I love IKEA. It is fun to walk around, the food court is a treat, and almost everything is priced at a reasonable/inexpensive level. There is one thing that has always rubbed me the wrong way about IKEA, however, and a new article on Huffpost by Holly Kearl discusses it too. Basically, there is a children's play area, but you can only drop your kid off and leave. You can't have even one parent supervise a child, regardless of whether they have disability or anything else.
Ms. Kearl's article covers how IKEA lacks an exact policy beyond, "Talk to a manager if there is an issue regarding playplace access," and I fully understand how she felt upset about being unable to monitor her son's safety in a playplace at IKEA. When we have gone there in the past, we inquired about Clarkson enjoying the playspace with Samii or me supervising--only to be told it was hard, "No." Unless Clarkson is at his school (which has trained professionals and ample safeguards) or with an incredibly small number of trusted adults who know how to work with him, we always have one of us with him.
The risk he could simply run off or not understand something is dangerous to touch/climb on is too great to simply drop him off with an unprepared employee at IKEA--that is unfair to said employee and Clarkson. We want Clarkson to enjoy playplaces with peers and take him to many--but we are always sure to supervise him and inform the locations we are at of his autism should any issues/emergencies arise. I imagine IKEA has its own concerns about adults who don't work at the store around a bunch of children in the playzone, but one would think if it is apparent a kiddo could need their parent's assistance, they can have parameters/rules/whatever in place for adults to supervise their child with needs. As I said, I love IKEA, but this is the one big thing I don't like about going there, which could (I assume) easily be corrected. Perhaps with articles like Ms. Kearl's drawing attention to this issue, things can be fixed.
No comments:
Post a Comment