Learning to live with our biology

Someone forwarded a New York Times article about successful dyslexics to an e-mail list I’m on. The article is about the high proportion of successful entrepreneurs who are dyslexic.

According to the article, it’s likely that these people are successful because of and/or in spite of their disability. One of the people featured, Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s, says, “I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence as a kid. And that is for the good. If you have a healthy dose of rejection in your life, you are going to have to figure out how to do it your way.”

That’s an example of succeeding in spite of your disability. You get so energized by people saying “you can’t do it” that you know that you have to do it.

Another comment he made is telling in another way: “I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator,” he said. “I think everybody should have dyslexia and A.D.D.”

That’s an example of embracing what others see as a disability and figuring out how to use it to your advantage. Again from the article: “One reason that dyslexics are drawn to entrepreneurship… is that strategies they have used since childhood to offset their weaknesses in written communication and organizational ability — identifying trustworthy people and handing over major responsibilities to them — can be applied to businesses.”

This way of looking at a disability goes hand in hand with what I think is a good parenting strategy. Instead of working on “fixing” children, I think parents and other caregivers would be much better off thinking of their job as a sort of helper or guide. We can watch our children and see where they will need to compensate. Even children without disorders have strengths and weaknesses, and as parents we can guide them to places where their strengths shine and also help them find ways to take advantage of their weaknesses.

This approach becomes all the more important if your child has an actual disability holding them back. I once met a woman who’d been born with spina bifida. She was born into a hard-working, no-nonsense farm family, so instead of pitying her or coddling her, she told me, they figured out how to help her do what she could do. Her father constructed a cart that she’d strap her bottom half into, and she’d pull herself around the farm on her hands.

Disabilities of the body are one thing, but people seem to have a different point of view on disabilities of the mind. Parents faced with a child who behaves unusually — is unusually energetic, unusually moody, or whatever — seem to react differently than if they had a child who couldn’t walk or a child who had a hereditary disease with purely physical symptoms. Our society seems to have a general sense of shame about disabilities of the mind, and need to normalize the children rather than let them see if they can adapt their biology to the world they were born into.

I think articles like this are a good reminder that before we had drugs to alter the way our brains work, we had strategies. And these strategies are something we shouldn’t throw out the window just because we have chemicals that make the job easier.

Each of us is born with our particular biology, the way our physical self works. Our brains are part of this. I remember the triumph I felt the day I was reading a book about misdiagnosis of brain differences as disorders, and I got to the part about “reactive hypoglycemia.” I had never heard those terms put together, but I knew exactly what it was. One of our children, if not fed a constant stream of calories at least every two hours, has complete emotional and mental breakdowns. A child who can do logic and reason on a full belly becomes a completely illogical beast when he’s hungry. It’s not crankiness — it’s such an incredible personality change that we were worried that he had something serious going on.

Turns out all we had to do was stuff him with tofu.

More difficult is the child whose general physiological make-up makes him harder to deal with: more volatile, more energetic, more creative, more difficult. That’s the situation we were presented with when we got our second child. I’d be lying if I said that we never talked about drugs, but I think that in a way the “she needs drugs” conversation is our way of relieving the stress of raising an intense child. The fact is, at some point in her life she needs to be able to live in her body. If it gets to the point that she really can’t function, that’s where modern drug therapy comes in. But if she’s too energetic to deal with going to a school where they sit still much of the day and fill in bubbles with number two pencils? Somehow I don’t think that drugs are the answer.

The answer right now is for her to learn to live in her body and interact with the world as it allows her to. If we drugged her now, at what point would she go off the drugs and learn to deal with who she is? From my point of view, it was best for Paul Orfalea that he had to deal with it early. He learned that he would never be a college English professor, an electrician, or a mid-level manager. He found entrepreneurship as a way to use his skills, and to use his disabilities as abilities.

There are children who are truly suffering and for whom drug therapy is the most humane and effective way to help them. But most difficult kids are just that: they’re difficult and they’ve got to learn to deal with it. Twenty years from now when my daughter’s boy(or girl)friend says, Sometimes she is just infuriating!, I’ll answer, I know exactly what you mean. Then we’ll sit back and watch that infuriating, energetic, creative person spin her magic.

And we’ll applaud.