Category: Health

Searching for Meaning: Idealism, Bright Minds, Disillusionment, and Hope
by James T. Webb
Great Potential Press

Dr. Webb’s work has been very important in my life. The day I picked up A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children is the day that I started to learn about my children—and myself. This was the first parenting book I’d read that admitted that children are different, that families are different, and that it’s not only OK to be different—it’s OK to acknowledge that you are different. And it’s not only OK, but also necessary, to know who you and your children are if you are going to get on with the business of living fulfilling lives.

Dr. Webb’s work with gifted children necessarily led him to the next step: what happens when gifted children grow up? In common belief, giftedness = high achievement. So a gifted child is only gifted by virtue of his or her high grades, and once school is over, somehow we all become “the same.” Yes, some of us as adults are achievers, but it doesn’t matter whether we were whiz kids in school or dropouts who made it big later in life—giftedness is not supposed to matter anymore.

What Dr. Webb has noticed, however, is that the brain that makes gifted children more excitable, more prone to being misdiagnosed with disorders, highly sensitive, and socially unusual does not disappear with adulthood. It’s that same brain, but more developed, more in control. The girl that screamed when she went into a room with bright lights becomes the woman who wears tinted glasses and has found a way to avoid working in office buildings. The boy who kept being sent to the principal’s office because he couldn’t sit still when he was excited about what he was learning has become the man who paces his office and talks to himself when he’s solving a difficult problem. We didn’t suddenly stop having a different brain because we grew up; we simply learned to shape a world that fit our needs.

But that ability to shape the world has its limits. Yes, the woman who is sensitive to light can wear tinted glasses, but if she’s sensitive to violence it’s hard for her to avoid knowing about the violence in this world. The man who paces his office has control of his part of the project he’s working on, but he doesn’t have control over the exploitation of the workers who make the computers he programs. We figure out a way to cope, but sometimes coping is not enough. When you have a brain that works on overdrive, it’s not easy to turn it off at your convenience.

Searching for Meaning is not an easy book. I have to admit, it’s not a book I would have picked up while browsing in a book store. Disillusionment? Hm, maybe I should go for something lighter. Existential depression? Gotta go, I’m late for an appointment. Admitting that what made me a “smart kid” is still intrinsically part of how I interact with the world? Not likely. But despite the fact that I would have avoided this book—perhaps because I would have avoided it—I really appreciate having read it through to the end.

The book takes an analytical approach to the problem by first dissecting it. What is a gifted child? What is a gifted adult? Webb devotes ample space to questioning what makes us who we are. He then lays out the base that the rest of the book builds on: Our overexcitabilities lead us to be idealists; our idealism leads us to want to change the world; our attempts to make things better will eventually lead us to realize that there are limits to what we can do; facing our limits can sometimes lead us to question what our lives are worth.

Dr. Webb could have made this a gloomy book, indeed. However, by laying the foundation of why so many bright minds find themselves confronting disillusionment and depression, he is then able to build on this understanding to help us climb back into the light. Using the different points of view of a variety of thinkers through the ages, Dr. Webb shows ways that we can view what we’re experiencing through a new lens. He offers new ways of looking at what might seem to be a bleak landscape, and cautions us against coping mechanisms (anger, narcissism, avoidance) that become destructive even as we think we are protecting ourselves.

Finally, Dr. Webb offers us the challenge to view our idealism and sensitivity as an asset, to find coping mechanisms that improve our lives and the lives of others, and to aim for hope, happiness, and contentment in a world that desperately needs more of all three.

If you think it’s uncomfortable admitting that your child is different and has different needs, magnify that 20-fold to admit that about your adult self. Dr. Webb’s current mission is to remind us that our brains — no matter which type we ended up with — still need TLC once we move into our adult lives. Dr. Webb’s mission is to understand the needs of brains we called “gifted,” but this book takes its place in a greater striving to understand all different aspects of humanity now that we have the tools to do so.

We are all different. We do have our own needs. Dr. Webb’s brave book encourages one segment of “special needs adults” to learn more about caring for their singularly overexcitable brains.

The Explosive Child: A new approach for understanding and parenting easily frustrated, chronically inflexible children
Ross W. Greene, Ph.D.
HarperCollins, 2009

The Explosive Child by Ross Greene has been on my reading list for a long time. I regret that I didn’t get to it earlier, though reading it now, when many of the other difficulties in our household have been ironed out, has been good timing.

Greene, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry, starts with a simple thesis that many families with sensitive, twice-exceptional, ADHD, learning disabled, or emotionally volatile children figure out over time: the usual parenting strategies don’t work with these kids. Many of us have taken a journey in this regard. We start out looking for help from standard parenting manuals, friends with typical kids, or even professionals. They have great ideas, but for some reason our kids are different.

Greene speaks directly to parents who feel like they’ve tried everything, and he points out that most of the solutions we’ve heard about boil down to two approaches. What he calls Plan A is otherwise known as authoritarian parenting; this is the “Because I said so” approach. Greene notes that even milder-sounding terms like “consequences” are a form of Plan A, because they don’t take the child’s point of view into account.

What he calls Plan C is the opposite: just giving in and letting explosive kids get their way. This permissive approach often seems easier in the short term, and Greene acknowledges that sometimes it’s a necessary part of getting through the day. Though most parenting books don’t advocate permissiveness directly, they do often counsel parents to offer understanding and support to their children in the midst of a tantrum, without giving any guidance for addressing the root causes of the behavior, as typically developing children will usually outgrow tantrums without intervention.

Greene’s interest is in helping parents put together a plan that not only addresses the root of the problem but also helps the child learn valuable life skills in the process. Neither Plan A nor Plan C fulfills these criteria, and in fact, both approaches can damage a volatile child’s chance of developing into a healthy functioning adult.

Greene’s Plan B isn’t easy. First of all, he acknowledges that it pushes a lot of common parenting buttons. Most of us harbor deep suspicions about letting badly behaving children “get away with it.” Also, we have immediate goals, such as wishing our children to be polite in public, that Plan B will put off for a more distant time while we work on our own responses to our children’s behavior. And, he admits, Plan B can be hard for our extended community, such grandparents, teachers, and adult friends, to buy into.

But the great thing about this book is its watertight argumentation: no matter what your resistance to moving to this new—difficult—mode of dealing with your child’s explosive behavior, Greene has a thoughtful, empathetic response.

I can’t vouch for the longterm success of Greene’s approach in my own parenting life, as I just read the book and am working slowly to implement changes in my own responses to common situations in our household. But I can say that as I read this book, I kept saying, “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” as Greene outlined the difficulties of raising a volatile child, and solutions that are at once sympathetic, humane, practical, and based on the longterm goal that we all have: raising happy, well-adjusted adults.

Update, 5 years later

I see that I wrote this five years ago. I can now revisit my last paragraph above and unequivocally state that Greene’s approach has been successful in my family and also for me as a teacher. I believe that reading this book changed the path our family was on. My fifteen-year-old is a happy, well-adjusted kid. Yes, sometimes we argue, but in a normal, healthy way. I can’t recommend Greene’s collaborative approach highly enough.

I have recently come upon two books that I think are important books for those of us with “quirky” kids to read. This is the first of my reviews—the second will be about The Explosive Child, which I’m still digesting! If the topics of these books speak at all to your child’s quirkiness, I highly recommend them.

Children with High-Functioning Autism
Claire Hughes-Lynch

In general, I don’t expect that books on autism will give me much insight into my parenting challenges. I regularly speak to parents with kids who have profound disabilities and feel like I’m whining about the comparatively small problems we face. I’m in awe of parents who face all the difficulties of raising children who may never be able to live independently.

I was intrigued by the title of this book, however, because I often have conversations with parents who have chosen not to pursue diagnosis for one reason or another. These conversations drift into the subject of how various of our kids, spouses, and even ourselves could probably be placed on the high end of the autism spectrum. Lots of the kids who fit into the scope of this book aren’t diagnosed, for a variety of reasons. But the parents of those kids will find interesting and thought-provoking information in its pages.

Hughes-Lynch is neither a medical professional nor simply a parent. She was a teacher in special education and gifted education before her children were diagnosed. This gives her a particular point of view that I think is novel: she writes both as a parent, frantic for information and insight, and as a professional who is now seeing her profession from the other side.

There are large sections of these books that won’t apply to many families directly, such as navigating the public school IEP and 504 plan system. But on the whole I found the author’s approach a novel and helpful one. She dissects the job of parenting a quirky child – in her case, one diagnosed autistic but also gifted, another diagnosed PDD-NOS – and separates out the various issues that parents will face. But on top of that, she follows up with knowledge and insights gained from her professional life. The result is a very balanced book, with both the mother’s passion and willingness to try everything, as well as the professional’s insistence on standards and data.

It’s a welcome book that recognises the difficulty of calling a high-functioning child “autistic”.

Hughes-Lynch writes:

“Despite the warning signs of autism, there often are signs of significant strengths that can signal high-functioning autism. “Experts” can watch children and say, “Nope, I don’t see autism” because the child is making eye contact, or is listening to you, or is engaging in imaginative play, or is talking—behaviors that often are not found in children with more traditional autism. These are the challenges that families face: there is “something,” but what? Giftedness? Autism? Anxiety? Asperger’s syndrome? These children often defy easy classification and are ultimately amalgams of many different, overlapping issues.”

Her insights about how autistic kids’ reactions are different from the norm offer parents a way to classify their children’s behaviors and weigh them against other high-functioning children’s behaviors:

“When autism has hijacked their reactions, children appear unable to control anything, and when they are momentarily in charge of their autism, they can be “too good.” There often is very little middle ground.”

The book is a goldmine about everything from support to therapy, with lots of pointers to research and other books. The one drawback of the book is that she cites lots of research that has become dated, given how quickly autism research is moving. So readers should check data that she cites before believing that they are still current.

Otherwise, I think book helps out in a couple of grey areas: Not for parents of profoundly autistic kids, it focuses on the unique concerns of children who may even be gifted learners and are more likely to be able to “graduate” from their autism into an independent adult life. Also, this is neither the story of a parent’s journey through autism nor a book written by a clinician – it spans both genres in a helpful and insightful way.