Tuesday, June 8, 2010

You Can Do It!

I said this to Quinn the other day, while asking him to take his own shoes off. After the phrase came out of my mouth, I realized that I rarely tell him, "You can do it," and I felt a little guilty and sad. I am pretty sure that if Quinn were typically developing, I would have started saying this at least once a day a long time ago.

I think Quinn will teach me a lot about how to empower a person with a disability as he develops. He already has many skills, and can do so many things. But I rarely encourage him to be as independent as he could be. Sometimes it's because we are in a hurry, though admittedly, it's probably less often that we are in a true rush, and more often that I am just impatient. I need to take the time, sometimes a very loooong time, to wait for him to do more things for himself.

Many of my friends with typically developing kids have already developed the patience to wait for their kids to dress themselves, feed themselves, get in and out of car seats themselves, etc. But often this is prompted by the kid who says (or screams), "I can do it!" Quinn does not yet do this very often. He is perfectly happy to be taken care of, so we have to take the initiative to encourage him to do more for himself.

5 comments:

Holly's mom said...

This is a really hard Balance that I also struggle with, I Let Holly do a lot, but I also baby her in other ways to for my convenience.

Jen said...

I think I did well with this with the older boys because I was in that frame of mind with Chelsey. But now with Evan, I know I do too much for him for my convenience, when really, I'm just making it harder on both of us in the long run. So I need to work on this, but yeah, making them do it is easier said than done.

Umma said...

We are in the same boat. Since he's our only child we really have no idea of what he should be doing on his own a lot of the time.

I do a lot of things for convenience and for keeping the peace. If we're going somewhere, I don't want him crabby and frustrated before we walk out the door so I'll put his socks on for him to spare us all the stress.

fragilemom said...

I'm so with you on this one. We realized how little we empowered Ian after we found out all the stuff he does at school! Learning process for us too!

shailja said...

"I think Quinn will teach me a lot about how to empower a person with a disability as he develops." What a great perspective!