Parts I and II of this series of posts here and here.
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I love Cars. Love it. I own the DVD and several Cars-branded toys. I agree with its message.
However, I wonder if that particular message - what matters most is friends - is overly pervasive in children's stories. Don't get me wrong: I want to teach my children to value friendships. But I would also like to impart a message of acceptance. I would appreciate a diversity of messages in my children's stories. Where are the stories that teach children it's okay if you struggle with friendships?
Instead, the autism-friendly children's books are mostly about awareness and tolerance, or how to be a friend. Which isn't for nothing.
But I worry that the emphasis on autism as a disability and remediation of social impairment will, as this article puts it, "...imbue them [autistic children] with a sense that they're unacceptably weird."
I hope to spare my children this fate, which I think is unnecessary and avoidable. Maybe I'll write and publish (on this blog) my own children's stories.
1 comment:
Good for you, Laura! I definitely grew up feeling unacceptably weird, though I didn't have a name for my weirdness back then. I have often wondered whether having a childhood diagnosis would have helped me or hindered me more--it certainly would have done both to some degree. But if I'd had parents like you (and tools, like the books you imagine) so that my way of being was affirmed as one-of-many-equally-acceptable-modes, rather than "unacceptably weird," I think a childhood diagnosis would have been a godsend. Both then and now.
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