The kicker? At this time neither my brother nor I spoke any English whatsoever.

But I agree muchly on the communication thing. It’s only recently occurred to me how much I willfully ignore the signs of people paying less attention to me and/or dismissing me because of my speech disorder because I just don’t want to know how much it happens and with whom – I can already guess that the answers are “rather a lot” and “even with people who know me quite well” but I don’t want to have that confirmed.

And I can echo the tales of it happening here.

My mom worked in a “special ed” class (the *sigh* “high-functioning” one) and there was a girl in there with no disability whatsoever, unless one considers speaking Chinese and having immigrant parents a disability.

I bet the thinking was, eh, ESL’s broke*, throw her in there, she’ll pick up something. Plus the parents don’t care! (Or because we don’t speak their language, and they’re not proficient in ours… we don’t care!)

*If something is messed up within a public school, various *isms are at play but most often it comes down to the lack of money. (Of course, how that money is used reveals blinkered thinking…)

Then there was their refusal to test kids for learning disabilities unless the parents were really pushy. My parents were pushy thankfully. But then, we were a white, upper-middle class family of English speakers, so it was easier for my parents to be pushy and get me tested.

The school also refused to make real accommodations for my LDs (their solution was an hour a day in the special ed room where I colored or played on the computer, learning nothing.) Again, my parents had to push and eventually sent me to a school for kids with LDs. It was a private school though and very small. If my parents weren’t educated and white and middle class, then I would likely not have gotten the help at all, because they had to use their social privilege to get me the help I needed. It shouldn’t be that way.

My grad school cohort was brought up better, possibly because our Dean was originally from Cuba, we had a professor who was Egyptian but raised in Saudi, two Black profs and a gay man. With some diversity both in administration and faculty, no way were we (who were also pretty diverse!) going to be allowed to remain ignorant. Because of my own experiences, I tend to assume that other psychologists are equally well-versed in cross-cultural issues. I about lose my cookies when I read stuff like this.

Bravo for your father. So many parents don’t feel they can stand up to The Doctor. My Mom was a bit like your Dad. When I came back from a school year in the hospital & at home recuperating from polio, the school system wanted to place me at “the CP (cerebral palsy) School.” I’m sure it had a real name, but nobody was using it with my Mom. She checked it out and determined that it was a variation on Meloukhia’s sitting-in-the-corner experience and said no way, no how was I going anywhere but back to the regular classroom with my friends.

Which of course was not handicap accessible, but that’s another story for another time.

Again, bravo for your Dad, and my apologies for the ass-hattery of some of my colleagues.

My parents had brought her in for assessment autonomously, though, so it didn’t impact her education. I don’t even want to think about how many children may have been held back due to that psychologist’s poor communication skills and judgey attitude.

This brought back memories of my gran. She became hard of hearing in her fifties and her hearing worsened over the decades. But for most of her life, we were able to all communicate well (if with occasional misunderstandings). But towards the end of her life, when her overall health worsened, she stopped wanting to use her hearing aid, and often couldn’t understand us even with the aid. We made do with writing things down, since sadly none of us, my gran included, had ever learned to use sign language. But eventuall, that no longer worked either.

There are always people who treat the elderly as if they were suddenly children again. It is a horrible practice, and I hated seeing onee of my aunts do the same to my mom. And I am sure that their lack of communication contributed a great deal to this. After all, it is so much easier to assume that someone has become “childlike” when that person can no longer take part in “adult” convcersation. My gran could still let us know what she wanted or didn’t want, but to my aunt, it was as if not being able to hear us was the same as not being able to undrstand us.