Parental Wisdom

Parental Wisdom

No Substitutes for Parental Wisdom,

Common Sense

by Barbara Pierce

Reprinted from the Fall, 1995, issue of the Buckeye Bulletin,

the newsletter of the NFB of Ohio.

Editor's Note: Mrs. Pierce is the President of the NFB of

Ohio, the editor of the Federation's monthly magazine, the

Braille Monitor, and a caring and competent blind mother whose

three adult children would make any parent proud.

With every passing year I grow increasingly aware of the

importance of our responsibility and commitment to the rising

generation of blind children.

In many ways they are more fortunate than any generation

of blind people before them. Technology gives them more access

to Braille and enables them to produce print more easily and

quickly than my generation would have thought possible as we

struggled to learn to type accurately. Closed-circuit

television systems enable students with some useful vision to

read print material that would otherwise be inaccessible to

them. Moreover, legislation now requires that blind students

receive a free appropriate education in the least restrictive

setting--a mandate that should make it possible for blind

students to take their rightful place in their academic and

social world more fully and easily than ever before. In

addition, the involvement of specially trained education

professionals in decision making about and instruction of

blind children can be a gold mine of information and expertise

for parents that previous generations never had available at

all.

At this point some of you are likely saying to yourself,

"What nonsense!" Too often technology is misused to prevent

students from learning the skills they need. Laws are only as

good as their enforcement. And we have all learned to our cost

that, though few things are more valuable to parents than wise

professional counsel, all too often such expertise is shaky at

best and often misguided. But beyond the issue of the quality

of the professional advice actually available to parents is

the temptation for them to abdicate their responsibility and

discount the value of their personal views about what their

children need and how to achieve it.

An incident at the 1995 National Federation of the Blind

Convention will illustrate my point. National Board of

Directors member Gary Wunder and I led a discussion on July 1

as part of the National Organization of Parent of Blind

Children's afternoon of concurrent workshops. The topic of our

discussion was ensuring that blind youngsters develop good

social skills. The subject is very important, and the room was

filled by interested parents with lots of questions and

problems to discuss. Not surprisingly, perhaps the most

distressing problem they raised was repetitive, socially

unacceptable behavior--head-shaking, eye-pressing, body-

rocking, and the like.

Afterwards, I talked for quite a while with a father

whose eight-year-old daughter presses her eyes with great

regularity. She maintains that it is a habit which she cannot

and does not wish to break. He told me that he and his wife,

the child's teachers, and even her friends pester her about

this behavior steadily. But to date they have had no success

in modifying the activity in any way. We talked about working

to make her understand why stopping the eye-pressing really is

important to her, even if she doesn't think so now. I then

suggested some methods of making it both possible and

attractive to her to change the habit using behavior

modification methods and rewards. These seemed to be things

that the family had not tried, and I hope they may be helpful.

The reason I bring the subject up at all is that I questioned

this father about the role being played by his daughter's

friends. He explained that, when he uses the word "friends,"

he was thinking of a neighbor couple who care deeply about the

little girl and have joined the family in fussing at her about

taking her fingers out of her eyes. I agreed that it could be

constructive to have other adults augment the parents' effort

but asked about her school friends and what they thought of

the eye-pressing. (She attends her local school and is part of

a regular class in a local public school.) The father paused

to consider and then announced, as though it had never

occurred to him before, that he didn't know the names of her

friends. I questioned him a little: did children come to their

house to play? No. Was she invited to birthday parties and

other outings with classmantes? No. Does his daughter mention

the names of other children when she talks about school? He

thought he could remember a name or two, but nothing

consistent.

I didn't say this to the father, and maybe the eye-

pressing provides a partial explanation for the dearth of

friends, but I view the loneliness of this child as an even

more serious problem than the eye-pressing.

In thinking over this conversation, I began to appreciate

with new insight and gratitude the role my own mother played

in my social development as a child. We lived on a dead-end

street with fewer than twenty-five houses. Amazingly, eight of

those families had daughters within two years of each other in

age. Mostly we played in groups of two to four, and I moved

freely among the various combinations. Our house had a large

side porch, and it became a favorite gathering place on hot

summer afternoons. We played house and office and later

canasta and (after my grandmother taught me the rudiments)

bridge as well. In the early spring, before my father painted

the porch and put the furniture out for the season, we roller

skated on it, and several times a summer we slept there all

night--or rather, tried to stay awake there.

But mostly what I remember is my mother coming out of the

side door carefully carrying a tray. On it were balanced tall

glasses of something cold to drink and some home-baked treat--

a plate of warm cookies, small pieces of cake, popcorn. It

didn't matter. The treats didn't appear every time we were on

my porch, but they were frequent enough to make playing at

Barbara's an attractive notion.

Not long ago I thanked my mother for all those treats and

glasses of lemonade and told her that I had appreciated them

then but that, having now done my share of providing snacks to

neighborhood children as my own three were growing up, I now

understood better and admired the quality of her love through

all those years.

She then told me something I had never known. There was

a time when my parents decided to move to a larger house in

another suburb. Mother was never happy with the small living

and dining rooms in our home, and she very much wanted to live

in another house. But it was she who decided that they would

stay for me to have those friends as the basis of my social

group in school. I know now what a sacrifice my mother made

for me, but neither of us can ever know the full extent of the

gift to me that her sacrifice made possible. I was never the

center of the socially elite group of girls in school. I was

too interested in good grades and not attractive enough to the

boys. But I had friends, lots of them; and I knew how to get

along with different kinds of people--both products of early

neighborhood experience.

My mother had no experts on blindness to advise her, but

she knew that it would be harder than normal for a blind child

to make friends in a regular class and even more important

that it be done. She couldn't do the job for me, but she could

help me get the practice I needed. She could make our home

attractive for other children. She could bring birthday treats

to school and have parties for groups of my friends. After

that I was on my own. It wasn't easy; growing up is never

carefree; and children who are obviously different have

additional complications to negotiate.

But every parent is equipped to help with the process.

Common sense is the guide, and love is the motivator. The

problem is that, when parents begin to depend on the views of

professionals only, they begin to doubt their own ability to

draw accurate conclusions and deny themselves the benefit of

their own, more personal, detailed observations.

Like all other children, blind kids need vast amounts of

reassurance and help in order to make it through childhood and

adolescence. Let's be sure to give them all the help to which

they are entitled. Technology, law, and professional

expertise--valuable as they can be--are a poor substitute for

parental wisdom and loving common sense. Blind youngsters need

all the support we can give them.