@CarolNelson523 And I am not trying to cast them as villains either. The system sets 'neutral' / well-meaning people up to go along with all kinds of things unless they actively dig in to youth liberation, learning from disabled people, and the conflict / loss-of-status that can go along with remembering one's own childhood accurately and not pretending that eighteen years of subjugation was okay.

My mother unfortunately was recruited into a group that teaches people that their disabled people's requests for medical privacy are a form of abuse (they start with this framing of "if someone told you not to tell other people how they treated you, that would be abusive, right?", and then slide into "so it's also abusive for a disabled person to ask you not to share their diagnoses publicly, or to ask you to just talk about times that their actions were hurtful to you *without* also publicizing their medical records to anyone you're talking to" - they really are like that,) lobbies in numerous states for more policing and detaining of people with psychosocial disabilities, publishes whole books and does whole trainings on how to manipulate and gaslight disabled people if they don't agree with abled people's advice, and says that people's social nonconformity is the reason they get discriminated against AND SO forcing people to assimilate is justified as "the way to get them accepted and ~non-stigmatized~ - that's equality!"

I do see that the abysmal state of childcare in this country is a contributing factor to caregivers winding up joining cults like that offer them "support."