[blparent] Food Battles (part of Diffusing Temper Tantrums)
Jo Elizabeth Pinto
jopinto at msn.com
Wed Sep 5 00:17:19 UTC 2012
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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