over and over for many hours a week. That’s dangerous. It’s especially dangerous for people with disabilities who have complex communication needs.

It’s dangerous to make a kid do things that make no sense to them over and over and over while relying on extrinsic reinforcement. That teaches them that people in positions of power can do whatever they want to them, and that they have no right to protest or understand or influence things. It leaves people subject to it very, very vulnerable to abuse. Extreme conditioned obedience is dangerous, and it’s the most persistently reinforced behavior in it. It’s generalized to other environments, and does not go away once therapy ends.

Ruti Regan

.

Next (Part B)