Money makes the world go 'round

So, I did something eith incredible brave, or exceptionally fool-hearty. Remember I was bitching about the emphasis placed on poverty have causitive connection to disability in kids? Well, part of the assignment for the class is to write "reflections" which are little one and two page papers about someting you experienced, how it related to the topic at hand, and how it will affect your future teaching. I guess the idea is to create teachers who alter their practice instead of teaching the same thing, the same way, year after year after year.

Well, I wrote my first reflection opposing the revailing theory about poverty and disability. I breifly described how I came from a disadvantaged background, and how I have managed to not be the crashing, disabled, crippled failure that my biography would predict if I were to leave it up to those people. I desribed how I was a decent mother, plugged into my children, and still had two that need speech services with one being ADD and the other being either extremely ADD or OD. I pointed out that the people who do the research come at it from a position of power and priviledge, and I recommended that someone look into the idea that in come cases, poverty is a symptom of the same problem that may have contributed to the disability, and the cause of disability.

And by symptom, I mean that when the parents are drug and alcohol abusers, the household is probably poor and the kdis are being paid attention to. I mean that when the parents are busy abusing one another, they probably aren't looking after the kids or coping well with work. I mean that mental illness in a parent can lead to weird kids, and un or underemployment. The poverty is a symptom or the problem, addicition, abuse, mental illness, not the cause of a learning disability in an otherwise healthy child.

I also happen to think that when people are poor because they just can't get a better job, like people who work as nursing aids, custodians, cooks, home ehalth aids, factory workers, then they are jsut poor. The kids live in a small house. They share a bedroom with siblings. They don't have the newest game system or the fastest bike. But the parents love them, get them as involved as possible, keep them on their homework and refuse to accept laziness in chores, homework, or any other endevore, that family is no more or less likely than the riches down the road to have a disabled child.

The problem is caused by BAD PARENTING. But POVERTY is not bad parenting. Poverty is a lack of funds.

Or maybe I am a raving lunatic.