Aug 23, 2024
Our 18 year old son, Graham, who has Down syndrome, just completed a summer working in our city’s youth employment program. His placement was as a classroom aide in our city’s subsidized summer camps for young children: affordable day care with twice weekly field trips and time at the pool for middle- and working-class families to get coverage, by lottery, in summertime. (Why these kinds of pro-family provisions are coded as left-wing will always mystify me.)
Whenever Graham starts out with a new team, my husband and I watch and wait to see whether we need to step in and run some disability 101 interference. It’s very rare for anyone to have a negative reaction to Graham these days; it’s more common that people will underestimate him, unwittingly, with low expectations. So we pause to see whether the person in charge understands him as a dimensional person beyond his genetic status. Whether they have decided upfront what a “Down syndrome person” can or can’t do, or if they’re able to watch, and wait, and encounter him as he is.
The good news and the bad news is that this form of human and humane perception is absolutely unrelated to the level of credentials a person has. We have seen him be babied and cosseted by people with advanced degrees; we’ve also seen people with serious training do genius and inventive work in adapting school curricula. We’ve seen almost entirely untrained people show the same dramatic range. Some people get it, and some people don’t. Turns out there’s no prescribed way to fill a person’s head with the cultivation of insight.