Mary and Beamon took their 3-year-old son to the family doctor, who concluded that the boy was being overstimulated by his parents. The doctor gave the usual advice for that era: institutionalize him. Parents were urged to put such “defective children” in an institution for life and cut off all contact. Mary and Beamon lived at a time when people believed that children with disabilities were a danger to society and were considered less than human [Donvan & Zucker, 2016].
