I can fight these in a 504 scenario with hard counters. I can show the school empirically that no one is free of either anxiety or free of emotion in decision making, males and females alike. Can most parents do this without specialized knowledge on the fly during 504 process or at a doctor's office? A little unfair to the unsuspecting.
I don't know if I made any more sense but I'd be happy to later post definitions of bias types, external validity. I'll spoiler them to conserve space no point in everyone scrolling half a mile.
No rush TT - I hope you are enjoying the holidays. I'm just taking this thread in.
Are there any simple strategies to nip the "mom is just anxious" thing in the bud that you could share so the rest of us could keep them in our back pocket? I've only had this problem with a couple of people, but once it gets started, it seems it can snowball.
Yes, that explanation made more sense to me. Thanks.
Links, my strategy with such people is two-pronged, if you will:
a. note this carefully and realize that they have an axe to grind-- their disbelief makes them
dangerous. I will NOT leave my child in such a person's hands without me being present to run interference and triple-check safety. Even now, if I get this kind of "vibe" from a person, I hear that Star Trek
red-alert noise in my head, and I
tell my DD to watch out for this person-- and why.b. Present
fact. Not opinion-- fact-- which is incompatible with statements that they've made to me, or the underlying beliefs that are likely to be behind them. Then ask innocent-sounding questions about what they think that means... Yes, this is slightly manipulative. I don't mind. It also takes
time to let them churn on it, as often as not-- and THAT, sometimes I
do mind, because it can be seriously inconvenient or stressful. But I have never ever had a person that didn't-- eventually-- see it my way.
For example, when my DD was about four, my mother and I got into a major argument over why I wouldn't let my DD eat watermelon that she had sliced up in her kitchen and brought to my house. "It's not house policy" wasn't good enough. So I bullied her using the kinds of quantities found in research papers on threshold doses (at the time), asked her just HOW confident she was that she had not used anything nutty in her kitchen within two days.. three days.... longer? Just HOW sure was she that a microscopic crevice in that container wasn't harboring any egg residue? Pointed out that DD reacted very significantly even to
steam-cleaned lines used to make pasta... and then I asked her how she'd feel if she
were wrong. Would it still feel "worth it" to her then?
When she was five, her allergist espoused the opinion that sending her to school would be "work, but feasible." He simply didn't believe in aerosol-provocation of systemic reactions. I
knew that he was wrong in DD's case, but no amount of MY opinion was going to budge him. So I bided my time, and let him SEE that I wasn't crazy or over-reactive. I graciously told him that we'd have to agree to disagree, because I
knew what I'd seen. We did reach common ground in that he conceded that any environment which was THAT contaminated was probably an unacceptably high risk for eventual inadvertent ingestion anyway, and so it was a good sign to "vacate the location" even if he didn't think that inhalation was a real "risk." In and of itself, I mean. I must say that my DH's skepticism a year before that hadn't done much to help my relationship with the allergist at that point in time, either. Another story, that one.
After four years of immunotherapy injections, he and his office staff had seen enough weird and impossible things from her that
they believed me. Completely. Of course, I think that it also has helped that he now has had the personal, delightful experience of turning over a kid with about three times DD's threshold to a school setting, too... so he gets it now in a way that he seriously just couldn't wrap his head around previously.
Bottom line, I find it unhelpful to get angry. I wouldn't be ANGRY if my cat were unable to unlock the deadbolt if I locked myself out of the house, after all. Ignorance isn't malevolent. Mostly, with food allergies, ignorance is fueled by two things: 1. previous anecdote that is counter to what they are hearing from me, and/or 2. sound bites or media reports from research studies that offer an "average" snapshot. The latter is only helpful if your experience happens to
be roughly average. Otherwise it is distinctly UN-helpful.