We all know that parents want to talk about the incredible things their kids are doing, but one father is adding an emotional dimension to the pride of parenthood. In a raw video taken from his car that has gone viral on Facebook, Robb Scott says that while at a store he overheard a son ask his father what Down syndrome is after having picked up Where Hope Grows, a movie that features a character with the condition. It's "an illness ... an illness of not knowing anything," the father told the boy. In his video, the Nova Scotia man counters that it is "literally one of the most beautiful things that's ever happened in my life." Scott's 5-year-old son, Turner, has Down syndrome, reports the Christian Science Monitor, and "it's fun, it's brilliant, it's amazing, it's funny, it's kind, it's loving, it's cuddly." The video has been viewed more than 1.3 million times since Scott uploaded it on Feb. 20.
He tells ABC News that he's now "trying to understand what it is that people have reacted to about this video," and that it "struck a chord and it's blowing me away." In the original video the tearful father adds that the conversation he overheard wasn't malicious in any way, and that the other father was searching for how to answer his son's innocent question. "But I heard that voice in my head say, 'Tell him what it is,' and I didn't. I let that ignorance grow in another generation—and failed my son in the process." While the Mayo Clinic defines Down syndrome as a "genetic disorder," Scott says it isn't a disability and that his son is both a learner and a teacher: "A well-educated man does not have more to teach than my son. He has different things to teach, but he does not have more to teach." (More Down Syndrome stories.)
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