“You don’t have to be perfect.”
This insightful and profound statement is coming from this soon-to-be eighteen-year-old lovely, trilingual, beautiful and wonderful young lady who just happens to have Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome)—Arianna Dinwoodie-Palmes.
Arianna lives in Barcelona, Spain. She reads and speaks fluent Catalan, Spanish and English. She attends a school where classes are taught in Catalan and Spanish. She learned English from her dad, who is from the United States. She takes a theater class once a week with “typical” kids, personally takes care of enrolling in the course every three months and pays for all her classes. She also does gymnastics with kids who have some learning challenges. She lives in an inclusive world. She navigates the very big, chaotic city of Barcelona on her own, taking public transportation to and from school while meeting with friends for movies, lunch and other social events. She loves Zumba, singing and doing research projects on the Internet and is very concerned about ecology and pollution. She is finishing high school this year and is looking forward to trade school next year, focusing on administration, sales and customer service. She is a happy, caring, typical teenager, who also happens to have Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome).
The video (see above) was Arianna’s idea and she wrote her own scripts. These are her unedited thoughts and words—in three languages! Arianna’s level of function makes her normal. Arianna’s insight, personality, smile and overall goodness make her exceptional—exceptionally wonderful!
“You don’t have to be perfect.”
Such a simple, obvious, but profound statement, particularly when viewed in light of the still staggering numbers of fetuses identified as having Down syndrome that are aborted. Recent research states that in the U.S. there is a termination rate of 67% of fetuses following a prenatal diagnosis of DS. None of us are, none us will ever be and none of us need to be perfect.
Somehow our enlightened, educated and politically-correct society has created and perpetuated the myth that some of us are not miracles of creation, that we do not have limitless potential and thus are condemned by myopic prejudice to be deprived of the right to live; or are often condemned by perceptions of limited potential and given limited “appropriate” opportunities that are commensurate with the perceptions.
Arianna is one of our NACD kids. She has been on one of our TDI Targeted Neurodevelopmental Intervention Programs since she was a year old. She and thousands of other NACD kids are reflections of what can be, given the opportunity. Defining opportunity as having dedicated proactive parents who, when given the tools and the vision, can truly provide their child with an opportunity. We all need to be perceived as having unlimited potential and giving the opportunity to achieve, but we also need to realize that, “You don’t need to be perfect.”
After all, isn’t being less than perfect what defines us as being human?
—Bob
In a scientific article published in Behavioral Neuroscience, May 2013, researchers at the University of California Irvine found that environmental sensory and motor enrichment serves as an effective treatment for autism. This may be the first “official” study demonstrating that sensory/motor treatment can effect change in autistic children. (I actually applied for a government grant back in 1974 to research a significantly more comprehensive developmental-sensory/motor program. It was rejected by the government because there wasn’t any research that would show that it worked—which would have been the point of the study–but the reality is that academic institutions get the funds, not the people who are out there actually making the discoveries.) Sadly, most people in the field still don’t get it. Where would we be without such open-minded people who are in possession of such wisdom? We have since been able to compare literally thousands of children within the spectrum based on the treatments they received prior to NACD’s Targeted Developmental Intervention and with TDI, using the children as their own controls. We have been fine-tuning what works for over forty years and helping these children not only progress faster, but in some cases lose those dysfunctions and behaviors that define autism.