Loneliness
The Most Disabling Condition.
Dr. Anne Snowdon has published her report “Strengthening Communities for Canadian Children with Disabilities”. Commissioned by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, the study concludes that most children with disabilities in Canada are isolated and can count few if any meaningful and reciprocal relationships in their lives outside of their immediate families.
“Communities tend to have more opportunities for children in the zero-to-six, maybe zero- to eight-year-old age range, but when we’re working with children who are 18 or 21 or 24, there are many, many fewer opportunities,” she said in an interview…When families were asked to describe their child’s friendships with peers, 53 per cent said their child has “no close friends” or only “one close friend.”
It’s a subject that “really reaches at the heartstrings when you talk to these children and their families,” said Snowdon.
“More than half of them had one or had no friends. So that is a very compelling red flag for me, that we need to work harder in our communities to help them maintain and to really build those social networks beyond no friends, and-or just one friend, because we all know nobody really thrives with just one friend.”
Sometimes the very foundational systems we put in place to provide children, with care, early intervention, special settings for education and sports, can be significant contributing factors to their over all loneliness, these systems can create barriers and a gradual but profound shift from real community into a life of paid service delivery.
Everyone needs a foundation. A strong, rock solid foundation in community. One that is based one shared interests, commonalities, even geography. Relationships that are real and alive and enduring bloom and foster in naturally occurring settings based on things that kids care about or are good at, not in places where children are grouped together based on what the community perceives to be most broken about them. This is the grounding and connection that all human beings need to thrive.
We know that for some of our most vulnerable citizens that foundation can be crumbling, deteriorating, and in the most devastating of situations virtually non-existent.
Citizens with disabilities are often people who have lived at the mercy of service delivery, lived lives lacking in unpaid relationships, who have lived in institutional settings, folks who float through this life with nothing that connects them in real and meaningful ways to the world and to it’s communities.
This lack of terra firma, of relationships, of love, or friendships sets us afloat in this life, occasionally touching down to get a taste the real flavour of family. Then before the gravity of respect, rights, or the ties that bind us to each other, get a firm hold on the legitimacy of citizenship, identities are often reduced and erased by shifting government priorities, vanishing funding, and rhetorical policies. These observers become tourists in their own lives, floating off again into the atmosphere… Such is often the reality for many citizens with disabilities.
Perhaps Simon and Garfunkel got it wrong…perhaps the problem is not in being a rock, but in being a rock who doesn’t know how it got to be a rock, or how it relates to other rocks…. Maybe the secret is in understanding how all the rocks make up an island…Like John Donne said…”No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
Who is a part of your “main” and who can we help bring to the “main” of people with disabilities in this world…for whom isolation and loneliness keeps them from attaching to the soil and sinew of this life.
Al Etmanski and Vickie Cammack of PLAN have long known this to be true. Thank goodness for personal support networks and TYZE (www.tyze.com). The future of our children with disabilities need not be lonely.
Really liking your website and message. I’ve come to think this is the most important conversation and we need to keep having it. Our organization came to that realization the hard way, by spending time with folks and realizing at thing we thought we did well was something that wasn’t priorised and which our stakeholders didn’t know how to do . It should, indeed, be a “red flag” when no one but the individual’s workers come to a planning meeting, or only his mom. Yet our organizations are not trained to see it as such and it’s only recently in BC that our government has addressed the gap with some great messaging around community safeguards. Most agencies don’t train for it, however, and for probably 99% of the staff that come to our workshops it’s new information (though the agency will often say it’s not). And families have few supports around figuring out what to do when they see the gap. tyze only works for people who already have networks, and a) PLAN has mixed reviews from consumers b) what does it mean that we’re willing to hand over responsibility for something central in life? The thing that research now tells us keeps us healthy, makes recovery more certain when we do become ill, supports our mental well being, makes us live longer, gives us more access to employment and opportunity and increases our executive functioning?
This is a huge red flag for me as a mother but should also be something that society concerns itself with. Inclusion in a community is great but if that means my son works in a store and then goes home alone to an empty apartment until his next shift than we have not reached the full meaning of inclusion. My son has one friend, many peers but only one true friend. He has a great personality, loves animals, wonderful reader and loves watching Big Bang Theory. How do I, as a Mom help him make social connections? It is an ongoing concern for me and for other families with children like ours.