I worked in a residential community consisting of many young people with various disabilities. Most of these had Down’s syndrome. From the OP...
> Individuals with Down syndrome generally have outstanding social skills...
Dam right! They were amongst the most compassionate, loving and witty people I have ever met. I remain humbled at their extraordinary humanity.
Other things the articles mentions are also true. Certainly Low muscle tone. This also signifies incredible flexibility. ...Seeing a 40 year old man with this condition bend over and place both his palms on the floor without bending his knees. Try it now! I dare you!
But ultimately these folk will always need institutional or family based care, or close oversight, for the rest of their lives. What bugs me is ‘stories of success’, like the young girl with downs who is a model. This does no one any favor, instead placing unreal expectations on them.
This residential community was very closed, almost like a religious retreat, or a very small village. In many ways it was the perfect place for such people. They held a valuable place in our lives, and were ‘useful’ in the way we all strive to be. In a more modern setting, their lives are more difficult.
Different situation but I have a 6yo with downs and this rings true to me.
He’s always trying to crack a joke. He’ll say loudly “good night Uschi!” (his grandmother’s nickname) to my wife with a grin on his face like he made the funniest joke. Not Seinfeld over here but we laugh pretty hard.
Always wanting to subvert serious situation. For example... me being in a bad mood having to get up at 5.00am to milk the cows, and this Downs boy looking up at me with a crazy big-ass grin that would completely wipe all sour thoughts from my mind.
They play with language in a very disarming manner. Not highbrow, but will find compelling nicknames for their loved ones and deliver them in a way that is difficult not to be drawn in by.
I've always pondered the "genetic utility" if you will of downs folks. I could imagine they play a real "symbiotic relationship" with their familial cohorts bringing lighthearted joy and other social softeners that add brightness to a group. It does come with costs however like people say with lifetime care, but the fact that these loving genetic subpopulations persist makes me wonder if they are not in fact anomalies but part of a richer fabric.
Probably not... but ancillary benefits like this can lower the selective pressure against trisomy 21, so that it's less likely to go away.
That's the thing. Something rare like Down Syndrome only has a very small selective pressure against it, and it's really easy for other effects to remove a fraction of it.
So things that seem ridiculous like this assertion or the "super uncle" theory about homosexuality are not so easily dismissed when one really thinks about them. Of course, there can be selective benefits from genes with a propensity for (forming trisomy 21, having homosexual individuals, etc) when the specific condition doesn't manifest.
Comedy is extremely situational — first scene in first episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer made somebody dying funny — so if OP says someone was witty when they did something, they almost certainly were.
I think wit is in the eye of the beholder as well. For the record, wit is typically defined as a form of verbal humor, so it's not really the same thing as situational comedy.
And this might also be a case of one's expectations. If you spent your entire week teaching preschool, and then on the weekend met up with some adults for drinks later, you might come out of that evening with the thought that those were some of the most urbane sophisticated people you'd ever met.
Yeah... because you spend the vast majority of your day preventing toddlers from sticking crayons up their noses. It's the intellectual equivalent of the ebbinghaus illusion.
My uncle sometimes puts his shoes on the wrong feet and once managed to put his jeans on backwards (buttoned but not zipped behind him). As he walked past the doorway my mom (his sister) said, "Your pants are on backwards!"
Without missing a beat, he countered, "Maybe I was going the other way..." and sort of moonwalked back the way he came.
I am 37, male, and can place both palms on the floor without bending my knees. I am definitely average in health and am sure this isn't unique, however, I am not discounting ligament laxity which is prevalent in individuals with Down syndrome.
If you don’t exercise, I am impressed. Actually, I can do it to. But this is because I have Ehlers Danlos syndrom (hyper mobility). This guy I am referring to would actually adopt the pose when he was relaxing. It was as natural to him as folding his arms.
We have to be careful about praising the disabled like this, because we risk being condescending. This is an age-old phenomenon – in Ulysses (published already a century ago), James Joyce has his protagonist muse on the fact that people are so quick to praise a blind person for his jokes not because the person is actually funny, but simply because people’s expectations towards the disabled are so low.
I think he was talking about Down Syndrome folks, and I can tell you that DS folks are the most friendliest folks in the crowd. I'll even go ahead and say that they are more charismatic than most software engineers.
My younger brother has Down's, yet he tends to be way more friendly with not only strangers but my relatives too, compared to myself.
This weirdly reminded me of how Michael Bluth fails to realize his girlfriend Rita has a learning disability because of her aristocratic sounding British accent in the show Arrested Development.
Is it wrong to say they look alike? There are just times where there is such commonality in a group due to genetic abnormalities and other factors that descriptions are more a fact than a stereotype.
I would think that's more of a cognitive thing where if you don't normally spend time around people with Down's syndrome, the particular physical features that characterize Down's syndrome really stand out in a way that makes you perceive them as looking less distinctive as individuals. But once you get used to it, it becomes apparent that they look as different from one another as anyone else does.
Is it pointless and insensitive for a scientific manual to indicate that all individuals with a certain genetic disorder look incredibly similar across races and genders?
My point is that there is a difference between stereotyping races/cultures/disabled and indicating highly correlated attributes in individuals with specific genetic/chromisonal abnormalities.
They don't look incredibly similar. They have common features that are not seen in the vast majority of others, which tricks your brain into not looking at their other features. It's the same as thinking Han Chinese people or Irish people look incredibly similar.
Is it bad for a textbook to point out how hypoxia kills brain cells during drowning? No. Is it tasteful to bring up at a funeral for someone who drowned? Also no.
If it's in a useful and tasteful context, discuss away. Otherwise, just don't be a chode.
> Individuals with Down syndrome generally have outstanding social skills...
Dam right! They were amongst the most compassionate, loving and witty people I have ever met. I remain humbled at their extraordinary humanity.
Other things the articles mentions are also true. Certainly Low muscle tone. This also signifies incredible flexibility. ...Seeing a 40 year old man with this condition bend over and place both his palms on the floor without bending his knees. Try it now! I dare you!
But ultimately these folk will always need institutional or family based care, or close oversight, for the rest of their lives. What bugs me is ‘stories of success’, like the young girl with downs who is a model. This does no one any favor, instead placing unreal expectations on them.
This residential community was very closed, almost like a religious retreat, or a very small village. In many ways it was the perfect place for such people. They held a valuable place in our lives, and were ‘useful’ in the way we all strive to be. In a more modern setting, their lives are more difficult.