The Insanity of Excessive Explanation

There is a practice known to parents and professionals of special needs to always explain everything at all times regardless of the context. The person with the disability has no say of when to ask any follow up questions, because by default, the professionals or parents just explain things that are the obvious.

What do I mean?

Let’s use say a follow up statement to what is typically an unmentioned topic as the low level information; and the general idea as the high level topic. The higher level topic is something that should be adopted through general knowledge or experience. So a further example say picking up the clothes off the floor in the bedroom (the higher level topic) will often be explained such as:

Johnny, pick up the clothes because you could trip!

By default, it’s known that they’ll say the because assuming the individual will ask “why”. Because should be the breaking point of the low to high level thinking.

Another example recently was my mother telling me this, low level is in boldface

I left the downstairs light on because I saw other lights in the office for you to turn off.

Obviously?

Essentially I cut people off when I hear the “because” without a challenge/response mechanism. Taking a page out of of computer security, a human if they are unaware of any unintended consequences would typically give some form of authentication to get further information such as a puzzled look or the childlike “why?”

But this doesn’t happen. I’ve seen this too many times where people just automatically talk at the low level, basically explaining every little detail that doesn’t need to be mentioned out loud. Any “statement” after “because” is basically causing people with a developmental or intellectual disability to further halt growth. The ability to learn from mistakes, or learn the obvious that is from a normal person’s eyes typically is left out for people with various intellectual disabilities.

As a result from constant communication, chatter, and bajillion references of “because” annually, many people won’t be able to have any intelligence and information processing because “the adults in the room” are too busy instructing these people all the time. When someone is being “instructed” its akin to having training wheels on ones bike forever because they won’t be able to use a natural intelligence based on their experiences riding on bikes to know when to break, when to fall over with grace, etc.

And as a result, people with a legitimate case of “special” needs are basically being treated like they are bubble wrapped human beings, and is basically treated like a machine because only machines (up till about now with AI) are the ones that have to be told how and what to do.

The halting of the logic of low and high level information processing is the reason why so many people (like your’s truly) has been unable to succeed, because we have been treated like machines.

Sadly I do not see that changing with the current establishment running the various advocacy and leadership processes.