[blindkid] Dealing with selfish behavior

Mon Jun 2 15:40:08 UTC 2014

A number of good points have been made in this discussion. In my experience with our (blind, no light perception) 11-year-old, I think Arielle makes some especially accurate observations. 

Many of our kids spend far more time working with, and being closely supervised by adults than many typically-sighted kids. Think about it— how much more one-on-one instruction does your blind child get that his/her sighted peers? That may help with a lot of things, but helping with peer-to-peer social interaction is likely not a among them— quite the contrary.

Meanwhile, in social situations, how much LESS time does your child spend interacting? I know my daughter has spent an awful lot of time waiting to have chances to socially interact than would be ideal. I suspect that is largely because she has to wait for opportunities to present themselves, and they are often harder to make happen with her effort because other kids have to be willing to interact as well. Unfortunately, the problem is self-perpetuating.  Due (in part) to lack of experience, our kids may be less successfully socially than average. Due to this lack of social success, our kids may have even fewer further opportunities to interact socially as well. 

Sighted peers are faced with a choice: Either make an extra effort to interact with a potentially challenging social situation, or hang with the sighted kids and play with very little effort. Blind kids often have fewer choices in these areas, but the choice (when no kids offer to interact) is to withdraw and do nothing, or to press hard to try and force opportunities. Neither of those would seem to be ideal.

Meanwhile, other factors, like needing to be pulled out of class for O&M, TVI instruction, extended testing time, and other added instruction to compensate for areas of concern where visual instruction needs to be adapted, plus any other alternative needs our kids may have, cause the social part of the puzzle to become more and more confounding, and our kids can quickly become increasingly frustrated, leading to many of them acting out in response to a lack of control in their lives. 

This, combined with missing information in-general, means, in some cases, a much increased chance of having bossy kids, and in other situations, very socially withdrawn kids. (Sometimes you can also get an interesting combination of the two.)

I remember Joe Cutter, perhaps my all-time favorite source of O&M information and provider of many great clues for strategies in raising a blind child in-general, pointing to how a young blind child needs a chance to explore playground equipment hands-on, before trying to use it effectively. One specific example he offered was kids waiting to go down a slide for the first time. Without pre-exploring the slide, a blind child is at a severe disadvantage, due to lack of experience and missing information. Even if this were the very first time any child in the whole queue had used a slide, most sighted kids waiting in the same line have practiced gong down a slide in their mind many times. They have watched it from across the park, perhaps for years. They have seen it on TV. They have seen it driving down the road when passing a park or a school yard. They have watched their neighbors doing it. There are nearly countless ways these kids have been seeing and practicing doing this in their minds, and in fact each sighted child does the same thing again as they wait their turn in the line just before they go— sort of getting "warmed up” before using the slide.

So what is going to happen next? The sighted child has practiced sliding in their mind dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of times. The blind child gets helped up a ladder (or sometimes just plopped at the platform) to a mysterious inclined plane which they are told is going to be fun to slide down. If they are fortunate, maybe they got to spend a few moments feeling the slide from the bottom, and side to offer a slight clue as to what this “sliding board” may be.

This situation and process isn’t just about young kids and slides; not in the least. Sighted people often practice and imagine how to do new things over and over before they do them, based on visual observation. Our blind kids are missing that experience, and need to have as much of that missing information filled in for them as possible.

How do kids socially interact? How do we learn this? Well, for many of us, as sighted people, we grew up observing other social interactions— at school, at home, at church, at the playground, in the mall, on the street, on TV… you name it... Take that same pool of experience and remove all visual cues and information. Not how does this situation play out for sighted people?

Should there be consequences for social misconduct for a blind child? Sure there should, because it is indeed part of the learning process, but there has to be a way to compensate for missing information factored in, and hopefully a process to compensate for the missing information as well. It takes a LONG time for blind kids to amass enough information to begin to catch up with the social body of knowledge their sighted peers have build throughout their lives.

If your child is like mine, what is happening when there is less-than-optimum social behavior, is that sighted people— kids and adults alike, stop and stare. And they probably do this pretty much silently. What are they doing? Well, a couple of things. One thing is they are learning— they are gathering information about socially undesirable behavior. Put a well behaving blind child in the situation (a bystander with a misbehaving child, be the misbehaving child blind or sighted) and they will be gathering zero visual input, unless someone describes the situation. We have to adapt this learning opportunity.

Now what about the blind child in this situation who is acting out socially? Do they know they are causing a disturbance? Do they know they are being rude, or at least how rude they are actually being? Probably not— at least not the full extent of their social transgression, because people tend not to explain this. We generally don’t talk about these matters. Society considers it rude to discuss such things— we are groomed our entire lives to silently observe the “shame” of the event. Little old ladies walk of in silence shaking their heads— things like that. Still, a sighted child would have the visual feedback, and know there was something odd going on.

Take a much more subtle example— do something slightly socially inappropriate. Make a private comment a little too close to others such that it is overheard… Talk too loud in a library… Or here is a favorite of mine— stare at people for no particular reason. 

No, my daughter doesn’t “stare", but her prosthetic eyes appear to do so. Well, staring is perceived as rude. So is failing to react visually to people’s glances and gestures. That’s why many autistic kids are perceived as being rude. Their failure to make eye contact is perceived as rude conduct. That means many of our blind kids appear to be acting rudely to sighted kids from the start. And it isn’t like I can teach my daughter not to look like she is staring, unless I have her close her eyes (absurd) or make her wear sunglasses, and we’re not hiding those beautiful eyes to avoid offending the occasional concerned individual...

Should these sighted kids "know better” in some of these situations? Perhaps not. (Though their parents probably should.) Who is educating these kids? “Mommy, why is that girl staring?… And why does that girl have a stick?”… How do you react to that? Personally, I respond by saying (politely, or so I try to be) “she’s not staring at you, her eyes are different than yours and she cannot see you— she’s blind…” or “that ‘stick’ is her white cane… her eyes work differently than yours, so she cannot see things, and her cane helps her know where she is going— it sort of helps her her ‘see’ how to get around like your eyes do for you.”

Of corse, my action isn’t entirely socially appropriate either, because most of us today are given to think we should not engage other’s children in conversation. I’ve been doing this for most of the last 12 years, and so far, not one single person has said anything to me for doing this sort of thing. I surmise they are too freaked out about the blind child.

This hopefully educates a few kids, and it models what my daughter has to learn (and now is beginning to demonstrate)-- that she will have to explain things about herself that others don’t understand, if she hopes to fit in. This is a slow process.

What I have seen from too many parents of these curious sighted kids is examples of parents scolding and reprimanding their kids when they do little things, like waving their hand in front of my daughter’s face as they try to determine why my daughter doesn’t react. Well, here’s a thought: Kids are naturally curious— especially young ones. I know things have changed a lot in the last 40 or 50 years, but I cannot recall KNOWINGLY seeing a single blind or visually impaired child until I was WELL into high school, and not once, EVER was I told as a child how to react to a blind kid. Honestly, I was one of those people who would see a blind adult walking with a cane, and I’d not know what to do to get out of their way. It didn’t occur to me to just say, "hello”… then they’d know I was there, maybe say hello back, and know to walk around me. It seems really simple now, but it never dawned on me.

It never occurred to me that a blind child would need a little cane, right up until I had a blind child of my own… that’s just the honest truth. How in the world should a small child with no CLUE what a white cane means know why my daughter is “staring at them”?

Shouldn’t this be a teaching moment for the sighted child? Absolutely it should, but what it becomes instead (all too often) is a socially awkward moment where the parent of the sighted child basically freaks out and has no idea how to react. These are probably the same parents who now, when my child is entering middle school, will ask me ABOUT her, instead of saying “hi" to her, like they probably would to a typical sighted middle school child.

My long-winded point is, I suppose, that often our blind kids are too socially isolated, and it exaggerates problems which are bound to exist in the first place due to a lack of information for the blind child, and often as well to misinformation and a failure by teachers and society to educate the sighted population as to what is appropriate behavior. 

With respect, I disagree that we cannot “rescue” our kids. The ‘rescue’ process, is teaching our kids what is going on, why, and wherever possible, teaching the kids around our own children what is going on as well. Hopefully we are there to help in this process (or there are caring, concerned professionals in our absence at school, doing so).

Our kids do make choices, but they are still in need of feedback and information to learn well from these choices. If my daughter is making a spectacle of herself, so long as she is calm enough to hear what I am saying (and at least partially process it), I have no problem explaining to her that she is causing 8 nearby children (or adults-- whatever the case may be) to stop and stare at her, and that I suspect it is because they cannot understand why she is behaving rudely, etc. Interestingly, this also has the added benefit of causing most of those stopping to stare (also pretty rude, if you ask me) to move right along…

On a sidebar, I also point out fellow cane travelers to her, so she knows she isn’t the only blind person walking around. I tend to do this in a way that lets the other cane traveler know that I’m not singling them out— “Kendra, there’s a person waking by with a cane like yours”, seems to work fairly well, and sometimes invites a discussion with a stranger that would probably not be possible for her otherwise. Sometimes, she is asking what the sound is. “That’s someone with a white cane, like yours.” Things like that...

Back to the social situations— if she’s too much in a crisis, then often a “de-briefing” after the fact will be in order. I have even, on occasion, recorded her behavior and played it back for her (in private) later. She has been quite amazed to hear what she said and did in situation like that. Sometimes it upsets her, but these are things to work through. Is she embarrassed to hear the recordings? Probably so, but she needs the information to learn. And in many situations, recorded, or out in the real live world, I will ask her if she hears any other children doing (fill in the blank) when she is acting up. “There are 20 other kids playing on this playground and you’re the only one who is doing… (again, fill in the blank)”. It works pretty well for us here.

Maybe we are just saying the same thing in different ways. Teachable moments? Absolutely, but my daughter is entitled to full disclosure all throughout the process. As a sighted parent, too often it is easy to overlook the fact that my daughter is simply working with less information than I am, and my job is to equalize that in all ways reasonably possible. The good news is that, as she gets older, the disparity in information she gathers seems to be improving slightly— she is learning to adapt and anticipate based on experience. 

I think it is also worth underscoring that we can’t put this ALL on our own kids, to even blame their own blindness for these challenges. I’m not in denial here. I get that much of the responsibility for social outcomes ultimately falls on our kids and their choices, but I’m also cognizant that some kids make it much harder on our kids than is reasonable, probably because they too are not properly socially informed. (Is that better than blaming their parents outright?)

A little kid waving a hand in my kid’s face to confirm that she isn’t reacting is one thing. (See under teachable moments.) On the other hand, taking food off my kid’s plate at lunch, knowing that she cannot see it, isn’t acceptable. Nor holding up a hand and asking how many fingers he has up. Those have both happened to my child (a number of times, especially with the “how many fingers” bit), and to kids of many parents on this list. Fellow students have even grabbed her cane and taken it on rare occasions. All of these things mold our kids behavior, and I suspect they make some of our kids react more selfishly than we might prefer.

Our kids need patience, calm, repetition, consistency, and lots and lots of information about the world around them as we work through all of these little behavioral concerns.

As I step down from my soapbox, I bid you all a good day….

On Jun 1, 2014, at 11:10 PM, via blindkid <blindkid at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Family boundaries still come into play and discussing consequences for certain behaviors. When she loses friends, it may be a hard lesson to learn.  We can't "rescue" them.   It is more painful for us sometime to allow nature to take its course.  We need to take the time to discuss, affirm and try again.  I tell my son he has to make a choice.  If he doesn't do X, then Z will happen.  His room is a lonely place for a period of time.  My hook is technology.
> 
> 
> Socially, it has been very difficult, but I find role playing and natural consequences help. Teachable moments.  For all our kids we used a support system for parenting effectively... so  glad you reached out and don't give up!  Things do change.
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pui via blindkid <blindkid at nfbnet.org>
> To: Arielle Silverman <arielle71 at gmail.com>; Blind Kid Mailing List, (for parents of blind children) <blindkid at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sun, Jun 1, 2014 10:55 pm
> Subject: Re: [blindkid] Dealing with selfish behavior
> 
> 
> I have a sighted 9 year old and I could throttle him sometimes! Traci, hang on 
> in there! 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Jun 1, 2014, at 7:09 PM, Arielle Silverman via blindkid 
> <blindkid at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Traci and all,
>> 
>> While I think that getting blind kids involved in volunteerism is
>> great for many reasons, I'm not sure it really addresses her issues
>> with behaving selfishly. I suspect that she is acting this way at
>> least in part because it is hard for her to take another's
>> perspective, as it is for many kids including myself when I was her
>> age. I wonder if requiring her to go along on your or her brother's
>> errands, for example, might teach her how obnoxious it is when someone
>> else is calling all the shots or making her do things she doesn't
>> enjoy doing. It could also be a good way to teach compromise, if she
>> has to go along on an outing or activity someone else enjoys and she
>> doesn't, but then in return if she is cooperative she can choose the
>> next outing or activity for the family.
>> I also think that sometimes blind kids can put on a bossy front to
>> regain control in environments where much of the action is
>> inaccessible to them. If all the kids on the playground are playing
>> sports that aren't adapted or are excluding a blind child from their
>> games, the blind child's best defense may be to come up with
>> activities she can do and then demand the other kids join her in those
>> activities. It's worth making sure that the popular social activities,
>> sports, etc. her peers are participating in are fully accessible so
>> she is not limited to just one or two options.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Arielle
>> 
>>> On 6/1/14, oandemom . via blindkid <blindkid at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>> Oooh, I know just the church thrift store where she can do that!  :)
>>> 
>>> Thanks for the tip!
>>> 
>>> Traci
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 5:46 PM, Marianne Denning <marianne at denningweb.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I had a blind student and her Mom took her to fold and hang clothes at
>>>> a church where people can go to get clothing when they need this help.
>>>> It accomplished two things.  The student learned to fold and hang
>>>> clothes very well and she learned to give back.  I tell all of my
>>>> students that we need to move beyond independence to interdependence.
>>>> It is important that blind people give back as well as receive.
>>>> 
>>>>> On 6/1/14, oandemom . via blindkid <blindkid at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>>>> Hello!  I have a daughter, 9 and VI, who tends to be bossy and selfish.
>>>> I
>>>>> feel I have to watch her interact with other children b/c she has a
>>>> strong
>>>>> personality and she wants to control what is being played.  I do my best
>>>> on
>>>>> this front.   Lately she has been very selfish, unless it is something
>>>> that
>>>>> benefits her, she isn't interested (you would think she is a teenager!)
>>>>> -
>>>>> its very frustrating.  We talk about how she isn't allowed to disrupt
>>>>> our
>>>>> family with her behavior (I do have some guidance from a special
>>>>> behavior
>>>>> preschool that she attended but I'm going off what I remember back then,
>>>>> but she attended mostly due to her social skills) - that she has to be a
>>>>> helpful part of this family and do as she is told, etc.  Today, I have
>>>> been
>>>>> reduced to making her write something 100 times because I just don't
>>>>> know
>>>>> what to do with her anymore.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I am trying to find some volunteer opportunities to have her give of her
>>>>> time to help others and to think of others, but I know she will think it
>>>> is
>>>>> fun, b/c she is "working"  - she loves to work.  She may like it for 5
>>>> min
>>>>> and then be done, so it may actually work out okay, but I need to try
>>>>> it.
>>>>> I thought of soup kitchens, but she won't get that visual effect that is
>>>>> what I'm really looking for to make her have an appreciation of what she
>>>>> does have.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I don't really think taking things away from her will work, b/c she
>>>> doesn't
>>>>> even know half the stuff in her room, she is so out of sight, out of
>>>> mind.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Does anyone know of any volunteer activities that they have done or seen
>>>>> that a 9 year could be included in and really get something out of it.
>>>> We
>>>>> talk all the time about how there are many kids who don't have what she
>>>>> has, etc etc, but it just doesn't click with her, as I'm sure it doesn't
>>>>> for many kids her age.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I would appreciate ANY suggestions!!!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>> Traci
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> blindkid mailing list
>>>>> blindkid at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindkid_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> blindkid:
>>>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindkid_nfbnet.org/marianne%40denningweb.com
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Marianne Denning, TVI, MA
>>>> Teacher of students who are blind or visually impaired
>>>> (513) 607-6053
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Traci Wilkerson
>>> Cell – 919-971-6526
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>> 
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