A Requiem for a Lost Summer and a Broken Spirit. In relative recent history many people with developmental disabilities have been subjected to the tyranny of behavior modification. How many of us who have done this work over our life time are familiar with terms like extinction, shaping,...

Krista J. Flint Looks Retrospectively at a Piece She Wrote Years Ago: I can’t believe I wrote this piece seven years ago when my now 14 year old was only seven. My three boys, Oliver (14) Simon (12) and Charlie (8) know first hand how much better their school, scout troop, tong soo do class,...

Better off Dead than Disabled?: The Royal Society of Canadian Experts Report released this week on End-of-Life decision making plays the all too familiar game of “duck and cover” regarding the effect of legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide on citizens with disabilities in...

Here is What I Know to Be True… There is a direct correlation between the way your organization’s leadership team treats your staff, and the way in which your staff treat the people they support. An environment suffocating under dictator like edicts, non-participatory decision...

The Guardian has documented a story that demonstrates the power of family leadership. Read how one families perseverance in a time when parents were encouraged… and moreover pressured, to surrender their children with disabilities to institutions, stood firm and raised their son in a...

Those of you who have been following this rabbit hole stream of consciousness – that I call a blog, will know that nearly a month ago now I wrote a piece on Cosmo Industries in Saskatoon Saskatchewan Canada. Through much correspondence and through the graciousness of the folks that run...

I have been following with great interest (Okay maybe more like RAGE) the controversy growing in Saskatoon Saskatchewan (say that 3 times fast my American friends!) over the exploitation of citizens with disabilities who attend a “work preparation day program” called Cosmo...

Lady Gaga, Popular Media, and Pushing Back the Tide I have been thinking a lot lately about what the general consensus is within community about the quality of life experienced by persons with disabilities. The messages abound-and most of them are dark, cloaked in a notion of pain and misery,...

This entire abominable race towards chromosomal and developmental perfection has got me worried…does it remind anyone else of a little social experiment that went totally off the rails in Germany in the 1940′s? The creeping resurgence of institutional thinking, segregated settings,...