Real Social Skills

Intrusive questions when you work with the public

September 23, 2013June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

I was wondering if you or your readers might have some advice. I have very poor balance and a pronounced limp due to a life-threatening illness and I work with the public. They comment on it, often asking what happened. It’s motivated by concern, but it’s embarrassing(I literally make people sad just by leaving the house) and I don’t know how to respond (do they think it’s going to be a funny story?). I think I’m bad for business and could quit if I really wanted. How do I deal with this issue?

Realsocialskills answered:

I don’t know. I have a couple of guesses based on things I and friends have experienced. I think many readers of this blog are more qualified to answer this than I am.

Here are my guesses:

Keep in mind that working with the public doesn’t mean you anyone an explanation of your health issues:

Just because someone asks doesn’t mean you have to explain
If you give an answer, it doesn’t have to be accurate
It’s your business and not theirs

Sometimes people aren’t actually looking for information. Sometimes they just want reassurance that they’re not supposed to be rescuing you.

For people like that, it might help to say something like “Don’t worry; I’m used to it.”

Some people are obnoxious nosy jerks, and I don’t know of any good approaches to them. The best I’ve seen is pretending they haven’t said what they’ve said, or else telling them in plain language to knock it off.

It might be better to say something like “Don’t worry, I’m used to it.” Sometimes what people want isn’t information; they sometimes really just want reassurance that there isn’t anything they should be doing to fix it.
Or something obviously absurd like “I’m recovering from a zombie attack.”
It’s also ok to say “That’s a rather personal question.” That probably works better with colleagues or in social situations than when working with the public, though.

It also might help to change the subject to something that’s actually on topic for your job. It’s possible that what they really want is reassurance that it’s ok for them to be asking you to help them even though you look sick. Eg:

“You look like you’re falling over. Are you ok? What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. Can I help you select some sunglasses? There’s a sale on women’s styles this week.”

Anyway, those are my guesses. Any of y’all have more informed advice?

When is it ok not to tell people things?

September 22, 2013June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

Is it okay not to tell someone something because you think they’ll disapprove? Assume it’s something that doesn’t affect their life, only yours, but you know they like hearing about your life and you know their feelings will be hurt if you don’t tell them. Do you have an obligation to tell them?

realsocialskills said:

There are very few things you have an obligation to tell other people about when they’re not personally affected. In fact, off hand, I can’t think of any. (Although, it’s not always 100% straightforward what does and doesn’t directly affect someone. Some things that seem like they don’t actually do.)

That said, outright lying about something the other person is likely to find out about tends to backfire, because it can have a corrosive effect on you. It can make you feel like you must be doing something wrong if you have to lie about it, and it can make you anxious about what will happen when they inevitably find out about it. Sometimes it’s a good idea anyway, but often it is not.

If someone is personally offended that you keep some parts of your life private, that’s a major red flag. It’s a sign that this relationship has bad boundaries.

No friends tell each other everything; no one approves of everything their friend does. There are always at least a few things that it’s better not to discuss.

In mutually respectful friendships, both people understand this and respect one another’s privacy. If someone expect you to tell them everything and gets upset when you don’t, they’re being controlling. They’re not treating you as an equal.

And it usually gets worse over time. If someone can convince you that you’re not allowed to have any boundaries or privacy, they usually keep pushing.

Some people who do this start acting right if you assert boundaries and refuse to tolerate it when they’re breached. That doesn’t always work, though. Sometimes you can assert boundaries enough to make the relationship work even if they never really respect them willingly. Sometimes that doesn’t work and the friendship can’t be safe even if you really, really like them in other ways.

What it means when kids aren’t allowed to know about bad things

September 20, 2013June 14, 2021 Real Social Skills

There are a lot of things kids are often considered too young to know about. For instance:

Rape
Violence
Racism
Sexism

The problem is, almost every bad thing kids are considered too young to know about happens to some kids.

The rule that kids should be shielded from these things has some really negative effects on the kids who are most vulnerable.

It hurts kids who have been abused, because they’re considered dangerous to other kids if they ever talk about it. Their peers aren’t supposed to know about it, so they’re supposed to just never talk about it ever. That creates a lot of shame, and living with that kind of shame hurts people.

It also hurts kids who are currently being abused. They get the overwhelming message from everyone that kids are not allowed to talk about these things. That makes it hard to tell adults what’s going on, especially if they don’t quite know the right words. If they try to tell indirectly, they might even be hushed and told that they’re too young to be thinking about that kind of thing.

It hurts kids of color, because they’re often required to put up with racist things rather than have the white kids find out about racism. Because they’re old enough to have to deal with racism, but their white peers aren’t considered old enough to be told about it.

There’s also parents who don’t want their kids to play with disabled kids, because they think their kids are too young to know about disability or serious illness or injury. Or even, to the point that a kids’ show hosted by an amputee actor got a lot of complaints that her missing arm was upsetting to children. This kind of attitude is all over the place.

Preventing kids from thinking about bad things hurts all kinds of kids, all kinds of particularly vulnerable kids. And I don’t see how it does much to protect the safer kids, either.

I’m not sure what the solution is. But I think it is a problem.

Getting real about physical accessibility

September 19, 2013June 14, 2021 Real Social Skills

Something I’ve noticed:

There are a lot of ramps, seating areas, lifts, and other such things that aren’t available to wheelchair users because they are constantly full of people pushing children in strollers.

Sometimes, this is because people are astonishingly inconsiderate, but often it’s the result of terrible design.

People assume that accessibility features are only useful for chair users. Then they design them to only have enough capacity for the (small) number of chair users they expect to be there. Then, everyone with a stroller uses them, and the building remains almost as inaccessible to wheelchair users as it was before.

When you are creating an accessibility feature, do not fall into this trap! Design it to have the capacity for all of the things it will be used for.

Some concrete examples:

If your building has multiple high-traffic entrances, it needs to have multiple ramps
Elevators need to have enough capacity to accommodate the number of kids in strollers, chair users, and people with luggage who will come through on a regular basis.
Family restrooms should be accessible. So should some of the stalls in the regular men’s/women’s/unisex bathrooms.

Just, generally speaking, keep in mind that in order to make an access feature usable, there has to either be enough to go around, or enforcement preventing unauthorized use. Unless you want to chase mothers and infants away from your ramp, make it big enough to accommodate traffic from both wheelchair users and strollers.

Being dependent on vs being limited by

September 18, 2013June 14, 2021 Real Social Skills

This isn’t quite the right concept but… these things are different:

being dependent on something
being unpleasantly or destructively limited by something

Being dependent on something can be really good. It can make things possible that weren’t before it. We’re all dependent on technology in one way or another (for instance, heating and air conditioning. Shoes. Large-scale agriculture.).

Sometimes people object to dependence because they think it will impose an unpleasant limitation. Even when it would actually make more things possible.

Like, someone thinks they (or someone in their care) shouldn’t use a wheelchair because then they’ll only be able to go where a wheelchair can go. They won’t be able to use stairs and such anymore. And sometimes this is true.

But often, this can mean that someone can only go as far as they can walk, and can only stay out for as long as they can stand. So they have trouble leaving the house, or going places for long periods of time. And are much more limited than they otherwise would be. Dependence isn’t bad, if it makes you able to do more things.

AAC can be like this, too. Verbal speech is more flexible, in principle, all things being equal. But all things aren’t equal, even for people who have some verbal speech. The important thing is for someone to have as much communication as possible. For people who get more communication from relying on things other than speech, dependence isn’t a bad thing. It’s good. It makes life better.

Getting more ability to do stuff you care about should be the goal. Not a particular way of doing it. Not judged against a theoretical ideal. Judged against what actually works best for you (or your child).

When you’re worried about old patterns

September 17, 2013June 14, 2021 Real Social Skills

I hear a lot of people say things along the lines of “My parents treated me badly in this way. I know they learned it from their parents. I’m terrified that this pattern will emerge in me too.”

The thing is, it’s not an either or kind of thing.

The pattern probably will emerge in you, some. You probably will, at various points, do some of the things you learned in childhood. That doesn’t, in itself, mean that you will turn into an abuser (or neglectful or whatever other bad thing).

You can learn how to act better than they did. You probably already have, to a significant extent, since you already know that what they did was bad and that you don’t want to act that way.

Just knowing this changes some things. But, as you’ve noticed, it doesn’t change everything. You still find yourself playing out some of the patterns you learned, even knowing why it’s wrong. And that can be terrifying. It can make you scared that you’ll inevitably turn into the same kind of abuser. But that’s not the reality.

Playing out some of those patterns doesn’t mean you’re bad or that you’re incapable of acting right. It means you’re doing something difficult, and that you’re not always doing it perfectly. It’s not enough to know that things are bad to do. You have to also learn new patterns of interaction. That can be very, very difficult, and it doesn’t happen automatically. And that means, sometimes, you’ll do the things you learned.

When that happens, the important thing is to figure out what happened, to fix any damage it might have done, and to find a better way to act.

A school project not to assign

September 15, 2013June 14, 2021 Real Social Skills

If you are a teacher, do not ask your students to make a family tree as a school assignment. *Especially* do not do this as a class art project to be posted on the wall.

A lot of kids have very complicated families, and complicated feelings about which words to use for which people.

For instance: Some kids call multiple people “mom”. Sometimes this is because they’re being raised by a lesbian couple. Sometimes this is because they are adopted and also maintaining a relationship with their mother who gave birth to them. Sometimes this is because their parents divorced and remarried and they also see their stepparents as parents. None of these relationships map easily onto a family tree project.

Some kids don’t have any parents at all. This isn’t something that they should have to tell their peers if they don’t want to.

Some kids aren’t sure who their parents are. Is it the people who adopted them when they were a baby and disrupted when they were six? The person who gave birth to them? The people they’re living with now? The one nice staff in their group home? The person they’re in foster care with who they’re hoping will eventually adopt them? It’s complicated and not ok to ask kids to declare this in writing in front of everyone.

There are any number of emotionally fraught and complicated situations that go along with describing families. It’s not good to have kids do that as part of an assignment, unless you’re working in a context in which getting people to do emotionally fraught things is appropriate.

Borrowing computers

September 13, 2013June 21, 2021 Real Social Skills

A reader asked:

Hi… I have a suggestion I’d really like to see: a post with more about people asking to borrow your computer and similar issues and why this can be a problem. Thanks for the blog! 🙂

realsocialskills answered:

Here’s how I’d explain it to people who are inclined to expect to have the use of other people’s computers:

Some people experience their computer/iPad/phone/etc as part of their body and find losing control over these things intensely distressing. Asking to borrow a computer can be like asking to borrow part of someone’s body.

Even for people who do not feel that way – Computers and things are expensive. Some people don’t like to share them, because they depend on them heavily and wouldn’t be able to afford to replace them.

Don’t put people in the position of having to tell you they don’t trust you not to break their computer. There’s no polite way to say that.

It can be ok to ask, but it’s important not to assume that the answer will be yes. And if you’re anticipating the need for a computer during the day, plan ahead rather than putting others on the spot.

For instance:

If you know you’ll need to look things up during the day, and you also know that Bob always carries an iPad, don’t just assume that you’ll be able to use his.
Either ask in advance, or bring your own
If you’re going to need a computer for a presentation or to show a video or something, it’s very important not to assume you’ll be able to use someone else’s.
Ask ahead of time, and take no for an answer if someone says no
Putting people on the spot pressures them to say yes even if it’s not really ok with them
Because it’s likely that everyone will think it’s their fault for ruining your presentation if they don’t agree to share their computer
Don’t do this to people.

Some people are happy to occasionally allow friends and coworkers to use their computers. Other people aren’t. It’s ok to be unwilling to share, and the reasons why are no one else’s business. Don’t pressure people into doing things with their computer that they’re not really ok with.