When Should I Start Teaching My Kids About the Different Types of Disabilities and Disabled People In General?

Your friendly neighborhood super advocate is back! In yesterday’s post, we discussed parenting with a disability for the third time. Since there was a great deal of interest in that blog post, I thought today would be the perfect time to deliver and talk about a topic that I mentioned at the end of last Friday’s blog post. 

Since I began blogging over a decade ago, I cannot count how many times I’ve heard the following question, “Since you write a lot about disability I was wondering, when is the right time or age for me as a parent to begin teaching my child about disabilities and disabled people in general?” For the longest time, I did not have a simple answer to this question. 

As a person with a disability, I have always believed that the earlier we expose children to a disability or any type of difference whether it be race, cultural background, disability, and/or language, this will foster acceptance, open-mindedness, and overall compassion. Children are impressionable if you teach them or if you raise them to be polite and nice to everyone then it is fair to assume they will not only grow up to be polite and respectful adults, but they will gain respect from others as well. 

In terms of teaching your child about the world of disability and the people who live in it, I recently came across an article that sums it up better than I can. An article on Today.com from July 28, 2020, entitled “How to teach children about disability, at every age,” puts it best. In the article, they use a quote from a woman by the name of Michelle Nario-Redmond. For those not familiar with Miss Nario-Redmond, she is a psychology professor and the author of the academic textbook "Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice".  She states in the article that when parents “yank the kids away from approaching a person with a visible disability, kids pick up on the fact that there's ‘something wrong,’ ‘something shameful,’ that they should avoid.” 

Rather than rehash the whole article I will include a link to it in this post. 

Miss Nario-Redmond and I believe that the earlier you teach not to fear or view people with disabilities as different, the sooner we will all learn that different is something to be celebrated, not scorned. 

Until tomorrow, your friendly neighborhood super advocate is signing off for the night.

Jay

Article and textbook mentioned above:

How to teach children about disability, at every age

Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice