How my teen became an Uno wiz
By Anchel Krishna
My parents were over on a recent weekend. Everyone except me had finished lunch and we had no plans. My daughter Nal was off in another room, and we decided it would be fun to play a game.
My husband Dilip suggested Uno, mentioning that our daughter Syona had learned how to play at school.
He pulled out a deck. He shuffled, dealt, shared the high-level rules for my parents' benefit and sat beside Syona. The two of them played as a team. He handled the physical cards. He told her what she had in her hand and what was on the pile. Everything else was up to her. Which card to play. When to hold a Wild. When to drop a Draw Four. My parents played their hands. I ate my lunch and watched.
Syona won.
I sat there thinking about how we used to try to play board games with Syona when she was little. Syona has cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair. She also has a visual impairment that makes seeing and processing what she is seeing tricky. We tried for a while.
We wanted to be a board-game family. But we never quite found the groove. We need to manage the physical parts of the game, like rolling the dice or moving her game piece, and narrate the text or symbols on the board or cards. This slowed things down. She wanted to do things on her own, which was fair, and we could not always figure out how to make that possible. Eventually we put the games away or pulled them out rarely.
I had not thought about that in a long time, until I saw Syona playing.
There are some things that Syona is a natural at. She is a people person, she is funny, she is caring, she is great with music—knowing songs, singers and lyrics. But almost every skill she has developed, every strength she can lean into, has been cultivated.
A team of teachers, therapists, caregivers and us work, actively, to help Syona master skills. Teaching is explicit and broken-down step by step. It can be a lot for everyone involved, including Syona. Is it worth it? Often it is. Sometimes it isn’t and that is when we adjust or pull back.
But there is a particular joy that comes when you learn that your kid is good at something, especially something you did not teach them. In a more “typical” world, your kid may come home from school, a friend’s house or playing a sport and they're better at something than the last time you checked.
For parents of kids with disabilities, that moment can take a long time to arrive, involve a lot of people and catch you off guard. At some point, Syona learned to be a great Uno strategist at school.
Somewhere in the middle of a school day, in a classroom I was not in, with people I did not organize, Syona learned a pretty effective Uno-winning strategy. When to hold back and when to swing. When to burn a Skip. When the deck is thinning and a Wild is worth saving. She knew. Truthfully, a lot better than I did.
Dilip knew too, apparently. The way he sat down beside her and set up the team arrangement had the ease of something they had done before. He handled the cards, she ran the game and nobody made a thing about it. It was just how they played.
My parents were part of this unfolding. They laughed out loud when Syona won, despite their efforts to compete. It was a special moment watching grandparents see their grandchild excel at something.
Nothing about the afternoon was planned. There was no therapy session, no adapted equipment, no goal written on a form. There was a deck of cards, a kitchen table, a few people who love each other, and a kid who turned out to be the best player in the room.
I used to think the measure of progress was Syona doing things we had worked on together. Years of therapy, years of practice, years of small adjustments adding up to something she could do.
What I realized that day is that some of the biggest gains happen out of my sight. And on a random Saturday, with her grandparents at the table and her dad shuffling the deck, I found out Syona can play Uno better than me.
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