If you’ve lived in the world of special needs parenting for more than a millisecond, you will have heard of the “Disability Paradox,” the notion that people with disabilities tend to report their happiness levels as equal-to or greater-than everybody else. I will be the first to admit this truth in Charlie. His birthday video <\/a>will testify.<\/h2>\n

Truthfully though, the term always irked me. Why does his happiness have to be an anomaly? So, in honor of all the Charlie-goodness in the world, I re-framed my definition and Scary Mommy<\/strong><\/em> agreed.<\/h2>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks Meg<\/a> for letting me share…<\/h3>\n

What does “happiness” look like to you?<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve lived in the world of special needs parenting for more than a millisecond, you will have heard of the “Disability Paradox,” the notion that people with disabilities tend to report their happiness levels as equal-to or greater-than everybody else. I will be the first to admit this truth in Charlie. His birthday video will testify. Truthfully though, the term always irked me. Why does his happiness have to be an anomaly? So, in …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86,11,26],"tags":[144,143,145,146,84,15],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mom-gene.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/laugh-1391102_1920-e1490578869726.jpg?fit=1920%2C1123&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ca5p-qh","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5500,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/5500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}