Sage

After reading the two websites about the program that S is doing with A, I feel even more annoyed at the legnths she is going to with her child.

I understand that a mother and father want the best for their children, and I understand that some of you feel that I'm being a bit harsh in my opnion. I do NOT think it is fruitless to raise a child with Downs, or ADD, or some other mental retardation. I'm not even trying to say it's fruitless to raise A and she should just be raised as a vegetable- it's her parent's choice how to raise her.

HOWEVER, my main beef is with the program itself. Read the Wiki article and the Quackwatch report on this technique- how the program blames the parents if the child isn't making progress, how there's no scientific data on the effectiveness of the program in the long term, and how draining it is finacially and emotionally on the parents following this program. It's hard for me to see S so feverently caught up in this program, spouting what it says, it's jargon and buzzwords, like they were the Gosples. I feel like she needed something to give her hope that her child would be normal, and so she grabbed at this program like a drowning woman at a life preserver. But I see it affecting her so much, taking up every single second of her day, and I get angry that there's ANYONE in this world who demands so much of a parent when the results just aren't proven.

A is missing parts of her brain- her brain doesn't even have folds like a normal person's. There are some things that she CAN do, like track things with her eyes, and S even says she repeats words sometimes when they're doing word comprehension. But she doesn't cry, doesn't babble, can't hold her head up, has seizures at least five times a day (even with meds), can't crawl.... honestly I'm not convinced that she's "there." To me, S's blind dedication to this program seems a way of not accepting the fact that her daughter is not whole and will never be whole. That's what sparked my thinking about "devlopmentally disabled" children and led me to reach my own conclusions about what I would do if I knew my child was going to be born with half a brain.

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