Beyond Inclusion
How to Raise Anti-Ableist Kids
If the question is “How do you raise anti-ableist kids?” the answer is “Become anti-ableist and then model it through intention and action for your children.”
Parents want to be inclusive of their disabled and neurodivergent neighbors and want to pass these values along to their children. What holds them back is not having the education or experience on how to appropriately do this. Beyond Inclusion breaks down fifteen common forms of ableism, with explanations, examples, and first-person accounts. Doing better starts with knowledge.
Author Carrie Cherney Hahn offers activities and perspectives that help parents understand the ableism that exists within them and supports their ability to process and dismantle it so that they can model anti-ableist practices for their kids. Each chapter offers children’s resources that parents can use to nurture informed and anti-ableist ideals in their kids.
Inclusion is actually the bare minimum. Our work is to show our children how to become more understanding, more accepting, and more appreciative of disabled and neurodivergent people.
Carrie Cherney Hahn, MA, CCC-SLP, is a pediatric speech-language pathologist and mother. She has served all ages of children in a variety of settings. Hahn facilitated an autism support group for parents, created a parent education newsletter for families at KidsCare Home Health, and has presented on topics of using visual supports to enhance communication, supporting caregivers of disabled children, and ableism in service provision at professional conferences, universities, and for family advocacy groups. She now has her own practice serving clients through direct therapy and support and uses her business page to share information about disability and neurodivergence. Her writing has appeared on iNFORM and Dystinct magazine. She lives in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.
