I've been fortunate enough not to have a speech delay, although I know I could've easily had one because I was born so prematurely and I do have some mild learning processing disorders. However I know many people who do have a speech impediment of some kind. I'll describe one particular encounter here.
In middle school I found a cool friend who was sighted and who took an interest in me not only because I was blind, but also because I never had enough energy. We didn't share common interests but we always found some vibe that had us wanting to hang out. He was fascinated with me as a person, but something drew me to him as well. He had a mild stutter, which normally only existed on the S sound. HE often had trouble transitioning from an S to another vowel. Beyond that, his stutter was subtle or completely nonexistent. It often didn't show unless he was tense, or needing to give specific responses. When we were just hanging out, his stutter calmed down considerably.
One day in a class, we had a substitute teacher. We were reading sections of a text book, and she would rotate around the room, having each person read a paragraph or two aloud. I think a student could decline reading aloud if he or she didn't want to, but I'm not certain. When she got to my friend with a stutter, he tried his best to read quickly. But his consonants were thick, and he'd get stuck around them. Every single time he got stuck, she would, with next to no hesitation, say the word he was having trouble with, as if impatiently pushing him to move on. As he fought through the text, her interjections came quicker and more swiftly, to the point where he had hardly a moment to breathe before she would drag him forward. I got the impression she knew he had a stutter before he even started reading, and this made her either uncomfortable, empathetic, or impatient. I couldn't figure it out. Even worse, I was little more than a few feet away from him. I knew I'd be up soon.
When I read aloud, she didn't give me much time for pause either. I didn't have a stutter, but I wasn't the fastest braille reader either. I read at a comfortably slow speaking pace, the pace that narrators often use in audio books. The substitute was pushing me along as well in some spots.
A few minutes later when class was over, all I heard about was how the poor kid with a stutter wasn't given any time to work things out on his own. "She didn't even let him finish his words," one of our friends observed. But him and I both remained silent. I later asked him how he felt about it, and he blew it off. Perhaps he didn't want to talk about it, or he was so used to it that he just wanted to get it done and move on.
This experience got me thinking. Was the teacher doing the right thing by keeping him from getting caught up in his speech impediment, or should she have let him fight it out? Was the class doing the right thing by giving him all kinds of support after the fact? Being blind, I have to think about these things a fair bit concerning my own areas of weakness. In my own personal opinion, both strategies are not ideal.
what I normally do with blindness-related challenges is to sort of adopt a subconscious 3-second rule. If I spend more than 3 seconds stuck on something, making absolutely no progress, then I start to be open to the possibility of help. Of course 3 seconds isn't a constant, sometimes I'll want less time, sometimes far more, depending on the task and how independently I feel I can accomplish it. But for the average routine task, 3 seconds is a compromise that's worked well for me. Like I say, it's a subconscious thing that has a load of exceptions.
I suspect my friend at school could've benefitted from something like a 3-second system. He rarely needed more than that to break himself from a stutter, and thus I never felt a pang of intense empathy for him. I never saw him get so wound up that he couldn't say what he wanted to say. Whether he wanted people to be more or less helpful is something I don't know. But he never expressed a need for any additional support, and it irked me when people would assume he needed it.
This also brings to mind a story that my Grandma told me a few years ago about my uncle. Every time he would stutter, my grandma would reprimand him, and sometimes would resort to putting soap or pepper in his mouth. Fortunately he "grew out of it." As she proudly states, "The only reason he stopped was because he knew Nanna wasn't gonna let him do it. If you don't do that early on, kids are gonna grow up stuttering and talking like babies." That generation of thinking seems to suggest tough love can do no harm.
What is tough love? From what I've heard, tough love is when you adamantly show your compassion for someone's well-being by subjecting them to dramatic treatment, either physical or psychological, which you are sure will impact their state of mind to push it in a better place. This is just my opinion, but I am firmly opposed to that. Here's why.
Some people stutter just because of nerves and emotions. Others have a legit reason for doing it. I recently saw something on Medical Incredible about a guy who's stutter is speculated to occur because of the crossing of signals between the hemispheres of the brain, causing them to short-circuit. His stutter was so severe that when he was caught up in a stutter cycle, he couldn't break it until he ran out of breath. I think it would take a pretty cruel human being to say that had his parents washed his mouth out with soap enough, he would not be stuttering today. It would take a pretty non-empathetic person to assume that if he just "tried not to stutter," or "just spoke more shamelessly," that it would go away. Thankfully that attitude isn't popular among this generation of people. But what still is popular is the attitude that people with disabilities either want or need constant help or support. Then we have the disabled people who flat-out refuse any help. I've seen blind people in particular who firmly believe that blindness is something to be minimized as much as possible, and failing to minimize its effects makes you helpless. It saddens me. The only reason independence is such a big issue among disabled people is that society has made it that way. It stems from societal ignorance of disabilities. I could really rant for ages about this but I would rather spare us all the trouble.
All I'll say is that if you want to help someone with a disability, just treat them like you would treat anyone else. The conversations could potentially be about different topics, but the dynamic should be natural, spontaneous, and full of a relationship between two or more people who actually feel some sort of connection to each other. Treating them as if they are just another friend is something they will appreciate. It's not wrong to talk about challenges which disabilities present, but sensitivity to each other's feelings comes first. Unfortunately I doubt we'll ever get to a point of complete integration. I'm always going to feel special and different just because that's how people with disabilities are often viewed. I think if we were more broad-minded individuals, more willing to talk things out in sensitive but open ways and can avoid pre-judgment, then we would go a very, very long way.
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
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