Parents encourage or let their kids opt into disability diagnosis because it seems like there’s little downside: more time on tests, better chances at college admissions, optional performance enhancing drugs, accommodations of all types.
I can’t stress this enough: the consequence is your child’s character. Many kids genuinely believe they’re sick or that there’s something wrong with them. You tell a girl she seems anxious, she’ll believe she’s anxious. You tell a boy he has a true disability in the form of ADHD and he starts thinking creativity or day dreaming is a deficiency.
You can gaslight people into believing they’re sick, and we have entire systems and institutions encouraging this. We’ve convinced young people it’s fine to be weak and frail, when we should be doing the opposite: convincing them they’re resilient, independent, strong people who can handle any challenge.
If there’s one thing I believe as a parent, it’s that you can will your children into greatness. Society will encourage them to do the opposite, but you don’t have to comply.
This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics.
- At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled
- At Amherst: more than 30 percent
- At Stanford: nearly 40 percent
Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving [disability] accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago."
As students and their parents have recognized the benefits of claiming disability—extended time on tests, housing accommodations, etc—the rates of disability at colleges, and especially at elite colleges, has exploded.
America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.