Argumentative Essay On Life Animated

People sometimes say that the best form of birth control is spending time with children. Even through this advice is usually given jokingly from the mouth of someone over the age of fifty, it doesn’t discount the fact that children are hard work. By making the choice to have a child, a person legally dedicates a minimum of eighteen years of devotion and care to this child, but parents of children with disabilities often sign up for a lifetime of total responsibility for every need of their child. These parents may not have chosen to take on this extra challenge, but in many cases they fully embrace it, putting their blood, sweat, and tears into ensuring their child achieves to the highest extent possible. The documentary, Life, Animated, focused
This would seem like normal three-year-old behavior, but the video became striking to the viewer when Owen’s mother explained that nearly a year after that video was filmed, Owen could barely walk correctly and was speaking in only gibberish. Owen, like most other children with autism, became faced with the incredibly frustrating challenge of being unable to successfully communicate in a way that his wants and needs could be universally understood. Owen learned how to communicate through Disney scripts, which allowed him to go from possibly never being able to speak effectively again to having nearly perfect speech. Although Owen was successful, many other people with disabilities do not have as good of luck and struggle with day to day more than any average person could ever imagine. For example, an article in the New York Times tells the story of a boy named DJ who was unable to communicate effectively due to his cerebral palsy. In DJ’s case and many other situations, his family turned to a method known as “facilitated communication” in order to help him perform this action that many people take for granted (Engber, 2015). With this method, DJ broke his 30 years of silence by pointing at pictures and spelling out words in order to communicate with the people around him. The main point of the article was less focused on DJ’s life long struggle to communicate, but it is still clear that this was a challenge that he faced for a majority of his life. By fighting for communication, people with disabilities are fighting for the ability to self advocacy. Having the ability to communicate gives any person the chance to advocate for their wants, needs, and opinions, and that is something that is often hard to do with the limited communication abilities that many people with disabilities have. Unlike DJ, Owen was able to learn to communicate and