[blparent] Blind Parenting

[Tammy]

Hi,

I Completely agree with you here!  I put my son in to a preschool last 
September, and I got a call around December saying that he needed speech 
therapy and needed to have his eyes and ears checked that he wasn't talking 
or responding to his name.  When I told the teacher he was acting fine at 
home she said that if I didn't do exactly as she asked that she'd call me in 
and tell cps that I was a neglectful parent.  I told her that she could go 
ahead and do that and he wouldn't be returning to that school.  He's in 
another school now and loves it and I've just gotten his report which says 
he's doing really well.  My point is that our children aren't trained 
monkeys, they're children and they don't perform on command.  So the word 
guidelines are just that, guidelines, and should be seen as such, but some 
social workers don't see it as that.

hth

Tammy

-----Original Message----- 
From: Jo Elizabeth Pinto
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 3:02 PM
To: Blind Parents Mailing List
Subject: Re: [blparent] Blind Parenting

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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