They say having children opens your eyes. Well, one of my nieces is severely visually impaired. She is about to turn 3 and as far as we know she can see some bright lights and possibly colors. Every day she opens my eyes to a part of the world I knew virtually nothing about. 

When we first found out she was blind, my initial reaction was something along the lines of "Well that sucks but we can deal with that. After all mom and I are half deaf." I had NO CLUE just how much MORE impaired a blind child is than a deaf child. And more than that - I had no clue just how completely screwed up the world of VI child support is (VI = visually impaired).

For starters: in the USA there are no VI specific speech therapist. They just don't exist. And ALOT of the techniques you use on a sighted child to teach speech DON'T WORK on a VI kid. There are almost NO TOYS for a blind child. She needs things that have cool textures and make noise, and move and flash bright lights. Things that just sit there or you look at are boring. Do you know how few toys there are out there that fall into that category for kids past the 1-2 year mark?

OH! and get this: My niece is blind but otherwise she has no other impairments. She is developmentally delayed but that is b/c she's VI, not b/c of any sort of mental shortcomings. So prior to age 3, all of her various therapists have come to my sister's home to work with my niece. Well, as of her third birthday she has to start attending the local elementary school to receive services. 

As part of her intake evaluation to start at the school they administered an IQ test. Well based on the results of this test the school wanted to label my niece as mental retarded. Needless to say the family and her previous therapists were outraged. The measure used to determine her IQ used questions like "Can she interpret facial expressions?" and "If you throw a ball at her can she catch it?" which have ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the intelligence of a BLIND child. Can you believe it?? 

My brilliant sister was able to sway the panel in her meeting today by asking the person who was arguing for the MR (mentally retarded) diagnosis  to: 

"Please close your eyes. Okay, thank you. Now I'm making a facial expression at you. Can you tell me what the expression means? Now I'm going to throw a ball at you. Catch it. Oh, I'm sorry you were unable to do either of those tasks, I'm afraid we can't ignore your low score. You're now mentally retarded." 

Some how that managed to get the point across.  

I can't decide which all of this makes me want to do more- hit a whole bunch of people upside the head with a clue-by-four, become a lawyer so I can sue their hindquarters into providing the same caliber of services they do for non-visually-impaired children, go into politics so I can help revamp the process to make it easier for these people to get the help they need, continue in psychology and specialize in research on therapies and implications of disabilities on development and hope I can learn stuff there to help.