When Mary was a little girl, she loved to watch Barney the Dinosaur. We watched every episode and bought all of the Barney Movies. As Mary got older, we stopped watching Barney. We often wondered if we stopped watching because Mary lost interest or because we subconsciously decided she was too grown up for Barney.
Truth be told, we struggle with seeing Mary as the 32-year-old young woman that she is. In many ways, we are still waiting for her to grow up, but she is grown up! She may be “stuck” developmentally as a 2-year-old, but she is 32. She is growing and changing and effected by the environment she lives in, including the change in hormones! There are things that she enjoyed doing as a child, that she no longer enjoys, like swimming. We were surprised and saddened by this, as this was always a favorite activity of hers. But all of us can think back to things that we did 25 years ago that we no longer have the same affinity for. That is normal for anyone, including our special needs “kids.” The key is that we may have to help our children discover or build new interests. But, first we had to see Mary as she truly was — a beautiful young woman with innocence and limitations, but a young woman.
We’ve noticed that several individuals at her day program sport backpacks with Dora the Explorer or Elmo, and we aren’t saying that this isn’t a good decision for the individual. If Mary was verbal and able to tell us that she still wanted a Barney lunch box, we would probably comply. But she isn’t verbal so we often make some of these decisions for her.
For us personally, we needed the visual reminder that Mary is no longer a little girl. If there still were those visual clues that told us she was a young girl (i.e., Elmo back pack, Aladdin hair ties), it would be harder to see her as a young adult. We will admit that this is a tough transition for many parents to make. And like so many transitions, you and your spouse may not be seeing it the same way. We know this caused some conflict in our marriage as one of us wanted to continue to see her as a little girl and not a young woman (we will let you guess which one of us it was!).
We encourage you as a couple to talk about this. See if this is something one or both of you are struggling with. As always, we’d love to hear from you.
Great message! Thank you
This is helpful – thank you! My son is not cognitively impaired, but is physically very small. He is 9 years old and about the size of a 6 year old maybe. The steroid medication he is on, that enables him to walk for now, inhibits his growth. Because he is physically small and my youngest child, my tendency is to go to “Barney” as you have said. Krista Hennessy
Thank you so much for your comment. I think your transparency would be helpful to many of our readers.