Parents Talk: Why You Need To Stop Using The 'R-Word'

Every time I hear it, I cringe, and my heart sinks and skips a beat.

“Don’t be such a retard.” “That’s so retarded.”

The “R-word.”

My friends and I said it all the time growing up, and it slipped out of my mouth from time to time as an adult. Never gave it a second thought.

Then, two years ago, my son Miles was born.

We didn’t know before Miles was born that he had Down syndrome. The ultrasounds all came back negative, and I was only 32. Not terribly old. Certainly not someone who would have a child with special needs. That was something that happened to other people. 

But the minute I saw Miles, I knew. I just knew. And my heart jumped into my throat. 

What would this child’s future be? Could I handle it? Could he handle me?

I was so scared that first night after his birth. I cried. Hard. A few times. But then the nurses brought Miles in for a feeding -- he had been under the lights most of the day for jaundice -- and I asked them to leave him with me the rest of the night.

I still tear up when I think about it, but Miles helped me heal that night. I tucked his tiny, swaddled little body next to mine and wrapped my left arm around him. He grabbed my left index finger and never let go. And we slept.

The time since that night hasn’t been easy in some ways, but it’s certainly nothing I feared that day and Miles is now the light in my life and many others he knows and loves.

I remember the first time someone asked me about my “retarded” son.

It was an elderly neighbor, and after many apologies I realized he just didn’t know any better, but that was the day I began my own personal campaign against the use of the “R-word.”

It surprises me how often people still use it, and how often I hear it in movies and on TV. 

Some people think the campaign against the “R-word” is just another product of our increasingly politically correct society. “It’s just a word,” someone once told me.

Let me tell you just why this word is so hurtful, and why you and especially your children, should eliminate it from your vocabulary.

 1. It’s Hurtful -- The “R-word” hurts people with intellectual disabilities because, to them, it’s an exclusive term meant to isolate and alienate. “We are something that is not like you and something that none of you would ever want to be. We are something outside the ‘in’ group. We are someone that is not your kind.” -- Joseph Franklin Stephens, Special Olympics Virginia athlete

2. It’s Demeaning -- The “R-word” is most commonly used as an insult to imply that someone is stupid or slow like someone with intellectual disabilities. It’s not a compliment or an endearing term.

3. It’s Hate Speech -- Your pre-emptive dismissal of people with intellectual disabilities, your mockery of them with this word, it’s nothing but another form of hate to me. And that’s certainly something we have too much of in this world already, and not something any of us as parents should be teaching to our children -- through our actions or our words.

Please take the pledge here and spread the word to stop the use of this hurtful term.