Today, my husband told our daughter E (3yo) that she needed to share the tv with other members of the family. She wanted to watch a movie and he reminded her what they discussed about taking turns and asked me if I wanted to watch something first. I said it was fine if she watched something but reminded her a few times that it was my turn after her movie ended.
When her movie ended, I got on YouTube and found a video by Jubilee (amazing YouTube channel by the way) called “Do all Blind People Think The Same?” which is part of a series. One of the blind people they had on the show is another YouTuber I follow, Molly Burke, so of course I had to watch it. It was interesting hearing their opinions about dating, life, disability, discrimination, etc.
What really stuck out to me was something Molly shared about the medical versus social model of disability. I had never heard of this before so of course I had to immediately look it up (hello ADHD). I was thinking about what it could mean to me as an ADHD and possibly Autistic woman.
According to the University of Oregon accessibile education center webpage: “The Medical Model views disability as resulting from an individual person’s physical or mental limitations, and is not connected to the social or geographical environments. The Medical Model focuses on finding a “cure” or making a person more “normal.”” The social model “views disability as a consequence of environmental, social and attitudinal barriers that may prevent people from fully participating in society.”
This idea completely changed the way I view disability. Not that I wasn’t already leaning toward the idea that we should be making our world more accessible to those with disabilities, but more because I hadn’t realized this was a model of disability that has been studied and had papers written about it.
I am firmly in the camp of making our world more accessible so that those of us who think or experience the world around us differently can fully participate in society. I don’t know about others, but I don’t feel like I need to be “cured” of my differences. They are as much a part of me as my hair and eye colors are. They just are. There’s nothing wrong with being neurodivergent. What’s wrong is how the world and society as a whole are set up.
Set up to support the majority rather than help the minority.
I’ve heard the term “survival of the fittest” thrown around for years (though thankfully never in the context of disability). I disagree with this mentality. Doesn’t it make us no better than animals? We should be smarter as a society and realize that we evolve, we’re all different and think differently. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us, it just makes us different. We should be helping the people around us in the world to survive and thrive in our world.
Set the world up for the minority… it just makes sense.
The Neurodivergent Homemaker 