How Children View Disability

Last Thursday was my first day interning at the Social Kids Lab, and every Thursday we have a team meeting where we discuss a journal article that includes Professor Shutts as an author. For that meeting, we went over "How Young Children Evaluate People With and Without Disabilities" (Huckstadt & Shutts, 2014), which was a study consisting of 3 tests that a group of 3-5 year olds participated in twice (once at the beginning of the school year and at the end). The kids were from different preschools, some being inclusion schools and others non-inclusion.

The first test was the Vignette Preference where a child was described to the participant verbally and either had characteristics of a typically developing (TD) child or of a child with a disability that isn't visually apparent (e.g. autism, visual/hearing impairments). Also described were TD children with mildly negative characteristics (e.g. don't share toys). Participants were asked to rate each described child on how much they wanted to be friends with them.

Second was the Visual Preference where participants were shown pairs of pictures: one TD child and one in a wheelchair. They were again asked to rate how much they wanted to be friends with each.

Third was the Norm Violation where participants were shown an animation of a group of kids doing an activity where they were supposed to guess the object inside a box by looking through a tube on its side; however, the video explicitly states that a certain child cannot see. Then, two kids don't abide by the rules and end up reaching inside the box in order to correctly guess the object (one TD child and the blind child). Participants were then asked how ok they thought each child's actions were (how acceptable).

Resulting data showed participants preferred mildly negative fact descriptions similarly to disability descriptions in Vignette Preference. In Visual Preference, participants preferred to be friends with TD children than disabled children, and in Norm Violation, participants gave the same ratings for the typical-violate child as the disability-violate (blind) child.

One thing we discussed was that in the Norm Violation, the 3-5 year olds did not take the blind child's needs into consideration when deciding whether or not her violating the rules was acceptable. They may not yet fully understand what it's like to not be able to see and only focus on following set rules, but something that would help children learn to empathize a little more would be activities where children are either blindfolded or told to close their eyes for a period of time. Because once children understand what a disability entails, they might be able to recognize, accept, and accommodate for their differences and overall be more inclined to be friendly, inclusive, and supportive.

However it also came up that not all disabilities can be so easily replicated and understood; in fact, it's seemingly impossible to do so for mental disorders. How does someone try feel what it's like to have depression when that person has never before felt that kind of sadness? How does someone without ADHD try to understand how incredibly hard it can be to concentrate on every word the teacher says in school? Additionally, its often times these kinds of disabilities (that aren't apparently obvious) that children might not recognize or provide accommodations for. For instance, if a child with ADHD is allowed to sit in a special bouncy-ball chair that helps them move still while sitting and another child doesn't understand why they get special treatment, they may think it's unfair. Therefore, it's imperative that children learn (whether that be from teachers or parents or even their peers) to accept and accommodate for disabled children by first learning to understand and empathize with their situation, which may then help them understand why they might be allowed to do certain things that other kids aren't (like in Norm Violation, the blind child had no other means of discovering the object, so it's ok that they didn't use the tube), and hopefully, if these ideas of understanding and acceptance are instilled to people as children, they'll grow up to be considerate of people with disabilities in the future.