Sweet Potato

Years ago, an older lady with mild intellectual disability living in one of the group homes started to have a difficult time getting out of bed. We thought she was in pain but she didn't tell us that. Maybe she was tired and didn't want to get up on our schedule. Maybe she didn't want to go to her day program anymore. We really didn't know and she did not tell us. We tried a few different approaches to help her since it really would not have been good for her to stay in bed all day. Nothing worked without a fight until one staffer found that if you called her "Sweet Potato" and talked to her in an overly sing-songy tone, she could be enticed out of bed.

We normally don't take this approach. It can be demeaning, infantilizing, and condescending to talk to adults with disabilities as if they are children. But it worked without an argument and without having to use physical prompts. So what should we have done? Well, she definitely seemed to feel loved, nurtured, and cared for with our new approach. If we didn't use the 'Sweet Potato' approach, we would have had on-going power struggles or had to use even worse approaches. Since we didn't know exactly why she wouldn't get out of bed, maybe her underlying need was that she wanted more love and affection and nurturing.

When I said that we normally don't take this approach, I meant most of us who work with individuals with developmental disabilities. However, there are numerous staff who choose to override this standard and go renegade. They are automatically armed with 'honey', pats on the head, and hand-holding. The majority of time, this is not because people said they wanted to be treated like children but because staff and members of society think of them as children.

There are so many people we support that enjoy us treating them like children. What if that is their preferred way of making a connection?

What's the harm if we take the 'Sweet Potato' approach automatically when it is not warranted or asked for? Well, we might be inadvertently reinforcing individuals with intellectual disabilities to enjoy being treated like children and then they will act like children. In other cases, some may become angry with being infantilized yet be unable to express this in words.

I can think of a few things we could do. We could have conversations with the adults we are working with and explain why we don't call them by gooey nicknames and pat them on the head and give them a smiley sticker for good behavior. (I know someone right now in his 30's that jumps up and down for a star if he comes out of the bathroom within a half hour.) We can reinforce adult behavior on their part with adult behavior on our part. We can educate and encourage families to engage in developmentally-appropriate conversations and behaviors with their maturing young person so that the coming generation of people with disabilities will enjoy being treated as adults more than as children. And we can find other ways to express affection and nurturing in our relationships with adults with disabilities and meet their needs much as we do with each other.

If the lady who wanted to stay in bed felt sufficiently admired and loved, perhaps we wouldn't have had to take the 'Sweet Potato' approach to motivate her out of bed. It is not the worst thing we could have done but it was not completely benign, either.