There’s recently been a flareup in the feminist blogosphere of a long-running argument about childhood misbehavior and the social obligations of parents. In a thread over at Feministe several people, on both sides of the debate, analogized childhood to disability, arguing about whether and how kids’ behavior in public spaces can be compared to that of adults with disabilities.
So I’d like to talk a little about the relationship between childhood and disability today. It’s a subject that I’ve got some familiarity with, and it’s one that’s relevant to both children’s rights and disability activism — two topics this blog has addressed in the past.
People who dislike children (not people who aren’t into having kids of their own, or people who are uninterested in kids, or people who are annoyed by bad parents — people who dislike children) tend to have a recurring constellation of complaints about them. For instance:
They’re dirty. They touch everything. They’ve got no social skills. They’ve got no regard for personal space. They’re loud. They say inappropriate things. They do inappropriate things. They’re creepy. They’re demanding. They can’t control themselves. They smell bad. They can’t control their bodily functions.
All of these complaints are true of some kids. None are true of all kids.
It turns out that this list is a pretty good facsimile of the list of complaints that folks who are intolerant of adults with cognitive disabilities have about them. And each of these complaints is true of some adults with cognitive disabilities, and none are true of all adults with cognitive disabilities.
I should pause here to explicitly state that I don’t consider adults with cognitive disabilities to be children, or child-like. Among the many things I dislike about the terms “retarded” and “developmentally delayed” is that they imply that cognitive disabilities are simply a matter of slowed-down intellectual development, which is rarely if ever the case.
But adults with severe cognitive disabilities, like children and the elderly, often behave in ways that challenge non-disabled adults’ beliefs about how people should behave, particularly their beliefs about how people should behave in public spaces. The ways in which I’ve seen people be made uncomfortable by children in some ways mirror the ways in which I’ve seen people be made uncomfortable by people with disabilities.
And I do think there’s another relevant parallel in the fact that some people who don’t know a lot about children, or about a particular child, nonetheless feel comfortable making assumptions about that particular child’s abilities and deficits, and making judgments about what that child should or shouldn’t be exposed to, or attempt to do, and using those assumptions and judgments to govern how they treat that child, rather than interacting with the child in an open and respectful way.
Replace “children” with “disability” in the above paragraph, and “child” with “person with a disability,” and I think the statement is just as true. And it’s not just true of people with cognitive disabilities, either — old people and people with physical disabilities are often wrongly assumed by strangers to have cognitive disabilities as well.
Building on that, I think there’s something important that those of us who are no longer kids, not yet old, and not presently dealing with disabilities need to understand:
Public space is not our space. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities don’t use parks, restaurants, stores, museums, and theaters at our indulgence, because it’s not our space. It’s everyone’s space, and everyone has an equal claim on it.
Parents who take their kids to adult-oriented places — myself very much included — tend to overstate the case for our children. “My kid would never scream in a museum or throw food in a restaurant,” we say. ” My kid would never impose on other people, and if she did, I’d deal with it. When you’re complaining about kids, you’re complaining about other people’s kids. Don’t lump my kid in with them.”
But here’s my secret: my kid doesn’t actually behave as well as I do. Sometimes she whines. Sometimes she has to be reminded to to keep her voice down, or not to run. So yeah, when I take her to the Museum of Modern Art, we do impose on other patrons, at least a little.
And you know what? A little imposition on other patrons is okay. I’ll apologize sincerely to anyone she disturbs, but I’m not going to apologize for her presence. Because MoMA is her space as much as it is mine.
My sister whines in public sometimes, too. Sometimes she gets overwhelmed and cries. Sometimes she raises her voice. (Running in museums is not an issue with her, I’m happy to say.) If we say that my daughter shouldn’t go to museums because she might whine or cry or raise her voice, then we have to say that my sister can’t go either — and one of the best days I ever spent with my sister was the day that we visited a MoMA exhibit of design for people with disabilities. MoMA is my sister’s space as much as it is mine.
And if we say that people who might whine or cry or raise their voices shouldn’t go to museums, then we’re going to have to bar my grandmother, too — if not now then very soon. My grandmother the artist. My grandmother who, when she was in college in Idaho seven decades ago, read Dorothy Parker and hung a print of the Rouen cathedral on her wall. My grandmother, whose copies of the catalogues of the MoMA “High and Low” exhibit and the Peggy Guggenheim collection sit on my bookshelf.
MoMA is my grandmother’s space far more than it is mine. She almost certainly will never again see the inside of it, but if she does, the rest of the people there will just have to suck it up. She’s old, and being old isn’t always pretty.
When my daughter was first learning to ride her Big Wheel on the sidewalk, I used to tell her that it’s not enough to not bump into people — you have to respect them, too. You can’t ride so fast or so close that you scare them, or make them step out of your way. If you see that they’re nervous, you have to slow down even more, and give them even more room. You have to minimize the disruption as much as you can.
Because my daughter isn’t a lone child zooming through a world of uniformly robust adults. When she’s out on the street, she’s sharing that space with other kids who might not be paying attention, and with old people who might be really worried about falling and shattering a hip, and with folks carrying heavy and fragile packages, and so on and on.
Which brings me to my most important point: that the duty to minimize disruption isn’t a duty that the young and the old and those with disabilities have to the robust adults among us, it’s a reciprocal duty that each of us, whatever our condition, has to each of our neighbors, whatever their condition.
Each of us has an obligation to refrain from whining too long or too loudly in museums. But each of us also has an obligation to accept the company of others good-naturedly, and to respond with grace when disruptions inevitably occur.
Note: This is a retooled version of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago. If you’re keeping score at home, I now have two daughters and no grandmother.
21 comments
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May 15, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Sybil Vane
This is a lovely post and the care you took into formulating your point really comes through. Thanks for this.
May 15, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Angus Johnston
Thanks. Much appreciated.
May 15, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Therese
I love this post! It’s so smart to bring together all these “types” or stages of people, and remind us of our interconnectedness and social responsibilities.
May 15, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Kevin T. Keith
I thought of this post when I saw the thread at Feministe. Thanks for re-posting.
May 16, 2010 at 8:52 am
Delinquents « blue milk
[…] in the meantime I would like to highlight this post from Angus Johnston at student activism: Public space is not our space. Children, the elderly, and people with […]
May 16, 2010 at 10:56 am
Joan Johnston
Thanks for putting this up again – it’s well worth repeating – and as the mother, grandmother and daughter-in law of the people mentioned, I think these points need to be widely disseminated.
May 16, 2010 at 3:46 pm
hexalm
Thank you for this, good post. On the posts you linked (how I found my way here) it’s amazing how much unchecked privilege (of various types) there was! Yikes.
May 17, 2010 at 9:55 am
awfv
This is SO good.
May 17, 2010 at 10:08 am
Penny
Thank you so much for this–and thank you especially for the note at the end, because I remember reading the version you posted years ago and it stuck with me! Glad to know why it seemed familiar ;) My kids (with and without disabilities) are human beings, just like everyone else in the museum, or on the airport, or at the store. Being in public means being around a range of other human beings, not mannequins, not clones of yourself; and if anyone assumes otherwise, that’s their mistake.
May 17, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Katherine
Absolutley perfect. I’m choked up.
May 17, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Global Feminist Link Love: May 10-16 « Gender Across Borders
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May 17, 2010 at 2:24 pm
meep
People often think I hate children when in fact, the problem is that large groups of children tend to exacerbate my disabilities. Some childrens’ voices and all children crying may send me into a seizure or just put me into such severe sensory overload that I can only cover me ears, flatten my body against the wall, and hope for them to pass quickly. Then try to walk somewhere safe while being unable to process where the objects in my environment are. Sometimes, that means it will be hours before I will be capable of getting myself home. No, not all children are loud and intrusive but I have to calculate odds that all the children in a particular venue are not going to be loud, etc. Headphones or earplugs don’t always fix the problem for me. So, I’m stuck trying to figure out when I’m least likely to encounter children (shopping at odd hours, avioding family restaurants, getting friends to scout locations I am not familiar with.) I don’t want children to be marginalized and shut in, I really don’t, but I don’t know how I can get my basic needs met (going to the grocery, getting to work, etc..) without some reasonable expectation of where I am less likely to encounter them.I know my needs are not common but it isn’t all children and PWDs against overentitled TABs.
May 17, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Angus Johnston
Thanks for writing, meep. Your perspective is an important one. And yes, you’re right that it’s not just a matter of the TABs against the rest — that’s what I was trying to get at with the Big Wheel analogy.
Part of teaching kids to be responsible citizens is teaching them to recognize that people’s needs and wishes and capacities vary, and that a decent human being is someone who anticipates and respects that state of affairs.
May 17, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Angus Johnston
Wow. Thank you. And I’ll take this as an opportunity to say thanks to everyone else who left a similar comment. They’re all very much appreciated.
May 18, 2010 at 7:11 am
Lounalune
I found this post through FWD. I haven’t read the feministe thread myself, because I don’t have the energy to deal with that right now, but I heard about it (and about people being infuriated by it) on a Shakesville open thread. I love your answer to the (common) conflation of children and PWDs, and what you write about public space belonging to everybody.
May 21, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Meg
Part of my neuro-atypicality is an abnormally long memory. I have memories from before I was mobile, and have been cognizant of how my cognition has changed over time. Memories from when I was three or four are especially clear. I kept enough records and have verified my memories against adults who were there, so I can be as sure as anyone can be of the validity of these memories.
This means I know what it was like to be a child. I remember the boredom as I was required to accompany other people while they did the things they needed to do, the helplessness and powerlessness, the sense of being unwanted, or disliked instantly, or expected and rewarded for disappearing. I was considered a burden, and sometimes a literal one. My mother was frequently told how “brave” she was for taking me places or doing things with me. People constantly talked about me as though I weren’t there, and I started understanding that they were before I became verbally expressive. When I was verbally expressive, adults would seldom take the time to listen to me and engage with my ideas. They assumed I was ignorant and incapable of forming conclusions.
I was also a child with disabilities. I share meep’s experience of sensory overload, but if I objected to going somewhere I knew would overwhelm me I was picked up and carried there, because I could not communicate why grocery shopping was physically painful and it would happen when it was convenient for my mother.
Childhood is miserable. The only people who routinely treat you like a real person, who may possibly respect your bodily autonomy and bother to have a conversation with you are other children, most of whom are frustrated too and happy to take it out on someone who can’t pick them up and lock them away if they get annoying. By the time I was six the kids around me had absorbed sexist, racist, classist, able-ism, anti-fat, kyriarchy-supporting ideas, but I hadn’t found the 6-year-old version of feminism/anti-racism/FA/etc to argue back.
Now I always take time to stop and acknowledge children, especially those being pushed about in a stroller or cart. It takes patience to have a conversation with a child, as they may have limited vocabulary, and some of their ideas may be based on incorrect or incomplete understandings of the world. On the other hand, they don’t mind if you have to search for a word, and will accept “I don’t know” as an answer. It makes me sad when I meet children who are overjoyed to have someone who listens to them, to be included in the conversation in places where they are the only child, to have someone acknowledge their existence after an hour at the yarn store, strapped in a stroller with nothing to do.
Thank you for writing this post.
May 23, 2010 at 8:32 pm
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November 24, 2015 at 12:10 am
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