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Teaching the disabled to compete must begin at home.

© William Robb

When I first began writing in Suite 101, someone asked me a question which I have thought about constantly for about a year. The question asked was, "How do you teach children to advocate for themselves." The answer to this took much soul searching because I was a child when I became disabled. I had to look retrospectively and see if things were more different than when I was a child growing up.

I looked back and saw that there was still peer pressure. However it appears to be different. Peers today appear to take pride in using the special labels of the school system to tell someone that they aren't smart enough to compete with those who aren't educationally challenged.

I looked back at the family. When I was a student most families were supportive of their educationally challenged children. They were supportive but they still made you try. They did not let you use your limitation as an excuse for not trying. Parents of my generation believed that it was better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. Parents of my generation believed that it was better for you to be thrown into the den of lions from whence you had to claw yourself to the top. I'm not sure about the parents of this generation. Many appear not to take any interest in their child's education and those with educationally challenged students appear to let their children use their limitations as excuses for not trying at all. Maybe these parents have been around labels for so long that they assume that a disability automatically means an inability to learn.

After looking at family, I looked into the schools. Here I found a great difference from my time. Schools today, unlike wen I was a child, appear to have to have a label for all types of conditions which may plague the student. They use such things as ADD, ADHD, EMD, TMD, PMD, ED, LD, DD, and OH. Such labels in themselves aren't bad; what is bad is what happens to the student after he has been labeled. Many are placed in special classes from self contained to resource. These aren't bad but to the peers of the educationally challenged they mean classes for those who will never be able to learn. These students are called all types of offensive names from which some never recover. These names usually lower their self image and sometimes make them quit trying because you know they will never be able to learn.

With all the labels which are around today it is even more imperative that the home life for the

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