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Raising Anti- Ableist Children
The Importance Of Narrative And Language
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What Is Ableism? Ableism is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as, "discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities." (Merriam-Webster).
What Does Ableism Look Like In The U.S.? Addressing the question of what other ways ableism occurs in the US is a little bit difficult because there are so many answers. Ableism can present itself in very bold ways. For example a person using slurs or derogatory phrases toward an individual that is disabled. However, what I feel is more common is the way that a lot of times people can be ableist without even realizing it. For example, someone meaning no harm at all asking "What's wrong with you?" Or a group of friends constantly making plans that the disabled individual cannot participate in. One of the places where ableism is the most statistically evident is in the workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2020, "Across all educational attainment groups, unemployment rates for persons with a disability were higher than those for persons without a disability." (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). This is clear evidence of discrimination in the workforce because unemployment rate should not be any higher for those that are disabled then for those that are not disabled.
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Popular Ideas On Fixing Ableism: Ableism is a recognized issue in the US and there are some popular ideas about how to fix it. Some people believe that ableism will be erased when all public facilities, public transport, and sidewalks are mobility equipment friendly. Others believe that abolishing ableism has to do with the terminology we use to talk about people that are disabled. I see where people are coming from with both of these ideas. However, I think it is an issue that requires something much cheaper and less officious. Changing the way that able-bodied people perceive those who are disabled. You may be wondering how do we change the way that able-bodied people perceive those who are disabled? The answer lies in cognitive development.
What Is Cognitive Development? Cognitive development is defined in "How Children Develop" as the development of the ability to pair perception with actions. (Saffran et, al., 2020). A large part of cognitive development is narrative.
What Is Narrative? Narrative is how we come to understand our place in the world, others around us, and our environment. Narratives shape individuals because they allow us to know what is expected of us at home, at work, and out in society. They shape culture because people come together with their shared views on the world in order to determine how their society will function. Narratives have both internal and external factors that shape us as well as the world around us. Through narrative we come to form an identity. We hear stories about what's expected of us and what kind of society we live in. We then take those stories that we hear, process them, then begin to tell stories about ourselves. Through this process we begin to acquire a sense of the things that make us who we are: this is identity. One of the ways that children experience narrative is through storytime.
What Makes Storytime So Important? One of the ways that children experience narrative is through storytime. This is what makes story time so important. Just like every other form of narrative it is a means of socialization, perpetuating culture, organizing knowledge that will later become wisdom, and helps with self-identity. There is a lot going on in the minds of children during story time. They are developing in ways that are both social and cognitive. On the social side of things the experience is warm and inviting so it helps them to build healthy attachments. Stories also serve as kind of a blueprint for what to do and when. When facing a new situation or challenge children will often reflect on the actions of characters in stories and analyze how what they did worked out for them. If it was something that worked out well children would do the same thing. On the cognitive side, story time provides children with a template for organizing their thoughts, their vocabulary gets boosted, and it enhances the development of self-regulation. Something else that is very important in cognitive development is language. Language is equally as important as narrative.
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Why Is Language Important? Language is equally as important as narrative. Language is a psychological tool that enables a meeting of minds. Essentially it is sounds that are combined with rules that come together in order to create meaning. When we exchange these "sound tokens'', better known as words, we exchange ideas. Thus, language controls behavior, relationships, and culture. This is because language is the clay that we use to form the sculpture that is narrative.
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The Dangerous Pitfalls Of Narritive: Narrative may seem like it is nothing but positive but if you're not careful you will find it has a dark side. This dark side is called a Single Story Narrative. Single stories are dangerous because they lead us to believe that only one thing is true of people that are different from us. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about in her TED Talk "The Danger Of A Single Story" when she came to the US she was very shocked by people's perception of her. Everyone thought that she had grown up in poverty and that she would not know English. The people that she met had a single story of Africa. They failed to realize that Africa is made up of multiple different countries that are all very different from each other and that English is actually the official language of Nigeria where she is from. Unfortunately single stories are something that are all too common and they contribute to all of the ism's. The Single Story pitfall is avoided with the language we use as well as the behaviors we use in our everyday lives.
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What Is Developmental Psychology? Everything we have discussed has to do with developmental science. It is a sector of science that is focused on stability and change in human growth and welfare, identification of pressure points, and promotion of enhanced human welfare. The overarching goal of developmental science is to track changes in the way that humans grow as well as to sustain positive growth within humanity.
The Big Debate: The biggest debate within developmental science is the nature versus nurture debate. The debate is rooted in the question of "How do we come to be as we are, as adults?" There are two perspectives in this debate: the nativist perspective and the empiricist perspective. The nativist perspective was founded by people like Socrates and Kant. It is founded on the idea of core knowledge. Essentially it says that children will grow and develop as they grow and develop and there's nothing that anyone or any environment can really do to impact it negatively or positively. Nativists also believe that development happens in clearly defined stages. The empiricist perspective was formed by Vygotsjy and Piaget. It is founded on the idea of constructivism. People with this perspective believe that everything the people who interact with the child does affects the child as well as the child's environment. Empiricists also believe that development happens constantly without any real clearly defined stages. The thought is that development is continuous.
Why Is It Important? This is so important because it affects the way that children are taught and raised. Nativist parents believe that their job is to manage their children rather than promote positive growth trajectories. They believe that their main job as a parent is to stop their children from hurting themselves. Empiricist parents believe that their main job is to nurture children to be their best selves. They focus on exposing their children to new experiences, setting good examples, and doing their best to assist their children in their education.
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Two Different Perspective On Developmental Psychology
Jean Piaget: Born at the cusp of the 20th century in 1896 in Switzerland was Jean Piaget. Piaget grew up to become a groundbreaking developmental psychologist who started his key works in the 1920s and continued on diligently through the 1960s. His work would continue to be studied long after his life. He not only developed a theory known as Genetic Epistemology but he established methods of empiricism appropriate for children from infancy through adolescence. This method included two things, clinical interview and carefully scripted tasks that offer a window into the way that children problem-solve.
A Broad View Of His Theory: According to Piaget cognition is intelligent problem solving that includes two parts: a figurative aspect and an operative aspect. The figurative aspect is making copies of experiences. This includes sensation and perception. Doing things like imitating observed motor movements and forming mental images. The operative aspect is manipulating copies of experiences. This is the establishment of schemas as well as the coordinating and manipulating schemas. By coordinating the figurative and the operative aspects of cognition enables a symbolic function. Piaget defined symbolic function as, "The ability to evoke objects or situations not actually perceived at the time by the use of signs and symbols." (Siegler, R. S., et, al). Human survival is defined by our ability to use symbolic function. This is because it allows us to benefit from past experiences by way of memory and reasoning. He believed that this function develops in an orderly and predictable fashion.
How Piaget Believed Cognition Happened: When it comes to the question of how cognition actually happens Piaget believes that it happened through intelligence. According to him intelligence is maintained and advanced in two ways. The first way is through the interplay between organizational, adaptive strategies, and equilibration. The second way is progressive development through specific age-related periods which he called stages. Within each of these stages there is a series of trial-and-error phases that a child must complete before they can move on to the next stage. He believed that intelligence was inherently biological and that the mind works just like the body does systemically. In order to learn he said that children need to experience discomfort. This means that they need to be pushed out of their comfort zone with new material. So that their minds go from a state of organization, to disequilibrium, and back to equilibrium in order to acquire knowledge.
The Four Stages
There are four stages, the sensory-motor period, the pre-operational period, the concrete operational period, and the formal operational period.
The Sensory-Motor Period: First, there is the sensory-motor period which is this stage of infants and toddlers. During this period children establish symbolic representation and learning intentionality. This is when schemes begin as action sequences. Infant sensation and motor movements become its first schemes. Primary schemes begin to be combined to take on a representational function. Infants learn that they can control things in their environment.
The Pre-Operational Period: Next, there is the pre-operational period which is the stage of preschoolers. This is the period when mental structures continue to grow and schemes expand. As the schemes grow so does the ability to combine them in make believe ways.
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The Concrete Operational Period: Then, there comes the concrete operational period which is the stage of school-aged children. In this state's children achieve operators that allow for logic.
The Formal Operational Period: Finally, there is the formal operational period which begins in adolescence and continues through the duration of life. During this stage we gain the capacity for hypothetical reasoning as well as scientific reasoning.
Constraints: Each of these stages came with something that Piaget referred to as constraints. Constraints are the things that you cannot do during a certain stage. He believes that the reason for these constraints are to ensure that the appropriate lessons are learned during each developmental period. During the sensory-motor period the constraint is that if there is no movement there is no learning. In the pre-operational period the constraints are the lack of formal operators. Better known as the lack of ability to use logic and instead use centration. Centration is the word that Piaget used to describe the way that preschool-age children only have the ability to reason from their perspective and to focus on what they see more than what they know. When going through the concrete operational period the constraint is the lack of ability to think abstractly. By the time we get to the formal operational period there are no constraints. This means that we have the ability to think both concretely focusing on things that are happening in the here and now and we also have the ability to think abstractly.
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Lev Vygotsky: Born the same year as Piaget (1896) in Belarus, Vygotsky would grow up to offer a very different yet nonetheless insightful perspective on child development. He became well-known in Russia in the 1930s. However, unfortunately his work was not known in the west until the 1970s and beyond back.
Broad View Of His Theory: Vygotsky's work was founded on the idea that consciousness is the intersection between thought, language, and culture. He believed that thought and language were not the same thing but that they did intertwine as each of them developed. He thought that everything children do is them engaging with cultural artifacts, discovering how tools work, and finding out how one is supposed to "be" in a given culture. Seeing as he thought that children's actions were them finding out how they are supposed to act in their culture he felt that in order to interpret things like children's drawings we must know the context in which they were created.
Culture And Context: Vygotsky was very interested in context because to him context is what gave symbols meaning. Therefore, context is how we come to understand cognition because cognition is a person, in this case a child taking a cultural symbol and internalizing it. He thought that children's expressions such as making drawings or even scribbling on the wall is an expression of their thoughts. In order to decode their thoughts we need to know what symbols are significant in the culture they are growing up in.
A Steady Incline: He theorized that cognitive development is continuous and fluid. In the nature versus nurture debate Vygotsky was a strong empiricist. His thought was that everyone that interacts with the child impacts it and well as everything in its environment. Due to this, children are constantly growing and changing. Given his empiricist views he believed that children can learn what they need to survive on their own but that they cannot progress past that (i.e., become culturally sensitive to the world around them) without intervention.
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Developmental Psychology Today: The cognitive development paradigm we have today is called Information Processing and it's exactly as it sounds. It focuses on what is going on in the minds of children when they are processing information.
What Is Going On In The Minds Of Babies? "If you'd asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that babies are irrational, illogical, egocentric -- that he couldn't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect." (Gopnik, 2011). However, over in the past 20 years this thinking has changed dramatically. We now believe that the minds of infants are like supercomputers constantly testing their environment and using their findings to make generalizations about the world. You may be wondering how this can possibly be, "Well, babies have to generalize from small samples of data all the time. They see a few rubber ducks and learn that they float, or a few balls and learn that they bounce." (Schulz, 2015). When we think of babies in this way we come to see that these little squirming, crying, and drooling individuals are really quite extraordinary.
Two Skill Sets: Humans have two categories of skills: domain general skills and domain specific skills. Domain general skills included, working memory, attentional systems, and self-regulation. Domain specific skills include, problem solving, analytical reasoning, conceptual knowledge, episodic memory, theory of mind, and language. Although our domain general skills get fine-tuned throughout our childhood it turns out that babies are born with them.
The Test Of Time: Some other theories that have withstood the test of time are Piaget's theory that children learn best when they experience the discomfort of a challenge and Vygotsky's theory that we can learn some things on our own but not everything. Piaget was correct in saying that children only learn when it is demanded of them. They need to experience disequilibrium, work through the new information and organize it, and return to equilibrium to successfully acquire new information. Vygotsky was correct with his theory that children can learn what they need to survive on their own but not much else. We can learn the basics on our own but we need help making leaps to academic learning.
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Piaget And Vygotsky At A Glance: Here is a quick overview of the ways Piaget and Vygotsky were the same and how they were different.
Language And Memory
Language Production And Comprehension: What area of the brain is being used when we are producing language? How about what area of the brain is being used when we are comprehending language? To answer these two questions you are probably thinking about Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Broca's area is located in the left hemisphere and is commonly thought of as the area of the brain used for producing speech. Wernicke's area is located on the left temporal lobe and is commonly thought of as the area of the brain used when comprehending speech. However, it is true that Broca's area is a part of the brain we use when we are producing speech but it is far from the only part. Speech production actually requires a large portion of our brain. It's the same story with speech comprehension. Wernicke's area is definitely used when we are comprehending speech but it is far from the only area of the brain used. When we are engaged in a conversation we're actually using our whole brain. As such a large part is used to produce speech and another equally large part is used when we're comprehending speech.
Blue = language production
Red = language comprehension
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Stored In The Brain: Knowledge is something else that is commonly thought of as being "stored in the brain" in a specific area when in fact knowledge is something that takes the whole brain to recall. Knowledge is activated by something called subjective awareness. Subjective awareness is receiving a stimulus that causes a spreading of neural functioning in the brain in order to allow us to recall all of the information we know about a given subject. Subjective awareness provides us with a feeling of knowing, a feeling of connection, and an awareness of our self versus other.
How Proception Be comes Cognition: During the infant phase of life visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensations are being transformed into cognitions. First signals are received by the central nervous system. Then these signals are organized into meaningful sets. From here these sets are organized into categories or concepts. In this process nature sets the stage with neural blooming and synapses. Then pressure to adapt creates a need to learn and allows us the ability to do so.
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Joint Attention: Nurture writes the script as its social environment guides attention, provides stimulation, and enables physical health. Children get verbal stimulation via child-directed speech and they get visual stimulation via the things in their living environments. Joint visual attention allows children to internalize and understand. This works because an adult will look at an object and name it. While the adult is doing this the baby will follow their gaze and see what they're looking at. When the baby sees what the adult is looking at and naming their brain fires. They have visual stimuli and an auditory word for the object that they're seeing. The visual signal plus the auditory signal creates a cognition.
Stages Of Language Development: From birth to the age of three months there in the pre-linguistic phase. From three to six months they are in the cooing phase. From 6 to 12 months they are in the Babbling phase. From 6 to 12 months they are in the Babbling phase. Next comes the word utterance phase which lasts from 1 - 3 years. The next phase is grammatical competence sometimes referred to as linguistic form 3 - 5 years.
Pre-linguistic: In the pre-linguistic phase babies are making random sounds.
Cooing Phase: In the cooing phase babies are making sounds that match the melody of speech. In the babbling phase they are making sounds with their native phonemes. They particularly favored the "B" and "M" sounds as they are particularly easy to make.
Word Utterance: During this phase children use holophrases, Telegraphic speech, and fast mapping. Holophrases are what children use when they say one word such as "up." Telegraphic speech is when children speak in short sentences using as few words as possible to get the point across. Fast mapping is when children acquire a new word after they've only herded it once or twice.
Grammatical Competence: In this phase children use mimicry and overgeneralization. Mimicry happens in the second year of life and it is when children repeat phrases that you say. For example if they want to be held they may say, "Mama hold you." Overgeneralization is when children make the linguistic error of making language more simplistic than it actually is. Like when they learn that adding -ed changes the tense they overextend the rule. For example if they break their crayon they may say, "The crayon broked." Instead of, "The crayon broke.'' Through auditory input children learn how syntax and grammar is used to create proper speech. Through the pairing of visual and auditory input children learn what objects are called. Language is a very complex mechanism that takes many years to completely master.
How Language Forms Memory: Language is imperative to creating memories. This is because language allows us to categorize things. This leads to semantic memory. Autobiographical memory is what you get when you mix script, narrative about what to do, and knowledge about the self. If you remember back to the first essay, narrative is really just a story and you can't have a story without language.
What Does This Mean For Raising Just Children? Seeing as language is a huge part of memory it's important that caregivers are careful what kind of language they use around children. If they use generic language then children take the generic statement that it has been made and apply to all things. In some cases this isn't bad like trees have leaves so the generalization is helpful for children. But when it comes to people this can cause quite a problem.
Color Blind Theory: So, you may be thinking if I don't want my child to notice the differences then why don't I just not talk about them? This is in fact an approach that is chosen by quite a lot of parents. However, while it is done with none other than good intentions it turns out you have quite a few detrimental pitfalls. In the article "Color Blind or Color Conscious? White American Mothers’ Approaches to Racial Socialization" Vittrup talks about these pitfalls from the parenting approach of raising children to be color-blind. The color blind theory is that if racial differences are not talked about then they will not be noticed by the child. This sounds like a great idea but, "Unfortunately, this strategy has not been linked to better race relations or eliminations of equality. Instead, the silence may be a breeding ground for prejudice development." (Vittrup, 2018). This happens because children believe that if something is not discussed then it must be because it's bad or taboo in some way.
Color Curious Theory: The good news is that when it comes to diversity these issues can be avoided by having a color curious approach to parenting as opposed to a color-blind approach. The color curious approach is when parents discuss racial differences with their children in a meaningful way. When talking about race as well as diversity of any kind be sure to avoid phrases such as, "God, made everyone different. It would be boring if we were all the same." While this statement makes the differences between people less of an issue it doesn't address why people are different. A better approach may be to get out of a map and talk about where different people come from. That way children accept the differences between cultures as well as just the differences in people's appearance.
A similar approach can be taken when talking about disabilities. Instead of just simply telling children that it's okay to have disabilities and that we should treat everyone equally. It would be a better approach to talk about what causes certain disabilities and why some people can't do certain things.
Thank You For Reading!!!
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About The Author
Ruth - She is a Junior at Pacific University studying Psychology. Being disabled her self ableism is a topic that is very close to her heart. She hopes that this project will give parents and other caregivers helpful tips for raising just kinds and getting us closer to a world without ableism as well as prejudice as a whole.
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