Lost in Translation

In this week’s adventures in moving: approximately 100 emails trying to determine my kid’s placement at their next schools —because nobody seems to be speaking the same language. There are moments in parenting a child with disabilities when the hardest part is not the diagnosis itself, but the language, systems, and institutions surrounding it.

Lately, I have found myself deeply frustrated trying to navigate Special Education systems across school districts and states. Every district seems to have its own vocabulary. One district calls something “Basic Skills.” Another calls it “Integrated Support Class.” Or uses acronyms no one bothers to explain. Meetings and emails can feel less like collaborative conversations and more like trying to decode an unfamiliar dialect.

Codeswitching is hard enough when you know the codes.

It’s exhausting when every district invents their own.

And honestly? Families should not need a decoder ring just to advocate for their children.

I remember this feeling vividly from when Eliana was first diagnosed. I sat in the parking lot of P.F. Chang's after an entire day of testing and meetings with child development professionals. My brain was overloaded with charts, explanations, percentages, recommendations, and terminology I had never expected to need to understand as a parent.

The professionals explained that Eliana met the criteria for what is clinically called an Intellectual Disability. Even hearing those words carried weight because of the painful history attached to disability language in our culture. But I didnt fully understand what that diagnosis meant exactly.

Sitting in that parking lot, emotionally exhausted, I pulled out my phone and googled “Intellectual Disability,” trying to better understand what it meant for my child and for our future.

And the pejorative word “retarded” came up.

It felt like a shot in the heart.

That word is so ugly, so incredibly pain-ridden. It carries generations of mockery, exclusion, cruelty, and dehumanization. For so many people with disabilities and their families, it is not merely offensive language; it is a reminder of how society has often treated disabled people as less worthy of dignity, belonging, or respect.

I wasn’t grieving my daughter. She has always been wonderfully herself—joyful, funny, expressive, loving, and full of determination. What devastated me was the realization that the broader culture still attached such cruelty to children like mine.

Thankfully, some things have changed since then. Advocacy matters. Disability activists and families have pushed for better language, better understanding, and greater dignity. Even Google results today are far more respectful than they once were.

But the deeper issue remains.

Families navigating disability systems are constantly forced to learn new vocabularies just to access support for their children. Special Education terminology changes from district to district, state to state, and sometimes even school to school. Parents walk into meetings already carrying fear, hope, exhaustion, grief, and love—and then are expected to decipher acronyms and labels that professionals use fluently but families may have never encountered before.

What I wish educators, administrators, and policymakers understood is that language creates access—or barriers.

Clear, compassionate, consistent language matters. It helps families spend less energy decoding systems and more energy focusing on what actually matters: helping their children thrive.

Because our children are not acronyms.

They are not labels.

They are not categories on paperwork.

They are human beings deserving of support, dignity, belonging, and joy exactly as they are.