Human Flourishing In The Lives Of Children Living With a Disability

Abstract

Disability is usually regarded as a barrier that prevents human flourishing. In Politics, Aristotle makes the claim that there should be “a law that no deformed child shall live”. Children living with disabilities face many challenges in their external and internal environment. The way in which we approach children with disabilities is often different from how we would approach nondisabled children. But disability is not a barrier that prevents human flourishing. What should be considered instead are the barriers that we, as a society as well as religious communities, put up to prevent children with a disability from flourishing. The author argues that children with disabilities are not only allowed to live, but also capable of living well and even flourishing. The author explores and critically reflects on human flourishing in children living with a disability from the context of the interdisciplinary field of Christian Spirituality and Healthcare.

Keywords:

• Children
• disability
• human flourishing
• body
• mind
• spirit

Notes

1 Group three are infants with serious medical concerns, yet are not dependant on intensive medical treatment that can be withdrawn (Singer 2016).

2 Techniques used to determine whether an embryo or fetus has any genetic defects. According to Glover (2006), these techniques “allow decisions about who will live to be made once again on the basis of genetic characteristics” (p. 25), causing some people to compare it with the practice of eugenics from the Nazi era.

3 Although the medical model focusses primarily on the body and mind of people with disabilities (Hayes & Hannold, 2007), in the present article, I view children with disabilities from a holistic perspective, and therefore I also include the spiritual aspect.

4 According to the University of Johannesburg, Department of Nursing Science’s Theory of Health Promotion in Nursing (2009), the mind consists of the intellect, emotion, and volition.

5 According to Reinders (2008), the “commonsense view” entails that people are different from other living creatures “because they have language, they have reason and will and a sense of self, so that they can make up their minds about things and choose what they want, they can pursue plans and ideals (p. 1).

6 Flourishing in this article has been defined as resilience in child functioning and further described as

(1) the child's interest and curiosity in learning new things;

(2) the child's ability to remain calm and in control when faced with a challenge;

(3) whether the child followed through with what he or she said he or she would do (Nabors et al., 2016, p. 171)

7 Pain self-efficacy is an individual’s resilience mechanism that focuses on the expectation of success. It is part of positive psychology interventions aiming at promoting human flourishing (Tomlinson, 2017).