So urgent are the wishes of active family advocates for personal relief that they use their children's voices, disallow independence, and sensationalize their children's anti-social activities. I have never heard family advocates assert that they have informed consent to tell these stories. I have rarely seen parents beside their own child, testifying together in advocacy for the same goals. Not all families are so authoritarian. But authoritarian families curtail growth with coercive interventions and a flourishing fundamentalism, using fear and polarities, displaying no tolerance for ambiguity, no flexibility, accentuating the unnegotiable authority of the medical and psychiatric professions.
Some families understand the many parts and obligations of parenting.
Some family members seem to be grieving for who they remember their loved ones were at some earlier time, while objecting to who those loved ones actually are now. Perhaps the hardest, arguably the most important part of parenting, is to trust the child enough to let go. Even children with disabilities deserve the chance to be let go. Moving counter to social trends of diversity, globalization and openness, the family advocacy movement fragments, segregates, isolates, imposes secrecy, shames. I believe today's mental health approaches will be remembered along with the Salem witchcraft trials as a dishonorable scapegoating of transformative experiences.