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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Many of them had received extensive coaching by their parents to play-up or play-down their disability based on the audience. Around authority figures, anyone w' the gov't or in a medical setting they acted more disabled

Yeah, that's part of the problem I've mentioned before about gaming the system. Some do it in good faith as the only way they've found to get anyone to pay attention to the problem - if the kid is deemed capable, then any supports stop there even if needed. So the parents are nearly forced into exaggerating the problem in order to get anything done.

Some people do it deliberately and will coach/bully the kids into acting 'more disabled' so that the parent(s) can get more goodies (not that there are a lot of goodies going); for instance, from my social housing days, I heard the story of one parent who wanted a new house because her child was a wheelchair user and she claimed the doorways in her current house were too small for the wheelchair to pass through.

The problem there was that (1) the guys who went out and measured the doorways were sure they were plenty big enough and (2) even though the child legitimately had a prosthetic limb, she was mobile and not wheelchair dependent. In fact, the same parent who said her kid needed a wheelchair to get around the house, hence why Mommy wanted one of the nice newly-built social houses to move into from the older council house she was living in, used to send her kid to pay the weekly rent and said kid walked all the way to the council offices from where they lived and back home.

This was a problem as they tended to slot us into the "authority figure" role and calibrate their behavior accordingly which was very unhelpful in a vocational setting where we were trying to teach them skills and asses their competency levels.

Preach, brother, preach! 😁