“Sir, I want to do it myself.”
People who do something only with someone's help, who live a daily life following someone else's plan, who find the road they want and what they like to be difficult and long. These are people with developmental disabilities.
When you become an adult, you have to make your own choices every moment of your daily life and live with responsibility for your choices, no matter what the consequences are. When adolescents with developmental disabilities become adults, they naturally want to live freely in making their own decisions and taking responsibility for them. However, they face many difficulties.
Rather, parents of children with developmental disabilities have a wish to live just one day longer than their children. “One more day than your child… ” is full of earnestness and affection for children. Although there are facilities and activity assistance services for the welfare of the disabled, still parents cannot take their eyes off their children with disabilities until they close their eyes.
Moreover, since adults with disabilities do not have many places to go, parents always live with worries about what will happen to their children after they die. This issue has already been publicly discussed, but there are no clear results yet. This is why adults with disabilities need space and programs to make choices through repetitive training so that they can make their own decisions.
Fortunately, there are a small number of welfare centers that offer programs for these people. We need more to improve the self-determination ability of youth with developmental disabilities during their transition to adulthood.
The goal of this program is to help participants make their own choices and decisions so that they can face the world without fear and with the confidence that they can do it on their own. However, in the beginning, it will be difficult for them to plan for themselves or even express what they want to do, and wait for someone to make a choice for them.
However, through repeated training in the process of finding what they like, they learn to enjoy what they do. Now, they can take the bus, go to the bank, order their favorite burger and drink, and make payments all by themselves. They take the subway to places they want to visit and buy delicious snacks for Mom on the way home. They also learn to give up what they like for their friends. By making plans about what to do, they get a feeling of satisfaction from what they do.
“It may seem attractive and convenient to have everything cared for, without having to choose, but if it is repeated and continues, you end up easily giving up on problems that can be solved with your own abilities, and you become a helpless person. We take a lot of time to make choices, make decisions and take responsibility for ourselves. However, if you cannot endure this time, you will end up doing the same things you have done so far.” (Words of Welfare Center Director)
Now, we hope that those involved can more easily access a space where they can independently live a life of ‘self-determination’ rather than a life chosen by someone else. Society should pay more attention and prepare so that people can live independent lives by choosing a form of life within diversity.
Therefore, we hope that both the church and the local community will serve as a space where people can increase their experience of self-determination. "I dream of a future where our parents allow us to go out for a reason, and we get together and become beautiful people."
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