Category: Health

A boy at 13

Posted on by Suki

The big news in our town recently was that a thirteen-year-old boy was shot and killed in his neighborhood. Police say the boy had gang ties, though his mother and a counselor who worked with him said he’d been turning his life around. My son is thirteen. It’s hard to look at lives like his next to lives like my son’s and make sense of it.

It sounds like the adults in his life were trying to do the right thing. But when I read the headline, with its emphasis on gangs and police, it made me think of how little sense our systems make when you compare them to what we know about brain development. I was blown away some months ago when I read the book Inspiring Middle School Minds by Judy Willis. Willis has the impressive creds of being a pediatric neurologist who changed careers to be a middle school teacher. Not only does she get kids’ brains, she gets kids.

What I learned from Willis and from other people studying and writing about brain development is that we have it all wrong when it comes to how we’re dealing with teenagers. Somewhere along the way, someone suggested that if we get harsher with them, if we push them harder, lock them up, treat them tougher, somehow this will fix the problems that teenagers cause.

This is, of course, ridiculous. Willis talks about how teens learn everything through the emotional centers of their brains. When they are experiencing pleasure, they learn. When they are experiencing negative emotions, they turn off. So when their gang friends tell them how cool they are, how grown up and tough, they feel great. They learn exactly what their gang friends want them to learn. When the police and the juvenile justice system slam them down and lecture them, lock them up and treat them as if they should view life just like a 30-year-old does, they shut off. They literally don’t learn.

On top of that, every single piece of scientific evidence about the development of the human brain points to decision-making as the very last piece that settles into the puzzle. The average person’s decision-making capability is in place by the age of 25—this means that some people take longer than that to attain their full capacity to make rational decisions. So what does that say about how we deal with teens? Our entire approach is just dead wrong. We can’t treat them more like adults—we need to treat them more like children.

My son has never had to deal with the juvenile justice system, but like all kids, he has done wrong things. When he makes a mistake, we tell him. But at the same time, he almost always hears loving words, accepting words, and he always gets a hug, a shoulder squeezed, a smile. And our son doesn’t have to make life-changing decisions yet. Hopefully, he’ll trust us enough to consult us, just as we did our parents, well into his 20’s when making important decisions.

But many 13-year-old boys are put into situations where they have to resist the pull of gang life, which makes them feel validated and important, and where they have to make life-or-death decisions on a daily basis. I know there’s no way to solve this problem for everyone—life is, at its core, not fair. But there is a way for us to make more rational decisions about how to deal with teens in our social systems. When I read about the juvenile justice system, about the way the police and social workers deal with teens, about how families deal with their difficult teens, I wish over and over that we would trust more in what our scientists are telling us.

Teens are still kids. Yes, it’s true that we shouldn’t treat them like babies. But no, we shouldn’t expect them to have the capabilities of adults. They don’t, and no matter how we treat them like adults, they won’t. They’re still kids, and they need love, support, and encouragement from adults who care about them.

I’m so sorry that a family lost their 13-year-old boy. I hope it reminds all of us to hug our teens, love them, and remember that they can’t be anything more than their biology lets them be.

The Power of Habit: Clean at last!

Posted on by Suki

I have a weakness for books that take brain research and attempt to apply it to our everyday lives. I think this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the time we’re living in: We’re amassing all this new information about how our brains work… so what do we do with it?

My husband knows my weakness, and recently passed on a book he was reading, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It’s a quick read, and not necessarily life-changing. Duhigg offers brain research and lots of anecdotes to back up what I think most of us instinctively know: Habits are easy to form and usually hard to break. Except sometimes, when we seem to drop a habit as easily as a smoker drops a cigarette butt.

You can read the book to get the particulars about the research and the real life anecdotes. But what interests me after reading this is thinking, How does this apply to parenting? And that’s where the point of the book becomes very interesting to me.

I’m sure your kids are a lot like mine. My husband and I have a joke that we have to think about every thing we ever allow our kids to do, because one time sets a precedent, and then suddenly one time becomes habit. One day you break down and let the kids drink a soda at Grandma’s friend’s house, and then suddenly kids who have lived their entire lives without touching soda are begging you every time you pass a convenience store.

Duhigg explains this phenomenon as a “habit loop”: You get a cue (passing a store that sells sodas), it clicks into a routine (one time when you begged and made puppy-eyes, mama said yes to a soda), and then you get your reward (the soda, sugar, caffeine, yay!). He shows that it takes a shockingly short time for our brains to develop habits, and then even if we suffer extreme brain trauma to the point that we can’t remember what someone just said to us, we still can remember—and perform—our habits.

I believe that a huge part of parenting is helping our kids set up healthy habits. Depending on each family, healthy changes its definition. In our house, we limited screen time because we thought too much was unhealthy. We emphasized filling yourself with healthy food before thinking about sweet, fatty, salty snacks. We set up the habit of reading just by doing it so much it became natural to our kids. We do the work we need to do no matter how much we’d rather do other, unnecessary things because that’s the habit that leads to a more successful life. And conversely, we’re willing to throw practical concerns to the wind if we are taken with a fun, creative idea, and we think that’s another habit worth cultivating.

But in reading this book I wondered, first, whether it is possible to be conscious about the habits you develop. Will our constant reminders ever help our kids remember to become good tooth brushers, have a neat house, or know where their jackets are? None of that seems to be catching on at all. In fact, Duhigg’s model is consistent with this: If we make a habit of reminding our kids to do things, will they just develop the habit of waiting to be reminded before they do the thing?

And that leads me to wonder, second, whether there is a better way for parents to help kids develop good habits. Should we ask them to consciously dissect their habits and decide whether they are healthy ones? Should we have them go through the process of doing things the right way, just for practice, so that it gets ingrained in them? How can we help them develop the healthy habits without inserting our own presence into the habit formation?

Lots of interesting questions here. From what I see, our successes and failures have been scattershot. On the one hand, we have a kid who would never consider leaving the house without brushing her teeth. (One time she forgot and she asked if we drive back home so she could do it. I gave her a stick of gum and hopefully didn’t set a bad habit in motion!) On the other hand, we have a kid who has never remembered, no matter what method we have used, to pick up his dirty clothing from the bathroom floor after his shower. Yes, we’ve tried it all, and still, the wrong habit persists.

Finally, Duhigg mentions the phenomenon of changing a “keystone habit” to create a larger change in life habits. In his example, a woman who decided only to give up smoking actually ended up changing every aspect of her life which was heading in the wrong direction. Is it possible that what we really need to do is—who knows?—change the way our son gets to his bathroom for the shower, or take away a picture he always looks at on the way to the shower, or…?

This sounds a bit too much like the kids I knew whose mom was getting a degree in psychology. She practiced everything she was learning on them, and drove them—not surprisingly—a little bit crazy. I don’t want to do that to my kids, but this has definitely given me some food for thought.

Ask me again in six months, and perhaps the floor of that bathroom will be clean at last.

 

All children are gifts

Posted on by Suki

Children are a gift. They’re the most special kind of gift. They’re not the gift certificate type of gift, where you get to go shopping for something you want. They’re not a birthday gift, where you get it because the giver thinks you’re special. They’re not the sort of gift well-meaning mothers-in-law give when they notice that your tablecloths are all really shabby.

Children are the sort of gift we can’t ask for. Children are gifts that come to us in good times and bad. They come to us whole or damaged. They come to us perfect or deformed. They come to us with the complexity of their biological parents’ genes twisted together. They come to us with the epigenetic memory of our forefathers etched into the fibers of their being. They come to us full of promise and full of mystery. They come to us as wholly imperfect beings. They come to us with brains hungry for learning.

Children are never what we expect them to be. Perhaps they have his nose and your hair, or her way of talking but your way of hugging. But the rest is going to be a mystery. How did she develop that passion? How did he develop that fear? Where did that stubborn will come from? I am perfectly sure I never screamed like that as a child. I can’t believe I was ever this smart.

Children can fulfill our expectations for good and for bad. We expect that they’ll do well in school like we did, and they do. We expect that they’ll not make it through the family reunion without a tantrum, and they don’t. We expect that they’ll like spicy Thai food like we do, and they do. We expect that they won’t like any unusual food, and they don’t.

Children are always the children we need. When childless friends remark how our lives have changed, we agree, and we notice how incomplete our pre-parenting lives seem. When we desperately need someone to love us unquestioningly, they are there. When we need a friend, an ally, someone who really looks us in the eye, there they are. When we need someone to remind us we are all human and make mistakes, they are happy to oblige. When we need someone to challenge us, they are always willing to be the challenge we need.

You can quit a job, stop seeing a friend, even divorce your spouse. But the challenge your child offers you is the hardest to back away from. They are the toughest coach you ever had, who makes you keep going when you’re sure you have nothing left. They are the hardest exam you’ll ever take, because the consequences of failure are so vast, you know that you can’t fail.

Your child is a gift you can’t sum up in words. That twisted DNA. That history of shared laughter, breath, home, learning, sustenance. Those emotions deeper and more violent than any others. What your child gives you is more than language can handle.

Your child changes daily, and you do as well. Your relationship twines upward, each twist new in its own way. When your child goes her separate way, you are still standing on the foundation you built together. You can see your own parents down there, feel the strange mystery of grandparents you loved or didn’t know, hear the distant sounds of places your DNA has been, feel the twining of shared lives that defies genetic inheritance.

And you know, from being a parent, that your child will never truly be away from you. Your shared experiences are part of the ground you stand on. The space between phone calls, the years you don’t see each other, or the unthinkable time when a child passes on before his parents—parents are never alone.

Having had a child, you have a child within you still.

All children are gifts, the sort of gift we can’t ask for.

On Being the Parent of a 2e Child

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their twice-exceptional children.

This is Part 3 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

I remember the day when our family therapist suggested that I refer to my daughter as a child with special needs. The suggestion literally gave me pause. I remember the swirl of ideas in my head: it seemed at the same time to be the most preposterous suggestion and the most practical one I’d heard.

I grew up, like many of us, thinking of “the helmet boy” as the poster child for kids with special needs. When I was in school, disabled kids were just starting to be mainstreamed. Nice kids knew that we shouldn’t make fun of these kids, but we weren’t given any guidance on how to integrate them into our world.  Adults suddenly expected us to pretend that we didn’t notice these kids’ differences, which was obviously ridiculous. I had the benefit of knowing a family friend who was developmentally disabled, but throughout my childhood, kids in special ed at school were “the other.”

So there was my adult self, sitting on a comfy couch, being told that I should identify my daughter—helmetless, verbally adept, mathematically quick, with an incisive wit and a keen eye for irony—as belonging to the same category as truly disabled kids. It was a hard thing to do, and it took me a few years more to understand why.

Twice-exceptional kids are a conundrum that our culture has no mechanism for dealing with. Since I was a child in the 70s, we have evolved. We now teach our children about differences; we teach them about multiple intelligences; we teach them to accept each person as he is. When my kids see a child in a wheelchair, or have a conversation with a child who is developmentally disabled, they have many more tools than I had as a child.

But what to do with the hardly verbal boy who is four years advanced in math? The verbally brilliant child who can’t read? The chess wiz who can’t go to tournaments because so many bodies in a room make her shake and cry?

Our culture is nowhere near understanding what to do with these kids, but we parents have had to take a crash course in dealing with our twice-exceptional children. And to make it worse, each 2e child is so different that we can’t crib notes off our neighbors. We need to ace a test that no one else has ever taken.

I remember the day a parent joined an online support group I belong to and introduced herself like this: “I have two sons. One of them was clearly gifted, and we thought that it would help to have him evaluated. So we decided that we should have our other son, who was in special education at his school and had been diagnosed developmentally disabled, get evaluated too. Imagine our surprise: Our gifted son was gifted; our developmentally disabled son blew the top off the IQ test.”

2e kids fool everyone around them. Sometimes they seem like well-rounded gifted kids, and people wonder why their parents don’t treat them as completely normal. Sometimes they seem so disabled by their other exceptionality that people can’t see their giftedness. And sometimes their disability masks the giftedness just enough that they seem completely average, not in need of any remediation.

I decided early on that forewarning was prudent where my daughter was concerned. I developed a vocabulary to use with caregivers of all sorts: new teachers, the coach at soccer camp, other parents who might notice her unusual behavior. “My daughter is ‘unusual.’ We don’t have an exact diagnosis, but you can use what you know about autistic kids to help her along when she’s having trouble with group activities.”

As she has grown and learned more self-regulation, I have fewer occasions to use this speech. Sometimes I give the speech and it turns out to be completely unnecessary. But sometimes I forget the speech and I remember why I started giving it in the first place!

But also as she has grown, I have realized how delicate the balance is when you’re raising a child with special needs. So many parents know that their children with special needs will never live outside of a group home, never hold down a job, never be able to marry. But parents of 2e kids just simply don’t know. On any given day, you might find me wholly confident that it’s going to be all right, or in despair over whether she’ll ever be able to lead a fulfilling life.

Sometimes when people ask me what I’m up to, I joke that I’m getting my PhD in Psychology—with my dissertation focusing on one child. When you have a twice-exceptional child, humor helps. Talking to other parents helps. But what would really help is knowing that when I utter the words “twice-exceptional,” others would have a bit of understanding, moving our culture a little further into accepting that people truly do come in all flavors, with no box the right shape to fit us all.

Continue to Part 4.

A parent’s view from the psychiatrist’s couch

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their twice-exceptional children.

This is Part 5 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #

I promise that I am neither exaggerating nor joking when I tell you that I could have gotten any sort of diagnosis for my five-year-old daughter.

Confused as to why our bright, funny, active child couldn’t make it through half a day in a classroom,  we sought help from a child psychiatrist. She held up the diagnoses like a bouquet.

“Here we have ADHD, which comes with this lovely drug. Or you might want to choose Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which comes with a drug of a stronger flavor. Of course, there’s always Bipolar Disorder. The drug for that diagnosis is very popular with parents this year.”

Now I am, of course, being facetious. She didn’t speak that way, but the implications were obvious. She could see that we were desperate, and she was there to solve our problems with pharmaceuticals.

However, if she’d paused to ask us, she would have found out that we had a very different mission in mind. We didn’t want to know how to calm our daughter down—we wanted to know what was causing the problem in the first place.

I found the answers on the SENG website and in the book Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children, and those answers gave us the courage the fire the psychiatrist and seek completely different ways to help our daughter succeed in life.

You could say that I’ve offered a happy ending, but here is the way I look at it: I am a highly educated mother, a writer who responds to questions by getting out her smartphone and looking up the answer. My own mother is a medical researcher who supplies me with information from Medline. My experience at the psychiatrist’s office is a common one, but my reaction to it is not. Most parents bow to the authority because they don’t see any other choice.

In my daughter’s life, we have sought help from the realms of psychology, psychiatry, family medicine, family therapy, educational theory, alternative medicine, and traditional Chinese medicine. In that time, a few constants have held true across disciplines:

  • No one ever asked about her intellectual profile
    Despite the fact that the research is solid, easily available, and accepted by leaders in many disciplines, no one ever considered how giftedness might interplay with her behavioral issues. Not once did a practitioner recommend testing of any kind that might relate her problems in the classroom to her learning styles and needs.
  • No one ever asked about her diet
    Parents of autistic kids upend their entire families’ diets because of the amazing results they see. Parents of kids with Down Syndrome see fantastic improvements with nutritional supplementation. Yet, despite the evidence, gifted kids are treated as if they have no special needs at all. Pediatricians should hear alarm bells when the parents of a delightful, highly verbal four-year-old say that he always throws fabulous tantrums in the mid-morning. Everyone should have “reactive hypoglycemia” on the tips of their tongues. But not one practitioner ever mentioned it to me.
  • No one ever suggested that the problems were with her environment
    It took hiring an educational consultant (not paid for by insurance) to get the straight dope on a kid like mine: “I can’t imagine a school that could serve her needs,” the consultant told me. So why couldn’t all the teachers, school principals, and everyone else suggest that perhaps school was the problem? School administrators are so sold on the idea that one-size-fits-all education is good for all kids that it doesn’t occur to them that their method can’t possibly work for all kids.

I think that the misdiagnosis of gifted kids is tied into our general cultural uneasiness with distinguishing “smart” kids from other kids. It’s like our culture is still in the high school locker room, unable to get past jocks vs. nerds.

But if we are truly trying to serve all kids’ needs, then that’s something we have to get past. Pediatricians should feel comfortable telling parents of obviously gifted kids about resources they might need when they run into trouble. School administrators should admit when their school doesn’t serve a child’s needs, and be ready to offer information and advice to parents who need it.

Finally, psychiatrists need to stop viewing high intelligence—and the accompanying overexcitabilities that send parents into their offices—as a disease to be masked with drugs. My heart goes out to all those families raising children with severe problems for which drugs are truly an answer. But it is simply wrong to offer drugs to high-IQ kids instead of advice about understanding typical psychological profiles, dietary needs, and appropriate educational environments. Drugs should be the last resort, not the first option.

Continue to Part 6.

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