We’ve all heard parents say that their children don’t know what to do in the school holidays and I’ve always thought that this was a rather damning indictment of the way we live. Survey after survey reveals that most kids actually think school is quite boring and can’t wait for the holidays so they can be...bored?

Or is it the case that school provides inescapable, structured boredom and home provides the freefloating variety? Or is it just that it’s okay to say you’re bored at home but unacceptable to voice this to your teacher?

Either way the practice of putting children into the system box day in and day out does not engender much ability to be self-generating, free-thinking and independent once out of it. And these are the ‘normal’ ones!

You learn something new every day so they say. I certainly find that my own life continually throws up new ways of looking at things and this week has been no exception.

A few days ago I attended a seminar for parents hosted by our local service provider called ‘Caring Through the Ages’ in which the full range of their services were detailed and parents were encouraged to ask questions and raise issues. In itself this was excellent and a great step forwards in consultation. But a few comments made by parents triggered that familiar, itchy feeling in my brain that occurs when a new perspective is making its way to the surface of my consciousness.

The services for intellectually disabled and autistic individuals were clearly outlined and are as comprehensive throughout a person’s lifetime as the strictures of funding can allow. An autistic and/or intellectually disabled child, providing they can cope within an institutional kind of setting, can spend most of their time not at home.

Typically they are at school all day with the school year extended to the end of July meaning that they do not get the long summer breaks of their ‘normal’ peers. But that gap can be filled by ‘Summer Camp’. And then there are Saturday Clubs and Respite weekends. And clearly all of these are wanted by parents.

But parents simultaneously described how their autistic and/or intellectually disabled offspring did not know how to cope with normal daily life on the occasions when these structures were not available.

This view also pertained to adulthood where Day Centre attendance replaces school.

This thought may raise a few hackles but I’m going to say it anyway (as you will by now have realised that I have a tendency to do).

As I sat there listening it occurred to me that so many parents put their children into as many services as possible because they believe that they are doing the best they can to ensure they will receive an input that will enable them to ‘cope with life’ . But as I sat there listening I realised that for many of these autistic and intellectually disabled people that is not what is actually happening. If, on the times that they are back in their own homes with their own families, both they and their families are at a loss to know what to do to fulfillingly integrate  them into normal, daily life then they are subtly, and certainly unwittingly, being ‘institutionalised’. Are our service provision systems not then simply producing institutional day pupils who just go home to sleep, producing ‘boreders’ as opposed to ‘boarders’ ?

A few years ago now I remember watching a programme where autism was being discussed. There were three parents being interviewed. Two were fathers who were advocates for these kinds of system-based services. The other was a mum who was trying (somewhat in vain) to explain her concern that the prevailing orthodoxy of handing one’s child over almost exclusively to service provision was not the best way to go about things. I understood exactly what she meant but no-one else did and she was clearly being typecast as a clingy mother. She wasn’t, she was trying to make the very valid point that both those who have to care for the disabled and the disabled themselves need to be personally empowered to cope within the home as well as outside of it.

Achieving this would require a radical rethink of both service provision and the power dynamic that pertains from professional to parent.

And now I’ll conclude with a further radical thought.

Some Disability Studies writers  have put forward the view that the current system of service provision endures because it maintains employment and power for middle-class, educated professionals whilst simultaneously placing the disabled and their carers in underclass positions of both disempowerment and financial disadvantage. Ooh, think about it !