The “Wild” Side of Kids with Disabilities

When I first met Graciela Tiscareno-Sato, I was literally living in the wild. In 1991, Grace and I were both students in the U.S. Air Force Survival School, and we spent a week in the forest on the Canadian border, eating ants and worms and trying to make fire with sticks. I was terrible at this stuff, but Lt. Tiscareno – as she was known then – became a “go-to” person for everyone in the unit. She wasn’t much better at starting fires than the rest of us, but her can-do spirit made her feel like someone you could lean on.

So imagine my surprise when I saw her name in the “letters to the editor” file at Teaching Tolerance 18 years later. Grace didn’t know I worked here: she just had a story to tell, and was confident we would be interested. In the Air Force, when you take that kind of adventurous stab at something, people say you’re doing things “in the blind.”

Grace wanted to tell us about her “wild” child. Milagro was born 15 weeks premature, and while she’s thriving now, she never developed the ability to see. People told Grace that her daughter’s visual impairment would limit her physical activity. But early on, Grace and her husband could clearly see that their daughter was “wild” in the old-fashioned, boisterous-child sense of the word.

So Grace and her husband let their “wild” child run that way. They installed a pair of trapezes in the living room. They introduced Milagro to skateboarding and gym classes. Today Milagro is a gymnast, a downhill skier and just generally a kid who likes, in Grace’s words, “to fling herself into space.”

Grace produced a documentary [2] to offer other parents some hints on how to raise “wild” children with disabilities. In this film, there’s not a lot of preaching about theories of child development. Instead, the documentary is  an up-close story of Milagro’s unfolding interest in any activity that is daring and challenging, and the story of how Grace and her husband made a space for that interest.

Every major point is underscored with video of Milagro in action at various stages of life – swinging, skiing, tumbling and taking bold first steps into a number of other activities.

There’s a lot of raw material here to discuss with your colleagues. Are we overprotective of our children? If you’re teaching children with disabilities, what things are parents doing at home that you can emulate? How do you scaffold kids to behaviors that go beyond what most people expect of them?

I’d love to hear what you think about living “wild,” and living “in the blind.”