Dear Gus Walz,
You know what I really like about you?
Your love is so big it got the world talking.
Respect,
Julianne
It’s a bold move starting a doctorate at 59 & 11/12ths.
I have a full private practice earned in 50-minute hours, shaped by the repetition of vowel digraphs, writing frames and Lady Macbeth. For any woman who has found herself late in life suddenly in need of financial independence, it can seem profoundly counterintuitive to halve your business.
My business is not just a revenue stream: reducing my hours means working directly with less children in need. I’m not virtue signalling here, suggesting that working with neurodivergent kids is somehow an act of service and not gainful employment. Nothing gets my goat like learning support which is well-meaning but without the rigorous training atypical cognition deserves. Ire is also reserved for the nascent wave of organisations profiteering from the desperate search for solutions beyond the mainstream. If you follow me, you know that I have a bone to pick with these covert iterations of neurotypical privilege.
At the end of the day, consulting and teaching hours are my business because I have chosen to make one thing my business:
Restoring dignity to neurodivergent kids
Kids who have been singled out in childhood as having needs so special that they can’t really expect the support they need.
Kids who everyone knows have a problem.
Kids who are routinely dismissed as unable and at risk of believing it.
Kids who feel bad in school every single day because they aren’t good enough.
Gus Walz may be non-verbal, but what a capacity for communication! I have dated adult men with worse communication skills. Seeing Gus at the Democratic convention, I know the preparation it must have taken to get him there - over not just the preceding days but the years. What brings me to tears every time I watch the reel is not just Gus’ unfettered joy, but the surety that Gwen and Tim Walz cultivated a home where Gus is given permission to shine: an oasis of dignity in a world which stigmatises and devalues 20% of our children.
That’s a big number.
This autumn, I am embarking on a doctoral programme at University College London to research the experience of stigma in children with learning differences. I’m interested in an especially tender moment in psychological development where a child, fresh from the known parameters of home, learns for the first time that there is something wrong with them.
In public -
In the social setting of school -
Amongst peers.
The verb ‘to out’ seems poignant, as the involuntary disclosure that you are different and less-good-than seems to me to have implications for later educational self-advocacy and self-esteem. That’s before you add to the mix what any school believes and values, and how that shows in daily classroom practice.
While there is some research about stigma and learning differences, little exists examining stigma among the cohort let’s just call your bog-standard SpLDs: these ‘hidden disabilities’. Unless a behavioural difficulty brings them to the fore, my experience is that lovely bright cool weird kids (my fave) make up an increasing percentage of the mainstream classroom and they’re not being treated with the same respect as TDs - typically developing kids. And I do not like that one bit. Nor do they.
So Gus, Gwen and Tim, and all the other kids and parents swimming against the tide of neurotypical privilege - you are my 60th birthday present to myself: the time to research and write about your experience. I have spent 20 years observing what I believe is institutionalised stigmatisation of children, young people and families, and I’m ready to speak up. I will miss the daily whirlwind of laughter, fury and gossip, Hitler’s rise to power, and the implications of Scrooge’s childhood. But at the end of the day, everyone deserves their chance to shine.