Here’s an interesting, but not surprising, article from the Health Behavior News Service:

New research suggests that Americans are more likely to socially reject children with mental illness than they are those with physical illnesses such as asthma.

Well...duh! Mental illnesses are scarier, misunderstood, less likely to be believed as a “real” illness. Even in circles where discriminatory comments about race, religion, ethnic background or even weight or age are unacceptable – “crazy” is still fair game.

Almost 30 percent of the 1,134 participants said they would not like their child to become friends of a child with depression, and almost one in four said the same thing about ADHD. Roughly 20 percent said they did not want a child with either ADHD or depression living next door. But when asked about friendship with children with ”normal troubles” and asthma symptoms, negative responses dropped to 10 percent or less in all categories.

Part of me wants to understand this – especially since I have a child so far outside the norm behaviorally. It requires a great deal of coaching and adult involvement sometimes to set up “normal” peer-to-peer interactions for LuLu. When I look at it from their side, I’m not sure I would want my child playing with LuLu. The study does go on to say that parents are less concerned that a mentally ill child attend the same school as their child, but they just don't want them to socially interact. For gosh sake folks, your kids are not going to catch my child’s neurological disorders!

The rejection seems to affect me more than LuLu – perhaps because I am better able to understand the subtle ways most people convey it, and she is socially impaired enough not to read the signals. At the times she knows she’s been rejected, my heart nearly breaks. And I don’t know how to tell other parents that it’s an incredible burden on me when they announce that they don’t hang out with us because their children feel uncomfortable around my child. We had some friends tell us about a year ago that LuLu is the reason why they don’t participate in some outings we do with a whole group of families.

It was painful to hear; especially since I wasn’t even asking them why they didn’t participate. “LuLu just makes our S very nervous. So t ask her to spend a whole weekend around LuLu would be too stressful. She is scared to be around her because of the tics and loud outbursts.” Oddly enough, S’s little sister shows great compassion toward LuLu. And this woman’s comments fall in the “if you can’t say something nice, keep it to yourself” category in my opinion. Although I believe she offered it up as a way to be honest (and maybe to ease her conscious a bit)…but it has forever changed my perception, sadly.

The burden on me is to figure out what to do in those situations. Do I try to keep the peace and maintain a “friendship” (although, let’s face it – reject my kid and my side of the relationship IS permanently changed)? Or do I point out to them that this is not only rude and discriminatory, but short-sighted as they are passing up the opportunity to teach their child something valuable about compassion, inclusion and concern for others? The times I’ve pointed it out I am sometimes accused of being bitter or “overreacting”. The times I am silent I stew about it and stay wounded for a very long time.

It's just one more battle to the multi-faceted challenge of raising special kids!