lostsometime:

bramblepatch:

capillaries:

whitesaviorcomplex:

valid criticisms towards the popularity of fidget items:

• a lot of people don’t realize they’re useful for children (especially neurodivegent children) and treat them like bad distractions instead of useful devices

invalid criticisms towards the popularity of fidget items:

• “neurotypical children dont need it!” some neurotypicals  can stim.

• ”you’re stealing something that’s useful for neurodivergent children only”  this might surprise yall, but you cant expect fucking 6-11 year old kids to know that they’re neurodivergent. What you brush off as NTs treating your tools as a fad, could be a young child unknowingly finding a device that helps them focus. like what do yall want schools to do? psychoanalyze every single child there to see if they’re worthy enough to own a fidget item.

• “they’re treating it like a fad” normalizing fidget toys can make a lot of neurodivergent children more comfortable with owning them.

• “NTs are getting them banned from classrooms!” little kids aren’t getting the toys banned and pinning the blame on them solves nothing. the real problem are uneducated adults who fail to understand that these toys have a purpose and value.

Neurotypicals have been teasing us for using fidget items for LITERAL DECADES. We have had our items taken away, we have been mocked incessantly. We have been ostracized, bullied, and relentlessly abused for needing fidgets. And now suddenly because fucking NT’s use them they’re ‘acceptable’? No, Sorry. Brrrrt. Wrong answer. Maybe next time. 

YOU DO NOT GET TO SUDDENLY ENJOY SOMETHING YOU USED TO MOCK SOMEONE ELSE FOR.

what the fuck kind of argument is that

you ABSOLUTELY get to develop an appreciation for a thing you previously disparaged, you’re allowed to reconsider stances you previously held in light of new insight or perspective, you’re allowed to stop trying to distance yourself from the needs and interests of those you’ve been encouraged to see as weak or defective

also NTs are not a collective consciousness and therefore it is impossible for a third grader to have been doing anything for “literal decades.” It’s not reasonable to punish small children (who, as the OP points out, may in fact be neuroatypical and have simply not been tested/diagnosed yet) because their elders are acting slightly less egregiously unkind than your elders did

the problem is not the normalization of stim toys, it’s the lack of understanding of stimming itself, and that’s not going to be fixed by treating the toys like some kind of holy relic that can be profaned by unclean NT hands

”you’re stealing something that’s useful for neurodivergent children only” – the OP has a good response to this (that, hey, you don’t know which children may or may not be neurodivergent!) but i think it misses a larger point

you can’t be “stealing” something if it’s not a limited resource

making more stim toys available, mainstream, affordable, and present in classrooms will only make them more accessible to ND kids who need them. nobody’s taking a stim toy out of the hands of a neurodivergent six year old to hand it over to some greedy collective of NTs. do you mean that you’re stealing the utility of the thing that’s “useful for neurodivergent children only”? do you think that these toys will stop being helpful to ND kids if some critical threshold is passed where too many NT people have them? Will it somehow make stimming ineffective? how exactly would that work?