Glass Children

Hi everyone! I hope you all are doing well and had a great week. Once again, my schedule is never ending, but I am in the home stretch for school. I am slowly working in blog work back into my schedule, so I appreciate your patience as I finish my junior year! My prom is also this week too, so I am very excited!

Today I am going to be talking and sharing this new concept and idea I discovered last week called glass children. I discovered this from a Ted Talk that was posted on a special need siblings support group site on Facebook.

Here is the Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3-uT2OCd30

I was really confused on what this term meant until I listened to this Ted Talk. Glass children are siblings of a person with special needs. It can be assumed because that glass means the person is weak or easily breakable, but this is far from the truth. The word glass means people tend to see right through the sibling and focus only on the person with the special needs.

I never knew there was a term for a sibling of a person with special needs, so I looked further into and it found another Ted Talk and an article written about it.

Here is the second Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSwqo-g2Tbk

Here is the article link: https://arcmonroe.org/glass-children-siblings-disabilities/#:~:text=Glass%20children%20are%20siblings%20of,but%20in%20reality%20are%20not.

Before I continue into my perspective on it, I want to make it clear that the term glass child is not just for those who have siblings with disabilities whether it be intellectual; or physical, but siblings to people who have needs that need a lot of attention. A few examples of those needs are mental health issues, addiction, and chronic illness (long term or short term).

I think this term is great from the fact that it brings awareness to siblings of those with special needs, but when it comes to myself I can not relate with it on all terms all the time. I have related to all aspects of this term at one point in my life with Cate thus far, but the feeling of being seen through is not a constant one. I would say a better description would maybe be looked over, but never seen through completely.

I have been struggling with "see through" aspect of being a sibling to someone with special needs recently. With Cate's hospitalization and poor health, I went from one extreme to another and it was very hard on me. I went from feeling see through to having all eyes on me in a matter of a week. This transition, (I am planning on writing an entry about the transition period with Cate this week), has been extremely taxing on me and a large aspect of it has been that all the attention is on me. It has been really strange and a lot on my mind.

I put a lot of pressure on myself to be the best and to put it frankly, to be a perfect person, and when Cate left home I felt that pressure multiply because all eyes were on me. I am an extremely hard worker and when I am stressed, I put my head down and ignore all aspects of my life that I do to make me happy: skincare, fitness, reading, blogging, and even social events. I overwork myself with my academic work and I have felt that habit increase when Cate left home.

Finding the term glass child made me feel like I could relate to something, for my entire life and especially in these trying times. I wanted to share it with all of you in hope that it could provide you with some comfort, something to relate to, and or information.

I hope you all have a great week and I hope to have another post or two up this week as well!! Thank you for your continuous support in my absence, but expect the regular schedule to resume soon!

-Alex