Where Do We Start With Self-Advocacy?
So many kids we know spend their day being asked to respond; to people, to stimuli, to events.
This blog post is by Sara Winter, a classroom aide to kids on the autism spectrum and the founder of Squag.com. She is passionate about creating opportunity for underestimated kids and writes about her experiences with The Huffington Post Canada, Autism Speaks Canada, and Friendship Circle International. She is the mom of two boys and lives in Toronto, Canada.
So many kids we know spend their day being asked to respond; to people, to stimuli, to events. Prompt, respond, prompt, respond –
Some days are harder than others.
It was really important to us to create something for kids on the spectrum (and their siblings!) that would give them an opportunity to find a starting point to create ideas –
To initiate, to explore and to self-discover.
This is where self-advocacy begins; an awareness and sense-of-self that offers the security to make your needs known to the people that care about you.
Technology is such a great way to do this, because we can make it beautiful, visual, and scalable to kids’ interests and communication styles.
Our goal is to have parents learn about their kids and have kids learn about themselves, making screen time more meaningful and providing a safe way to build a identity.
We always said was the whole point of building SquagTM was to create something that families could try, tinker with, and tell us how to make it better. We’ve gathered feedback from our families and one thing is for sure: The SquagpadsTM for parents and kids need to be free for everyone.
And now they always will be.We’re thrilled to have gotten this far but we are nowhere near done yet. We won’t rest until kids are using our platform to build confidence to take with them everywhere they go. So please sign up for SquagTM now and join in our mission to bring self-discovery to the kids we love and learn from every day.
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This is where self-advocacy begins; an awareness and sense-of-self that offers the security to make your needs known to the people that care about you and technology is such a great way to do this, because we can make it beautiful, visual, and scalable to kids’ interests and communication styles.
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As if there weren’t self-advocates out there already! Here’s how non-autistics start with autistic self-advocacy: stop speaking on our behalf, stop talking down to us, stop callously exploiting us for money, and start LISTENING.