By Clay Kaufman
What does it mean to be a good self-advocate? And how can we inculcate good self- advocacy skills in our children? Self-advocacy is one of the most valuable real-world skills to build. It includes expressing your thoughts and opinions effectively, learning how to ask for help when necessary and, of course, learning how to stand up for what you believe in. Ultimately those skills help ensure that we all learn how to speak up in our lives and careers when we are not respected, to have the confidence to ask for proper compensation (and not always just accept what we are given) and to seek new opportunities. In broadest terms, it is a tool to confront injustice.
In school, especially for younger students, self-advocacy starts with learning how to speak up. Parents and teachers often begin to inculcate that skill by giving young children choices: would you prefer choice A or B for lunch today, or would you prefer to wear outfit A or B. Children learn that their opinion matters and they are allowed to express it. For the youngest children, their preferences and choices may not be earth-shattering, but they can learn that it is okay to have preferences. When my son was 4 years old, attending pre-school, he was getting ready for school and came downstairs.
For some reason, he was wearing two shirts. His 6-year-old sister asked, not necessarily helpfully, what was the most shirts he could put on at once. Dashing upstairs and back down, my son proudly sports 6 shirts at once, and, at his sister’s urging (again, of questionable helpfulness), insisted on wearing all 6 shirts to preschool. What started out as a lark actually turned into a great example of learning self-advocacy. We received a call from his teacher after school explaining that one of the volunteer parents in the classroom was extremely upset at the idea of 6 shirts and tried to explain to my son why it was “wrong” to wear multiple shirts. Apparently, then, at snack time, my son spilled something on his shirt, walked over to the volunteer parent and, peeling off the outermost shirt, said “See?” His teacher told us she thought it was a great example of him standing up for a harmless preference. My son has indeed grown up to be a fierce self-advocate!
For many students, the most challenging kind of self-advocacy is asking for help. Unfortunately, students often feel that in school, quiet acceptance is the rule, and that asking for help imposes on others. Good self-advocacy, however, means speaking up: being willing to ask for clarification about the instructions on an assignment or asking for specific help when you’re stuck. That doesn’t mean saying, “I can’t do this”, but rather, “Can you help me write my topic sentence?” or “Can you help me with step 2 of this math problem.”
As parents, it can be tempting for us to take over when our children need assistance. However, we can instead encourage our children to be good self-advocates by rehearsing with them how to ask a teacher or another adult for help, and then sending them off to try it themselves. And success in self- advocacy breeds success: once a student sees that asking for help has made a difference, they are much more likely to ask again in the future. I have been head of school of several schools for students with language-based learning differences, where students often came to us from larger schools where they weren’t getting the help they needed. Sometimes, prospective parents would ask me, “how can my child really learn self-advocacy at your small school, where it’s easy—it’s not the real world.” My response echoed what my students always told me after they went off to large colleges: if you learn self-advocacy in a friendly environment, you learn to expect it to be effective, and that gives you the confidence to apply it anywhere.
My 6-year-old daughter, who encouraged my son’s shirt self-advocacy, grew up to be an effective self-advocate for herself and others. In her junior year of high school, one of her friends was invited to a dance by a boy from a nearby school, only to have the boy rescind the invitation two days before the dance (apparently so he could take someone else). When my daughter found out, she told her friend to get in her car and off they drove to the other school where the boy was in the middle of after school varsity soccer practice. My daughter got out of the car and started walking across the field. A coach interrupted her saying “Young lady, you can’t be here. We’re in the middle of practice.” My daughter responded, “I’m looking for Josh. He did something wrong and needs to apologize.” The entire practice came to a halt while my daughter found Josh and ordered him to march over to the car and apologize. Apparently Josh looked to his coach for help, but the coach just shrugged and indicated that he had best just get this done. Josh walked over and apologized.
Now, not every kind of self-advocacy needs to be that dramatic, of course. But if our children can learn to ask for what they need, advocate for themselves and stand up for what is right, they can experience the satisfaction of going through life s themselves and others, with the confidence to receive the help and respect they deserve.
Clay Kaufman, a longtime educator and school leader, is former Head of School at The Cedar School, a high school for students with language-based learning differences, such as dyslexia, in Greenwich, and is currently at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale.
