[blparent] Blind Parenting

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

Hi Agnes.  A good example of what you were saying about how children don't 
follow the rigid textbook mind-set is the ongoing issue with my little girl 
and her finger dexterity.  It all started because the visiting nurse I had 
when my daughter was small wanted her to string big round wooden beads on a 
shoelace.  I had no doubt that my daughter could have performed the task 
adequately if she had wanted to.  But instead, she put the beads on her 
fingers and pretended they were olives.  I thought what she did was cute and 
creative.  But there was no place on the nurse's inventory form for cute or 
creative.  We had to mark down that my daughter didn't complete the task. 
Yes or no, that was it.

The second part happened because my daughter's preschool teacher said she 
wasn't holding her crayons right.  She still grasps them in her fist instead 
of with two fingers.  My boyfriend and I have both tried to show her the 
right way.  She's not interested.  But we've done all of the activities the 
teacher suggested--picking up small seeds and gluing them on cardboard, 
manipulating pipe cleaners and yarn, cutting tiny shapes out of paper, and 
my daughter can do them all perfectly.  Last week she was picking up those 
teensy little stars and moons that are thrown as confetti at parties, since 
we have church in a hotel meeting room and there had been a party the night 
before.  I can't even feel those silly things in my hand, but she was 
grabbing them off the carpet with no trouble.  There's nothing wrong with 
her fine motor skills or hand dexterity.  She just doesn't want to hold her 
pencil the right way, and the more the teacher pushes her, the more inclined 
she is to dig in her heels and stick to her own method.

Those examples aren't ones that will get my child taken away, thank 
goodness, but many professionals stick to their rigid beliefs and take no 
account for the individuality of children.  For my daughter's entire first 
year of life, the WIC nurse kept hammering me because she wasn't gaining 
weight fast enough.  She got a slow start, but she's now four and right on 
track with her growth charts.  I was in my thirties when my baby was born, 
and perfectly capable of tuning out the WIC nurse.  But I often wondered 
what might have happened if I were a scared teenager with a new baby and 
someone down her neck all the time, or a mom who struggled with English as a 
second language, or one who was easily intimidated by the ominous "system" 
in all of its forms.

Jo Elizabeth

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's 
brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and 
died in cotton fields and sweatshops.--Stephen Jay Gould
-----Original Message----- 
From: Agnes Steinhoff
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:44 AM
To: Blind Parents Mailing List
Subject: [blparent] Blind Parenting

Hi Tammy:

I couldn't agree more with you.  I think social workers get too much into 
everybody's business.  The thing that is really annoying for me also, is 
that most of them don't even have children of their own.  They go by a 
textbook that they learned from in school and think that every family is 
supposed to be textbook perfect and that every child should be a certain 
way.  I have met very few social workers who have children.  They may be 
textbook educated, but when it comes to actually raising a child, it is 
totally different.

For one thing, the last time I checked, there was no instruction manual 
attached to the umbilical cord when the baby is born.  You give birth to the 
baby and then you are expected to raise them for the next 18 years or so. 
If we all had textbooks about raising children attached to the umbilical 
cord, I'm sure that there would be no such thing as CPS involvement.

Lastly, I thought that the whole purpose of Child Protection Services was to 
protect children from abuse and maltreatment and not from disabled parents. 
I just feel that this CPS thing has gotten out of hand.

Agnes
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