My Son And I Were Turned Away From Ikea's Play Area For 1 Disturbing Reason. Here’s What They Don’t Understand.

The author's son showing passing cars the sign he made sign advocating for people with disabilities.In late June, a few days before Disability Pride Month began, I took my 7-year-old child on an outing to an Ikea store.As I filled out a waiver so he could enter the store’s small play area, I noticed I was the only parent present.It turned out that parents typically drop off their children while they shop, but that wasn’t an option for me. My son has a rare, severe form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome, among other medical conditions, and he can’t be without a grown-up carrying his seizure rescue medication, as I was. The scary reality is that around one in five children with Dravet syndrome die in childhood because the seizures can be so severe. There is currently no cure. I explained this to a staff member and told her that I’d need to be in the room with my child. She informed me that no parents were allowed into the play area. “But isn’t there a policy for kids with disabilities?” I asked.She told me a service dog could accompany a child, but a parent could not. I stopped signing the form. I said to the staff member, “That’s discrimination against kids with disabilities.” She didn’t respond.I hadn’t known about the store’s play area before this visit, and I had been happy to see that it wasn’t a playground – just a space with toys like a train set and dart board. Since my son had a seizure at an indoor playground a year ago, I’d stopped taking him to them. But now, even this play space was not an option for him. My child and I were both upset. He loves going to Ikea to walk through the showroom and eat in the cafeteria – a place open enough that it was the only indoor restaurant he ate in during our four years of masking during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have several Ikea furniture items, including bunk beds, a coat/shoe cubby and a toy chest. He helped us build them all. Since his severe seizures began about two years ago, he’s had to change his life in significant ways. Heat, sports, just running around to play, illness and excitement have all become triggers for him. Summer is especially hard – on hot days, he can’t be outside. In fact, we had driven the hour to Ikea in traffic just so he could walk and have a change of scenery in a large, air-conditioned space because the temperature outside was dangerous for him. I told him, “This isn’t OK.” He said, “We should talk to someone.” I was proud of him. After talking to a few staff members, we spoke with a manager, who said he wasn’t familiar with the policy, and he’d get back to me the next day. He didn’t. Later, I looked online, and there was a section on the Ikea website directing caretakers of children with disabilities to start a conversation with the Ikea store manager about how the child can best have their needs accommodated in the play area. I was hopeful that when we went in the future, we could show the policy to the staff.However, that doesn’t undo the pain my child felt after hearing that he wasn’t welcome in that play space because of his disabilities. During the hour-long car ride home afterward, we talked a lot about discrimination. I reinforced that what happened wasn’t OK, and that the more than 3 million kids with disabilities in our country deserve to be included. I told him about my older sister, his late aunt, who had microcephaly and faced various barriers to equal access too, like having to sit on the sidelines of playgrounds in her wheelchair. It upset me. When I was 10, in 1993, I read about new accessible playgrounds in an issue of Scholastic News, and I hoped we could build one for her. Sadly, she died a few weeks later, but in her memory, my family and I worked with the Cincinnati Parks Department to build an accessible playground. My son thought that was cool. I also explained that many groups of people face discrimination for reasons such as gender, race, sexual orientation, immigration status and more, and we need to be allies and stand up against all forms of discrimination. I also told him that one way to help is to make disabilities more visible and raise awareness, as we have done in his school class for the past three years. This June, for Dravet Syndrome Awareness Month, he and I held a neighbourhood lemonade and cupcake fundraiser and donated money to the Dravet Syndrome Foundation, which helps fund the kind of critical epilepsy research that the Trump administration has recently cut. After our experience at Ikea, as one of his bedtime books, we re-read the picture book All the Way to the Top, about a child who protested and helped advocate for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed 35 years ago. Afterward, I told him about children with disabilities who went to Congress this summer, asking their leaders not to make it harder for them to go to the doctor and get the medicine and treatment they need. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump’s domestic policy billhas since passed, and many people, including children with disabilities, will be harmed as a result. Two days after the bill passed, my child woke up and said, “I want to make a sign about disabilities.”He asked for my help with spelling before writing the words, “People with disabilities are important” in pencil and then tracing over them with marker. He stood by our Disability Pride yard sign, and then, since the temperature was cooler out, he walked down our street and held it up for cars passing by. He said that when he grows up, he wants to be an “activist” and “protester.” I told him that he already is. [Editor’s Note: HuffPost reached out for a response, and Ikea US issued the following statement: “At IKEA, we strive to offer a safe and inclusive environment for children to play while in our stores. Our Småland policies  are in place to keep children safe when they are in  our space. Regarding this family’s recent experience in our College Park, MD store, we are incredibly sensitive to feelings of exclusion, and so we have shared information with the family about our accommodations process, so that they may have a more positive experience at IKEA. We are constantly working to improve how we create an inclusive space while maintaining policies that keep all children safe.”]Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at [email protected] Charities Urge MPs To Defeat Starmer's Plans For 'Two-Tier' Welfare SystemI Worked Quite Well With My Disability. That Never Stopped Customers From Saying Wild Things To Me.I Hid My Disability At Work For 6 Years. When I Stopped, My Entire Life Changed.

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