People will have to understand...

People will have to understand and I will protect my child.

Unfortunately, the response to the above is no and no.   People in the broader world will not understand your child’s disability and sometimes folks in your own family don’t understand.   All those people in the grocery store, the shopping mall and on your very own street who give you dirty looks that imply if you knew how to raise children, your kids wouldn’t be acting that way.  They don’t understand and aren’t going out of their way to be able to understand.

The other sad situation is that hard as you may try, parents cannot protect their kids forever.  We cannot protect our children from being in a car that is hit by a drunk driver.  We sometimes cannot even protect our kids from another family member.  And unless we expect to keep our child always in our home and in school and expect to live forever so we can do that, we need a plan B when it comes to protecting our children.

Children with disabilities are more like their typical age-mates than they are different.   Their hormones will kick in at about the same time as typical kids.  Boys are likely to masturbate and/or to have spontaneous erections.  Children are going to develop secondary sex characteristics and to, all of a sudden, be curious about the kids of the other gender. These are the same people they had nothing to do with just a couple of years ago.  There will be lots of teen age drama about who likes whom.   Social media will make the information sharing much easier to do and, most unfortunately, much more graphic.   That is where plan B comes in.

Our children will always be our children but they will not always be our babies.  We need to teach and explain what is happening to their bodies.  We need to share that even without social media, we have fought these same wars when we were teens.  We need to be open to questions and we need to let our kids do some test driving.  We learned to drive a car by studying the rules and then really driving the car.  Our children need to learn to drive not just social media but social events.  We need to clearly teach about social boundaries and what “this far and no farther” means.   Just as it is important to teach about these things, we need to give children the opportunity to use what has been taught.  It does not serve our kids well to be kept in a bubble.   One day the bubble will burst.

The community at large and future employers are not interested in doing charity work.  Employers will give money to a good cause but when it comes to their business they are looking to make that money.  So anyone they hire has to have the social skills to contribute toward that end result.  Employers, and the community at large, look for five magic words, please, thank you, excuse me and for a smile at greeting.  

In the end, if we teach our children well and make sure they practice the skills, people won’t have to understand, and our children will have the skills to protect themselves and that is what we really want anyway.