Episode 58: Bad Touch

TRANSCRIPT OF “BAD TOUCH”

[rock guitar music]

MALE VO [00:03]
This is Bad Attitudes.

[rock guitar music]

LAURA [00:20]
Hello friends and strangers! Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast about Disability. I’m your host, Laura.

The episode in which I unironically advocate for putting children on leashes. Oh, yeah.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Jala Prendes. Thank you, Jala!

If you would like to sponsor an episode, visit ko-fi.com/badattitudespod and make a donation. Every donation gets a shout-out in a future episode and your donations help keep the pod running.

If you like this episode, share it and the podcast with your friends. Word of mouth is absolutely the best way to grow this podcast and our community. And please make sure you are rating and reviewing the podcast on your preferred platform. It really helps me out!

For questions, comments, or ideas, email badattitudespod@gmail.com or reach out through social media. Follow @BadAttitudesPod on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

As always, I want to remind you that disability is not a monolith. My experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community but I am not the only voice.

[rock guitar chord]

LAURA [01:47]
Some months ago — before Christmas, but after I wrapped up the pod for last year — I came across an Instragram post from a mom to a disabled daughter. I didn’t save the post, much to my chagrin, but it’s stuck with me all this time, so I guess I didn’t need to.

To be clear, I don’t know many details beyond what was shared in the post. It was a post from the mom of a disabled daughter, who I believe to be about 7 years old. I don’t know the nature of her disability, but I know from this story she at least sometimes uses a walker.

In the post, the mom shared that she, her husband, and daughter were out for the day, and the daughter was using her walker. Then, from essentially nowhere, a small child approached and viciously shook her daughter’s walker, which resulted in her daughter in the ER with a broken femur.

The fury I felt on behalf of this mom and the terror I felt on behalf of her daughter cannot be overstated. If I were a parent, I probably would have bodily thrown that child at its parents and then verbally eviscerated them all. When I was the daughter’s age, I also sometimes used a walker or forearm crutches when out in public. If this had happened to me, I probably also would have ended up in the ER, likely with more than just a broken femur. Even now, as an adult, if someone I don’t know and trust touches my wheelchair without my permission, I feel a surge of panic. I don’t know what their intentions are. I don’t know what they plan to do.

When I was in school, something my peers loved doing — especially the boys — was picking up the back of my chair like they were going to dump me on the floor. That is some of the scariest shit I have ever experienced. And it happened to me up through COLLEGE.

NO ONE — not a toddler, not an adult — has the right to touch someone’s mobility aids without express consent. It’s rude and annoying, but it’s also incredibly dangerous. Imagine if those idiot boys had actually managed to dump me out of my chair. To say the hospital would have been in my immediate future is an understatement. I’ve fallen out of my chair before, with no assistance needed, and my injuries were always numerous, and ended up with me missing things like my entire senior year of high school.

I know that small children are curious, and that one way they learn about the world is through touch. In the years after I graduated from high school, a family friend gave birth to two daughters, and when they were young, they loved running up behind me and trying to push my wheelchair. Because they were small kids and I was an adult, and stronger than them, I maintained control and was in very little danger. I also knew them and their parents very well, so I knew that if things got out of hand, their parents would pull the reins, so to speak. But, imagine if I was around the same age as them, in a child-sized chair. Imagine if they weren’t part of a family that I knew and trusted. Imagine the potential for this situation to go horribly wrong.

I’m not fear-mongering. It is perfectly fine to let small children explore mobility aids and assistive devices under controlled circumstances. We can’t educate our children about disability if we don’t expose them to it and explain it to them. But not having your children under control around mobility aids means shit can go horribly awry.

Which is why I advocate, in all seriousness, for small children to be leashed.

I know that somewhere out there, someone’s brain just screeched to a halt. Before you come at me saying that it’s inhumane to put children on leashes, please be prepared with acceptable reasons WHY it is inhumane. “Because we put dogs on leashes,” is not an acceptable reason.

There are two main benefits to putting dogs on leashes: Their safety and the safety of others. That seems like a pretty humane reason to reel our kids in. Toddlers, small children, and dogs all want their independence, but they do not possess the emotional or mental capacity to use it responsibly. Not without training. People train kids as surely as they train dogs, they just call it something else. Education. Parenting. Ritalin. You get it.

I will tell you something else. I trust my dogs around mobility devices WAY more than I trust small children. My dogs explore a new mobility device by sniffing, maybe a tentative lick, not by shaking it like it’s a polaroid picture. My dogs also take it seriously when someone says “no” in that certain tone of voice. No offense, but generally speaking, your womb fruit has selective hearing, at best.

I’ve also noticed that people pay more attention to what their dogs are doing than what their kids are doing. Take the parent in the aforementioned story. If they had been paying attention to their wayward offspring, I highly doubt the daughter would have ended her day in the ER. As a rule, adults move faster than toddlers, so theoretically, they could have stopped their child. But they will watch their dogs with an eagle-eye to ensure no one is aggressively humped.

I know kids get away from parents all the time, but wouldn’t that be at least somewhat mitigated if said child was tethered to the parent in some way? Oh, look at that. Another “pro” for leashing kids. Imagine if you could say, “I just turned my back for five seconds,” and the kid was STILL THERE.

Obviously, if your child is mature enough to follow instructions and respect boundaries, they don’t need to be leashed. I’m not a complete monster. But just because a kid is old enough to be free from the constant constraints of a stroller does NOT mean they are old enough to be free wheeling through public spaces.

Also, because I’m sure someone will be thinking it, the fact that the daughter was injured is not her mom’s fault. I won’t entertain the idea that she didn’t “protect” her child because it’s not her JOB to police other people’s children! Can you imagine the outcry if she had bodyslammed this little toddler before he got within grabbing distance of her daughter’s walker? Because I can, and it would not have gone well for her. That mom had no way to predict what this strange child was going to do. She was out enjoying a day with her family. She should be able to expect that other parents are parenting their kids. That’s a totally reasonable expectation.

This isn’t about mom-shaming. I’m not shaming the younger child’s parents. I mean, I am, but not in a mom-shaming way. This isn’t an instance of, “Your kid is crying, you’re a horrible mother.” This is an instance of, “Your child actively hurt another child and you didn’t do anything to prevent it.” I’m sure that parent was horrified by what their child did. But they could have prevented it.

It would have been reasonable for that parent to talk to her child in an age-appropriate way about the walker and its purpose and NOT LET THE CHILD TOUCH IT. Kids are never too young to learn to keep their hands to themselves. It’s never too early to start teaching them to make and respect boundaries. And it’s never too early to start teaching them about disability and respecting the devices that accompany it.

And it’s not inhumane to put a leash on a rowdy toddler. I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and leashing your kids was a common practice. I don’t know what happened to make it fall out of fashion, but, honestly, it just makes good sense. Your kid wants to walk on their own two feet but can’t be bothered to hold your hand? Leash ‘em. Ankle-biters have a tendency to wander away? Leash ‘em. I mean, seriously, how helpful would it be to have a retractable leash on a kid? They’ve gone too far away? One push of a button and ZIP, they’re right back where they belong.

It IS inhumane to let your children run amok and potentially cause serious harm to innocent bystanders. I would fully support the posting mom if she wanted to sue that little hellion for all the pennies in his Fisher Price piggy bank. Medical bills AND pain and suffering. Because that little girl is going to be traumatized. “Kids are resilient,” is a popular refrain, but that’s not the whole story. I’ve spoken about my medical trauma, and if you think this little girl isn’t going to be affected by what happened, you are not paying attention.

I couch a lot of things in humor, but I really do think more parents should leash their children. Make sure they can’t escape. Put a combination lock on that sucker if you have to. Bottom line: Control your kids. Or better yet, teach your kids to control themselves. But if they don’t have the skillset for it yet, YOU do it.

And while we’re on the topic, control your own damn selves. Adults are FAR more guilty of grabbing mobility devices without permission. I swear to God, if I could figure out how to electrify my wheelchair, I one thousand percent would. I would enjoy nothing more than giving some motherfucker a couple thousand volts for touching my chair without permission. Zap, zap, bitches.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll talk to you in the next one.

[11:32]
[rock guitar music]