My 12-year-old daughter, Maggie, uses a wheelchair. In 2021, when school went in person for the first time during COVID, Maggie met her class in an open park near our house. We all wore masks and stood several feet apart, relearning how to be social. One of Maggie’s classmates approached her and said, “Why do you use that thing?” She pointed at Maggie’s wheelchair. My daughter said, “It’s hard for me to walk, and my legs get tired kind of fast.”
Maggie pointed at her classmate’s hijab and asked her, “Why do you wear that scarf on your head?” The little girl explained that it was a symbol of her religion.
The classmate’s mother seemed to wince a little when her daughter used the word “thing” to describe Maggie’s wheelchair, and I certainly resisted the urge to intervene when my kid stuck her finger in her new pal’s face to ask her about her hijab.
Maggie and her classmate moved on to talking about their teacher and their favorite video games. I stepped a bit closer to the classmate’s mom. We both apologized at the same time, then laughed. “They don’t get offended like we do,” she said.
“It’s like they really trust each other’s curiosity,” I heard myself say.
“Asking questions is a good thing,” the mom said.
I’d never thought about it in precisely these terms before this moment. Watching our daughters interact, I realized how much of my life beside Maggie pointed to these subtle but important truths.
When Maggie was 3 years old, she talked constantly, but nobody could understand her. She would later be diagnosed with a newly discovered genetic condition that causes both physical disabilities and a speech disorder, which meant she could understand and use language, but her sounds didn’t match her words.
Maggie was given a litany of early diagnoses. “Late talker” became “developmental delay” and then “articulation disorder.” By the time she started kindergarten, she’d been in speech therapy for four years. Maggie’s speech therapist helped us program a tablet to speak for Maggie when she pressed illustrated buttons to say words. Her first full sentence was, “I want more money!” After the device spoke for her, Maggie threw her head back and laughed, pointing at my purse. Her next sentence was, “Joke! I love Mommy … and birthday presents!”
By the end of kindergarten, Maggie’s speech had transformed, and nearly everyone could understand her without her device. Her speech therapist used words like “unprecedented” to describe Maggie’s progress. Her teacher called it “miraculous.” They weren’t falling into the trope of praising Maggie as inspirational just because she was disabled. The speech therapist and teacher were acknowledging, as best they could, how hard Maggie worked on her speech and how exciting it was to be able to understand her sentences.
The biggest reason Maggie’s speech improved was that every time Maggie pressed her tablet to talk, she repeated the words and sentences over and over verbally, training her own sounds. I caught her navigating away from the “talker” app in her tablet to record herself practicing words, her ABCs, and eventually, so, so many silly jokes. I never saw her frustrated while she practiced. In my view, Maggie practiced a lot because she thoroughly enjoyed connecting with people, and she worked super hard for every single word.
I became a speech therapist myself after witnessing Maggie’s journey over the years, realizing that the capacity to communicate is one of the most thrilling parts of being human. For years, I worked in a middle school with kids with speech disorders like my daughter as well as kids with autism, stutters and language disorders. I’m also neurodivergent, and I began most speech groups with a conversation about problem solving and diversity. “Everyone in this room has a diagnosis,” I said. Then, we practiced talking explicitly about our speech and language diagnoses. I asked the group about the differences between a diagnosis and a label, and we expanded our conversation outward, practicing asking and answering questions about our identities, experiences, families and cultural backgrounds.
In the last five years, the subject of being offended almost always popped up in these groups, like a microcosm of our society’s widespread conversations about trigger warnings and cancel culture. My colleagues and I discussed the nuances frequently: It’s hard enough to figure out how to talk to people we know well and love, as adults, when we have radically different ideologies or experiences. Imagine trying to guide kids — who are also navigating the drama of puberty — through the same divisive and vulnerable topics, especially when many of those kids have a specific disability in how they understand or express words.
There’s no easy answer. I told my students that mistakes are opportunities to learn. I told them that we can try to be gentle and compassionate with our word choices: We can’t always predict what words might hurt someone else’s feelings, so we need to remain open to their responses. We role-played repair strategies when communication went wrong. We talked about the “size of the problem.” I asked them: What size of what problem is bad enough to cancel someone? What is the alternative to “canceling” when things go wrong?
I reminded them that everyone in our group struggled with saying or choosing the right words, and when we are out in the world, we can’t know what other people’s experiences, diagnoses or struggles might be. One of my school’s mottos was, “Compassion is a two-way street.” I asked the group to come up with examples of situations when they felt so offended it was hard to be compassionate, and we talked about how to move up and down the compassion street, in both directions.
Guiding these groups was challenging but beautiful because the students and I created a space where we could safely make mistakes and learn from them. The rest of life is trickier — or so I thought before I witnessed the simple conversation in the park between Maggie and her classmate. In that small conversation, both kids didn’t perhaps ask the totally correct question, and neither got offended. They both truly sought to understand. Then, they moved on to more interesting subjects.
In that small conversation, both kids didn’t perhaps ask the totally correct question, and neither got offended. They both truly sought to understand. Then, they moved on to more interesting subjects.
The first time I told this story in one of my speech groups, I asked my students what they thought about Maggie’s interaction. A seventh grader said, “Maggie and her friend didn’t get hung up on word choice.”
“They were focused on meaning,” said an eighth grader.
“The fact that they stayed friends for a long time is what’s really important,” another eighth grader said.