Magic Valley NLP

On this page is an excellent metaphor for what it is like to have a child with special needs. I have also included a second metaphor, a parody on the first.  Both are excellent.  As far as I know they are not copyrighted and you can share them. I have shared them often. 

Welcome to Holland
By Emily Pearl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this:

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans... the Coliseum, Michelangelo's David, the gondolas of Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!", you say. "what do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life, I've dreamed of going to Italy!"

The stewardess replies, "There's been a change in the flight plan. We've landed in Holland and it is here you must stay."

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place full of pestilence, famine and disease. It is just a different place. So, you must go and buy new guidebooks. You must learn a whole new language. You will meet a whole new group of people you would never had met. It is just a different place. It is slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy, but after you have been there while and you catch your breath, you look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That is what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever, ever go away because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland. 

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Holland Schmolland
by Laura Kreuger Crawford

If you have a child with autism, which I do, and if you troll the Internet for information, which I have done, you will come across a certain inspirational analogy.  It goes like this: Imagine that you are planning a trip to Italy.  You read all the latest travel books, you consult with friends about what to pack, and you develop an elaborate
itinerary for your glorious trip.  The day arrives.   You board the plane and settle in with your in-flight magazine, dreaming of trattorias, gondola rides and gelato.   However, when the plane lands you discover, much to your
surprise, you are not in Italy -- you are in Holland.   You are greatly dismayed at this abrupt and unexpected change in plans.  You rant and rave to the travel agency, but it does no good.  You are stuck.  After a while, you
tire of fighting and begin to look at what Holland has to offer.  You notice the beautiful tulips, the kindly people in wooden shoes, the French fries and mayonnaise, and you think,  "This isn't exactly what I planned, but it's not
so bad.   It's just different."   Having a child with autism is supposed to be like this -- not any worse than having a typical child -- just different.

When I read that, my son was almost three, completely non-verbal and was hitting me over a hundred times a day.   While I appreciated the intention of the story, I couldn't help but think,  "Are they kidding? We are not in some peaceful countryside dotted with windmills.  We are in a country under siege -- dodging bombs, trying to board overloaded helicopters, bribing officials -- all the while thinking,  "What happened to our beautiful life?"

That was 5 years ago.   My son is now 8 and though we have come to accept that he will always have autism, we no longer feel like citizens of a battle torn nation.    With the help of countless dedicated therapists and teachers, biological interventions, and an enormously supportive family, my son has become a fun-loving, affectionate boy with many endearing qualities and skills.  In the process we've created. well. our own country, with its own unique traditions and customs.

It's not a war zone, but it's still not Holland.    Let's call it Schmolland.


In Schmolland, it is perfectly customary to lick walls, rub cold pieces of metal across your mouth and line up all your toys end to end.  You can show affection by giving a "pointy chin."  A "pointy chin" is when you act like
you are going to hug someone and just when you are really close, you jam your chin into the other person's shoulder.  For the person giving the "pointy chin" this feels really good, for the receiver not so much - but you get used to it.   For citizens of Schmolland, it is quite normal to repeat lines from videos to express emotion.  If you are sad, you can look downcast and say "Oh Pongo."   When mad or anxious, you might shout,  "Snow can't stop me!" or  "Duchess, kittens, come on!" Sometimes, "And now our feature presentation" says it all.   In
Schmolland, there's not a lot to do, so our citizens find amusement wherever they can.    Bouncing on the couch for hours, methodically pulling feathers out of down pillows, and laughing hysterically in bed at 4:00am, are all
traditional Schmutch pastimes.
The hard part about living in our country is dealing with people from other countries. We try to assimilate ourselves and mimic their customs, but we aren't always successful.  It's perfectly understandable that an 8-year-old boy from Schmolland would steal a train from a toddler at the Thomas the Tank Engine Train Table at Barnes and Noble.  But this is clearly not understandable or acceptable in other countries, and so we must drag our 8 year old out of the store kicking and screaming while all the customers look on with stark, pitying stares.  But we ignore these looks and focus on the exit sign because we are a proud people.   Where we live, it is not surprising when an 8-year-old boy reaches for the fleshy part of a woman's upper torso and says, "Do we touch boodoo?"  We simply say, "No we don't touch boodoo" and go on about our business. It's a bit more startling in other countries, however, and can cause all sorts of cross-cultural misunderstandings.   And, though most foreigners can get a drop of water on their pants and still carry on, this is intolerable to certain citizens in Schmolland who insist that the pants must come off no matter where they are, and regardless of whether another pair of pants are present.

Other families who are affected by autism are familiar and comforting to us, yet are still separate entities.   together we make up a federation of countries, kind of like Scandinavia.  Like a person from Denmark talking with
a person from Norway, (or in our case someone from Schmenmark talking with
someone from Schmorway), we share enough similarities in our language and
customs to understand each other, but conversations inevitably highlight the
diversity of our traditions.  "Oh your child is a runner?  Mine won't go to
the bathroom without asking permission."  "My child eats paper.  Yesterday he
ate a whole video box." "My daughter only eats 4 foods, all of them white."  
"My son wants to blow on everyone."  "My son can't stand to hear the word no.
We can't
use any negatives at all in our house."  "We finally had to lock up the VCR
because my son was obsessed with the rewind button."

There is one thing we all agree on:  we are a growing population.

10 years ago, 1 in 10,000 children had autism.

Today the rate is approximately 1 in 250.

Something is dreadfully wrong.   Though the causes of the increase are still
being hotly debated, a number of parents and professionals believe genetic
pre-disposition has collided with too many environment insults -- toxins,
chemicals, anti-biotics, vaccines -- to create immunological chaos in the
nervous systems of developing children.  One medical journalist speculated
that these children are like the proverbial "canary in the coal mine" here to
alert us to the growing dangers in our environment.    While this is
certainly not a view shared by all in the autism community, it feels true to
me.

I hope that researchers discover the magic bullet we all so desperately
crave.   And I will never stop investigating new treatments and therapies
that might help my son.   But more and more my priorities are shifting from
what "could be" to "what is."   I look around at this country my family has
created, with all its unique customs, and it feels like home.  For us, any
time spent  "nation-building" is time well spent.

You know you're in Schmolland when....

 …you're picking up the living room and you notice someone has used one of your many copies of "Procedural Safeguards for Children with Special Needs and Their Families Under IDEA (revised 7/02)" as a bookmark.

 ...your 6-year-old comes to you with his eyes alight, jumping up and down and screaming, “Mom, David gave me EYE CONTACT!!"  (David is the non-ASD baby brother, and was only two months old at the time!)

 ...you don't find anything too unusual about saying, "Get your tongue up off the floor this minute!" while browsing in a scrapbook store.  

  ...you precede sentences with the words, "Eyes on Mom" all the time. 

...you fnd yourself holding your breath in the bathroom so your child won't discover you are in there and ask through the door 15 times, "Mom, are you in there?" just to hear you answer "yes" 15 times!

 ... you can quote state special education regulations verbatim, without any notes (chapter and verse!).

... you decide that it is better to let a child pull out a $1.50 spool of thread because you know the child is safely occupied for at least an hour while you finish your sewing project (LAST Easter's, that is).

... you accept ketchup as a 'vegetable.'

... you don't see any pictures on the walls because they are continually pulled down and the glass from the frames gets broken.

... you save artwork on walls that demonstrate mastery of an ABA concept/lesson/target.

... you send rejoicing e-mails to your friends because your ASD child tried to lie to you for the first time.

... you can quote the entire scripts for every Disney movie ever made into video!!

 ....you fix dinner according to colors and textures;   buy clothes according to texture and color and you know all the words, music and lyrics to, "......................." (insert favorite video). 

…you are so used to giving praise to your child that you forget everyone doesn't need it.  I was at the pharmacy and the old pharmacist was having such a hard time getting the sack stapled.  I just stood there watching him struggle (looked familiar, sort of like my son trying to cut a straight line) and when he finally got the sack stapled, I said "Way to go, you rock!"  I didn't even think before I spoke.

…when you try to teach ‘functions’ of everything you do!  We were teaching my son "functions".  While I was curling my hair one morning, and he was watching me, I asked "What am I doing with this curling iron?"  My son replied, "Cooking hair"....

…you take pictures off the church walls before the rest of the family enters, for fear your son will try and take them off ...again.

…you can't go to the bathroom and close the door, and your son has a fit if you flush before he can.

 …you make a scrapbook page of your 10 year old tying his shoe for the first time, (taking 4 years to do it)...

 …you have to travel with a "Barney" cassette tape on a home buying trip.  After days and days of driving around with the realtor and listening to Barney, you are surprised that the 60 year old realtor knows how to whistle all of the Barney tunes, and he didn't even know he was doing it.

 …you are in a hotel elevator and your 10 year old grabs a pop out of a man's hand, takes a sip and then dumps it, right there at his feet… YIKES

  …your autistic child pushes someone in anger and you feel like cheering because they actually realized there was someone next to them.

....your child runs up to a stranger who is walking their dog, he licks the dog, and you smile and walk away.

 ....everyone sees the Today Show and calls you to tell you about the new way to "cure" your child.

  ....your child wakes up at three in the morning laughing in the dark. You would laugh too if it weren't for the fact that it stopped being cute after two straight weeks.

 …you never get to use the bathroom without being asked, “What’s you doing??”

 …your son brings home a permission slip from school to go to Lagoon (an amusement park called "the fun spot of Utah") and your son insists you check the NO box. Because he is afraid of the rides.

 …you haunt the local thrift stores for stereos that work, knowing that your son will tear them apart the second he gets a chance....  Your neighbors give you their broken appliances so your son can tear them apart...your son owns 5 vaccums and he asks for them for his b-day and Christmas every year.....(he's 22)

...he belches loudly always followed with "Is that a good thing to do?”

You might be in Schmolland.

 You know you’re in Schmolland when…

 When my son was about six years old we went to dinner at Red Robin. I ordered chicken fajitas which I had never ordered before. If you have ordered these, you know that they come on a sizzling, steaming plate. It is all very dramatic, lol.

 When the server came to bring me my fajitas, my son took one look at the platter coming towards our table and leapt out of his chair and yelled, "FIRE, FIRE!".

 The other patrons were quite surprised. I was very impressed!  With his language and cognitive delays, that was an awesome feat : )

 …chanting with your hands held over your ears is a perfectly acceptable way of saying: "Thank you, I have had a lovely time but I must be going now."