A friend with a child with physical disabilities was in a water park. The child has special socks to keep the skin on her feet from being damaged, which can take months to heal. The 16 year-old lifeguard told her she had to have her child take the socks off, as socks were not allowed in the water park area.
My family was at a splash pad and my son, who is special needs and has eight different diagnoses, wanted to go down the water slide. But because at that point he couldn’t right himself physically at the bottom, so risked drowning, he needed to go down on my lap. The lifeguards told me that we couldn’t do it because policy stated that using the slide is only for one person at a time.
Do these scenarios sound familiar? Especially during the summertime, we special needs caregivers run into all kinds of issues in public spaces. These places have general public policies. Their young workers are told to enforce the policies. So they do. But they don’t know the law. In fact, often management doesn’t know the law for special needs individuals, either. They are legally required to have trainings on this, but lots of times, these things are very brief during trainings. They are quickly covered and moved past.
This is why YOU, as a special needs caregiver, need to know your rights.
You don’t even really need to know the law. I have had wonderful, lengthy debates with some of these types of places where I just kept stating that they were out of compliance with “special needs law,” and leaving themselves open for “legal action,” because of it. I didn’t even need to state what the law was. The fear that appears in their eyes when you mention special needs and legal action has often been immediate and impressive.
But, since we’re here, we might as well know the actual law. I promise you, I’ll keep it short and sweet.
By the way, I highly recommend that you not even bother having this conversation with the 16 year-old employees (not knocking them, LOVE them, but this is not their forte). When told that you can’t do what you need to do for your child by the youngins, explain briefly but then just ask for management. That is who you need to address and it’s just faster that way. Be sure you tell the young employee that you do not intend to get them in trouble so they don’t have to freak out about losing their job because they did what they were told.
Here’s a link that explains which laws do what:
For public spaces, you want to know about the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act). If you scroll down and click on the link for ADA, it will take you to what this law covers in public spaces. What you want to remember is the term “reasonable accomodation.” So any time you are in a public space and need to have the rules altered for your child to participate, you can use this phrase, “Through the ADA, your organization is legally required to make reasonable accomodations for anyone with a disability. In order to participate, my child needs you to allow [fill in what you need]. If you can’t give my child a reasonable accomodation in this situation, you are out of compliance with ADA. If you don’t like the accomodation I am asking for, what do you suggest we do instead? Because my child has the legal right to be here and use these facilities.”
You will see backpedaling and scrambling like you have never seen before.
If for some reason you don’t get what you need, please refer to the link above, which also explains how to file a complaint on that business.
If you have trouble remembering this stuff because, I don’t know, you haven’t SLEPT in years as a caregiver, take five minutes to print out this resource and tuck it into your wallet or purse. Then you don’t even have to remember, you can just pull it out to refer to or hand to them or whatever.
Problem solved.
Want more? I have released a book! It is written especially for you to uplift you as a caregiver, soothe you, help you navigate and, most importantly, help you to be OK. Take a look!