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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. The R-word is a euphemism for retard and retarded, words that are considered offensive and disrespectful when used to describe or insult individuals with intellectual disabilities or to insult people, places, and things by comparing them to individuals with intellectual disabilities.
The campaign against the R-word comes at a time when the term mental retardation is also falling out of use, increasingly replaced by intellectual disabilities or cognitive disabilities in medical and legal language. The verb "retard" means to hinder or to make something slow. Over time, the word "retard" came to be used as an insult, tossed around the playground as a synonym for "stupid" or "idiot. As advocates began to work at changing the medical terminology, Rosa's Law was passed in The law eliminated all references to mental retardation in U.
New terminology was also adopted for the DSM-5 in and in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases ICD in , replacing mental retardation with intellectual developmental disorders and intellectual disability. People may object when use the older term in a medical or legal sense without meaning it as an offense.
Protests over the use of the R-word in the movie Tropic Thunder in grew into a movement to remove those words from common speech. A website was set up to offers resources for those who wish to encourage others to take a pledge. Special Olympics started a campaign at r-word. Lauren Potter, an actress with Down syndrome who played cheerleader Becky on Glee , made a PSA denouncing the R-word that can be seen along with many other videos on R-word. Though many folks who defend the use of the R-word claim that such efforts mean "you can't say anything anymore," there are in fact many less-offensive words that work as substitutions.
Make your speech more varied and less hurtful. Children still hear about Simple Simon and Epaminandos. Everybody believes that Esau, although strong and a hunter, was a fool, who sold his birthright cheap and probably needed better parental supervision.
The need for such consideration has arisen partly owing to the industrialization of society and the consequent growth of cities, partly because of compulsory education. The increases in the social services which characterize modern society have led to a growing recognition of this need.
Today it is still rare to find existing the conditions which would render it possible for subnormal children to make full use of their limited abilities and potentialities. How then orient the general public to a real and growing understanding of the rightful place of the mentally retarded in our present society?
When my Stephen was born he seemed like any other normal healthy infant. He was full grown, ate and slept well, and was lovely to look at. The obstetrician and pediatrician found him perfect. Had I not had another child born six years earlier, I might not have suspected anything either. But from the moment Stephen was laid in my arms, I felt that something was not quite right with him. He was too quiet, even for a new-born infant; he was too good; he felt too close and yielding and soft against me.
When the nurse said he was the best baby on the floor, never cried at all, just ate and slept, my heart jumped within me. Yet I did not know quite how to express my misgivings and so kept quiet. After all, who was I to question my doctors, both of whom were teaching professors, or my husband who also was a physician, well-trained and practiced general medicine? I point these things out because they have bearing upon the great need for training amongst physicians and nurses in early recognition of signs of mental retardation.
Probably a neurologist would have detected signs, but the ordinary physician was not trained to think and observe in terms of possible defect, except in cases of gross physical or neurological abnormality. I certainly had no comprehension from my academic training and bowing literary acquaintance with the terms moron, imbecile, idiot, of the hazards which confront a child in the pre-natal and natal periods.
I had only the feel which a mother develops from close handling and management of a child. I took my baby home. He progressed normally enough, but not fast enough for me.
He picked his head up a little later than he should have; he did not roll over until six months old; he was late in reaching for objects, late in walking, late in recognizing people. By two years, Stephen was walking, he was toilet-trained, he was sleeping in a big bed, he could handle a spoon at feeding time; he was not talking, not even making any baby sounds. Above all he was good, good, good — sweet, lovely looking, tractable, almost desperately so, because it was becoming more apparent that something was not right with this child.
By this time my physician-husband must have known what the trouble was, and my pediatrician; but nobody wanted to tell me. Then the blow came. I remember I went alone that next day to hear about Stephen. I knew much was amiss; perhaps I went alone because I could not bear to face my husband and the awful truth with other eyes watching. I was not prepared for what I did hear. I was told that Stephen was severely mentally retarded; that he would never develop beyond childhood; that I should take steps to send him away immediately to some institution for the rest of his life for the sake of my other child and my family.
She told me that an institution can be very good for a child who needs that environment. I heard her voice dimly through my confusion, the blood rising in terrible painful waves to my face and head.
I took my dead child who was living and went home with him. I prided myself on my Radcliffe training; I had a large and general knowledge, I thought; knowledge of mental retardation was not part of it. I had never seen an institution for the retarded; I did not even know they existed, and my picture of any institution was vague, dismal and Dickensonian. My husband knew very little more. I was alone, I had nowhere to turn for a helping hand, no one to tell me what this place was really like, nowhere to go back to for another talk, for a bit of assurance, a suggestion perhaps that there might be some temporary alternative.
No one thought at all that perhaps one does not send a little boy away from a happy home just because he is different. Had Stephen gone away, my part in his story might have ended. But he stayed with us; two other children came to join the family circle, and Stephen had his place in it. I did not have any particular plan for him. We found a little nursery school that accepted him. The nursery school teacher gave me the first real advice on handling Stephen.
Stephen began after his sixth birthday to talk — not as you or I — but intelligibly to those who lived with him. He was dressing himself to a greater extent. He grew rapidly physically, slowly in mental development. Every sound that he uttered, every coordinated movement he made, I cherished and tried in my inexpert way to cultivate. We did well enough. Stephen was happy. The other children accepted him as part of the family; the neighborhood in which we lived did not shun us. There were occasional problems that arose in handling Stephen in a community situation, but they were not radically different from day-to-day community relations that arise with any family.
We operated on as natural a basis as possible. Stephen himself began to contribute to the family. He hung up his own clothes, he hung up the clothes the other children left about; he emptied wastebaskets; he went up and downstairs tirelessly on the many errands of a big household. He never went far from the door and was always available. If directions were simple and given one at a time, he performed miraculously well and increasingly well as demands were put upon him.
And when there was nothing to do, Stephen liked to sit by himself in company. What a blessing to a busy mother to have a child among the others who was not constantly injecting his personality into the schedule of the day. What a blessing to brothers and sisters to have someone always available.
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