[blparent] Food Battles (part of Diffusing Temper Tantrums)

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

I started kindergarten in 1976, not long after the law changed so that 
children with disabilities were allowed in public schools.  I was the first 
handicapped child to be let into the school district where I lived, and that 
was only after my mom threatened a court battle.  The reasoning of the 
school district at that time was that there was no point in going to court 
because my parents would give up and send me to the school for the deaf and 
blind long before the case got to trial.  So, although I was oblivious to a 
lot of it at the time, I entered a fairly hostile environment.  I had some 
good teachers, but the word of the vision specialist was law.  At the age of 
five, I saw her as a harsh woman with very little empathy.  It wasn't just 
the food battles, although that was a big part of the problem.  I remember 
getting sent to sit on the floor on my hands with my nose in a corner once 
for bumping into a counter in the school office and getting a scratch on the 
corner of my eye.  Believe me, if something like that ever happened to my 
child, I'd be down the throats of the vision teacher and the school 
administration so fast and fiercely they'd never be the same again.  But my 
mom had a parenting style that fit well with the views of the vision 
teacher.  In her defense, that vision specialist went on to become a leader 
in the field, and has run a very successful preschool for blind kids in the 
state for many years.  She was young when she worked with me, probably newly 
out of college, and maybe her methods and views softened over time.  Also, 
the education of blind students has become much more normalized than it used 
to be, and I doubt if a vision teacher trained today would even think of 
implementing the "three chews and swallow" rule, much less holding a child's 
jaw closed till the swallow came.  Like I said, it's common now to see kids 
with all kinds of disabilities in public classrooms,and I'm sure there are 
better procedures in place now if parents or teachers need to file 
complaints.  Special education, at least I hope, has come a long way in the 
last thirty-five years.

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: Bernadetta Pracon
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 5:48 PM
To: blparent at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [blparent] Diffusing Temper Tantrums (Part of Whose 
rulesshouldtake precedence?)

Wow. Being forced to eat in that manner is truely harsh. Child services
would have probably been all over that kind of thing today. I can't
believe the vision teacher implemented that sort of thing. I've never
heard of a parent forcing their kid to eat twinkies...That's not all
right by any means. Sorry you had to go through all that--I can't even
begin to imagine those kind of food battles, not to mention at home.
Bernadetta
a

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