For
children and youth with disabilities, I believe the core outcomes of
engagement, independence, and social relationships (EISR) still apply—as well
as quality of life for their families. My so-called expertise is limited to
young children but I am the father of a person with disabilities, and other
outcomes people mention for older children and adults (e.g.,
self-determination, feelings of belonging or membership, quality of life) in my
experience are all tied to the big three. Of course, that might just be me,
seeing everything through that lens.
For
school-aged children, academic success is also important, but I see EISR as
precursors to the ability to learn academic content. It’s just that we can’t
stop at EISR. We have to ask what they will be useful for—self-fulfilment,
becoming an interesting person and therefore having friends, getting a job, and
so on.
I
do think that self-determined satisfaction with one’s life is huge, within
reason. You and I might share some common ideas about what should be a
satisfactory life, based on our shared ability level and possibly some shared
interests, but that doesn’t qualify us to determine what a satisfactory life is
for someone else. On the other hand, we might have a responsibility to protect
people. If a person likes sitting in front of a video game hour after hour, we
might think this is a shallow, empty existence. The individual might think it’s
a rich, interesting, exciting existence. If the person’s hours in front of the
video game are during recreation time, that’s one thing. If the person doesn’t
hold down a job, because of his or her obsession with video gaming, that’s
another thing. We would presumably try to protect the person from penury by
teaching him or her that that the decision to forego employment in favor of the
video game is a bad one. A tricky issue. But the point I began with is that the
variety of ways people with disabilities define their quality of life might be
even bigger than the variety of definitions held by people without
disabilities.
