Myth: People with Down syndrome are severely mentally retarded.
Most people with Down syndrome fall within the mild to moderate range of intellectual disability, as indicated by scores on an IQ test (individuals with the mosaic form of Down syndrome typically score 10-30 points higher, which places many of them in the “normal” range of intelligence). As you’ll see below, however, IQ tests may not tell the whole story. Note: the preferred terminology today is “intellectually disabled,” primarily due to mainstream society’s co-opting of the r-word as an insult.
Deconstructing the Myth
The Origins
Beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1960s, medical professionals strongly encouraged parents of children with Down syndrome to place them in institutions. IQ testing of individuals who were raised in these institutions seemed to back up the belief that they were severely intellectually disabled. In 1964, Stedman and Eichorn compared children who were raised at home with those who were institutionalized and were able to demonstrate that the home-reared children fared much better than their institutionalized peers.
Recent history suggests that while people with Down syndrome do learn at a slower rate than their chromosome-typical peers, both medical treatments and educational interventions can play a dramatic role in increasing learning. At one time, it was believed that children with Down syndrome “plateaued” and learning stopped, but that’s been proven untrue in recent decades. Although institutionalization began to be phased out in the 1960s, both early intervention programs and mainstreaming in school are still relatively new, and much of the data available to researchers today is based upon people with Down syndrome who did not have the opportunity to benefit from inclusive schooling.
The Rest of the Story
People with Down syndrome often have health issues such as congenital heart defects, hypothyroidism, and gastrointestinal problems. Children with Down syndrome are also at greater risk for respiratory infections. These health issues have the potential to impact both IQ test scores and development in other areas, and are cited by critics as possible causes for lower scores which do not reflect the true intelligence of people with Down syndrome. (Didn’t you ever get a lower score on a test because you weren’t feeling well?) Additionally, traditional IQ tests fail to measure other aspects of intelligence such as creativity and emotional intelligence.
There is no question that Down syndrome causes developmental delays. What is debatable is to what degree those delays are predetermined and fixed, and if not, how well they can be overcome. Although the true level of intellectual disability of people with Down syndrome is up for debate, one thing is not: the belief that all people with Down syndrome are severely mentally retarded has its roots in the soft bigotry of low expectations.
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