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Mental Disabilities In Child's Play By Alice Munro

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In today’s times ADHD, ADD, and Down’s are not as big of a deal as they use to be. In Child’s Play, Alice Munro touches on the discrimination children with disabilities faced back in the fifties. In this essay I will be commenting on how Alice Munro used her story Child’s Play to show the relationship between people who have mental disabilities and the discrimination they faced. This story shows how back in the fifties people with mental disabilities were treated like they are less than everyone else, how they were treated differently, and how they were a burden to everyone around them.

Calling someone special, slow, or retarded in today’s society is seen as discrimination and is frowned upon but back in the day it was just a part of the …show more content…

Verna is described as some horrible disease infecting her home. Marlene spent most of her days trying to avoid Verna as if she was to touch Marlene she would catch her disabilities. “I would have to go so close as to touch her and to risk her touching me”- pg 76 Marlene also would make it a point to feel like Verna did have some kind of illness. “What was the problem? Contamination, infection? Verna was decently clean and healthy. And it was hardly likely …show more content…

A child with a disability is an even bigger responsibility. When a child has a mental disability there are many factors you have to think of when caring for them. In Child’s Play I got the idea that it seemed like Varna was a burden to live with, people always have a tendency to feel sorry for the poor parents who have to care for this child. “Even grown-ups smiled in a certain way, there was some irrepressible gratification and taken-for-granted superiority that I could see, in the way they mentioned people who were simple, or a few bricks short of a load. And I believed my mother must really liked this, underneath” – pg 76 Once the specials got to camp it seemed like there was an extra burden put on the counselors. When Verna went missing it was more annoying than upsetting “’someone is missing’ ‘who?’ ‘One of the specials’ ‘oh drat. Wouldn’t you know.’” The fact that they had disabilities made it more of a challenge to keep track and make sure they were safe while also keeping them away from the normal children. Children with disabilities are made to seem more of a burden then a normal

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