Category: Health

Daddy’s little genius

Posted on by Suki

There has been a small rash of these news stories recently: Kid gets extremely high score on IQ test, applies and gets into Mensa. Parents rush to news outlets to make sure Precious Petunia gets her 15 minutes of fame.

I shouldn’t be so mean, but it really makes me feel mean. These aren’t 15-year-old whiz kids who are looking for fame. This is a 4-year-old who likes Barbies and Legos, or a 3-year-old who likes to play with water and test tubes.

There are many aspects of these stories that I have no problem with. I have no problem with parents wanting to get their kids IQ-tested if they feel that they will get meaningful information from the test. A lot of parents choose to IQ test because aspects of their kids’ learning confuse them, or because they suspect that their kids have learning problems that are masked by their ability to compensate in other ways. Other parents get their kids IQ-tested because they don’t really believe that their kid has special learning needs, and they need the number to make it real to them. Other parents get their kids tested because they have to in order to get into programs or to get services.

I also have no problem with parents pursuing opportunities—like Mensa—for their kids. There is a fine line between helping exceptional kids thrive and pushing them to bolster the parents’ egos, but I try to assume the best about parents. Through experience, I’ve learned to give the parents the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. So I do that, and I assume that families choose to apply to Mensa because they think that there will be some genuine benefit to their kids.

However, a few aspects of these stories give me big problems: First of all, entering your preschooler into a media circus just because you like the flashing lights and fun music. No preschooler needs to be the subject of an article in national news. Preschoolers need a sandbox to play in. They need adults who talk to them seriously about things they care about. They need small and fuzzy things (living or not) to love. They need really excellent stories told to them by adults both orally and through books. They need the opportunity to follow their passions and they need to feel safe and cared for. But they do not need to be the focus of adults who do not know them, do not love them, and do not care about what the attention will mean to them as they grow older.

Secondly, families who push their preschoolers into the spotlight totally miss the point about what IQ means. I do not believe, as it is fashionable in some circles these days, that IQ is totally meaningless. Anyone who has spent time with people on different sides of the IQ spectrum know that it is something that makes people different. Saying that IQ is meaningless is like saying that no one notices that one person has dark brown skin and another has light pink skin. Noticing the difference is not the problem; the problem is what you do once you notice. If we agree that all human beings are important, all human beings have potential, and all human beings should have their potential nurtured, then I think we’re all on the right path and there’s nothing wrong with noticing differences and trying to understand them.

What’s important to understand is that IQ is descriptive, not predictive. When you say that someone has a 130 IQ, you are describing the sorts of gymnastics that their brain is able to do. When you say that they have a 160 IQ, you are describing a person able to do very different gymnastics. Gifted education experts point out that someone with an IQ of 130 (very, very smart) differs from someone who has an IQ of 160 (profoundly gifted) as much as someone with an IQ of 100 (average) differs from someone with an IQ of 70 (developmentally disabled). IQ is a handy construction that allows us to quantify the level of gymnastics a brain can do, and the level and quality of stimulation a brain needs and is capable of handling. As a descriptive number, IQ can be helpful in some ways for working with some kids.

IQ, however, is not a prediction. It is not a skill. It is not a gift. And it is definitely not, as all of these articles erroneously say, “genius.” One of the most famous, longterm experiments in IQ and its predictive qualities was done at Stanford by Lewis Terman. Terman wanted to know how having a high IQ affects people in the longterm. So he tested lots of people and accepted only those with the top IQs into his program. He followed these people for many years, and came to a (for him) surprising conclusion: IQ is predictive of nothing. IQ does not predict success, in money or fame. IQ does not predict happiness, marriage stability, health, or longevity. People with the highest IQs are completely normal in all other ways.

So what does this mean about our cute little geniuses? Obviously, it means that the word “genius” is misapplied when it refers simply to IQ. Einstein was a genius, and did have a high IQ. But he was a genius because of what he did. Many others with his IQ lived and died in obscurity. Other geniuses became geniuses without the benefit of a super-high IQ. People call them geniuses because of what they did with their lives.

As a parent, my heart goes out to these little people who are so abused by our press. To be called a “genius” by Huffington Post when you’re 3 is no gift. It’s a curse. How can a child ever live up to such a start in life? When she starts to develop into the flawed and incomplete person she will become, will she suffer from the fear that she’s actually a fraud? How mortified will she be when she finds out she doesn’t know everything, and never will?

Here’s my advice to parents who find out that their preschooler has a “genius” IQ and want to make sure that they help their child reach his or her potential*:

  • Make sure they have plenty of time to play in the sandbox.
  • Make them feel safe and loved.
  • Tell them stories and give them excellent books to read.
  • Listen to their ideas and take them seriously.
  • Speak to them like they are people, and allow them to have opinions and make mistakes.
  • Make sure they have fuzzy things (living or not) to love and cuddle.
  • Try to open up opportunities so they can explore their passions.
  • Love them, and make sure they know that you’ll love them no matter whether they become geniuses, billionaires, happy, productive people, or anything else.

I know, this would make a very boring news article that would never get picked up by the Huffington Post. Trust Avant Parenting to give you the advice that’s guaranteed not to make your kid rich or famous…unless they work hard to get there on their own, regardless of the number they drew out of the IQ box.

*By the way, this is my advice to any parent, no matter what the IQ score, if any!

Siblings

Posted on by Suki

Things have been pretty darn quiet around our house the last few days. Our son has been off on a school trip to Yosemite, so our daughter is living the life of an only child.

What a relief!

Don’t get me wrong: I adore both of my kids. I couldn’t imagine life without either of them. I’m glad I have them both.

But the truth is, the only extended period of time in which they got along really well was when she was a baby. And not just a baby but that tiny, sweet baby who didn’t yet know how to make her big brother cry. As soon as she figured that out, well, the merry-go-round started to turn.

This is not to say that they never get along. There are some activities they do really well together: They love to go down into the woods to their “fort” and hang out there… as long as my son doesn’t start criticizing his sister for how she pronounces a word. They like to play Minecraft together… as long as my daughter’s avatar doesn’t decide to beat up my son’s avatar with a pick-axe. They like to exchange weird e-mail… as long as my son doesn’t criticize her use of weird fonts and as long as my daughter doesn’t send him more and more e-mails that just contain the word “poopie” copied and pasted hundreds of times. They like to play games together… until one of them has to win.

So you see how it goes: They know each other’s buttons well. They push those buttons. Then they give the button-pusher the satisfaction of retaliation. And so the merry-go-round goes round.

Doggies
Gratuitous new puppy photo. The puppy and the big girl played so hard they just had to go to sleep!

I grew up in a large family, and in many ways my kids’ interactions are not that different from ones I remember from childhood. The big difference is that they have only each other. When one of my siblings got sick of another, we had others to play or fight with. Sometimes when we were feeling especially anti-social, we’d move down into the basement with the spiders!

But my kids can’t get away from each other. Even when my son was in school, they seemed intent on butting heads whenever possible.

The reality of it is that at some point, they will have to detach.

My son will learn that he will never, ever make his sister perfect. Or, conversely, he will realize that she is perfect (as much as any human is), so he should just stop trying to change her.

My daughter will learn that when you poke people they react. Her brother is not a stuffed animal, a dartboard, or a tree she can climb. She cannot rule the world through force of will alone.

Both kids will realize what most governments still can’t get a handle on: reacting to injustice with more injustice just ramps it up. The day one child makes the decision to rise above, not to react anymore to the petty hurts that the other inflicts throughout the day, is the day our house will become more peaceful.

That’s the theory, at least!

Of course, this is all talk. Action is much harder. So occasional, enforced vacations like this one are good for us all. My daughter can come to me for companionship, but I’m never going to be as good as the boy who goes into the forest to help her build a fort. My son can come to me seeking justice, but he’s never going to find me in his Mindcraft world, building a structure for him that says “I love you” in actions if not words. Their friends are there for them, of course, but friends come and go.

Siblings are irreplaceable. So get on that merry-go-round, kids, and play nice… or at least as nice as my siblings and I played, when we weren’t slamming each other’s fingers in the door.

Crippling self-doubt

Posted on by Suki

I had a conversation recently with someone whom I respect greatly. She’s a great person, a loving mom, and has a successful career. But partway through our conversation, I had a realization: She suffers from crippling self-doubt.

I didn’t mention it to her. Perhaps it’s just me projecting, but I’m somewhat of an expert on crippling self-doubt.

I used to mull over everything anyone said to me, trying to find the hidden insults and innuendo. I used to stop myself from doing things because I’d step outside of myself and think, Who would want *me*, of all people, to do *this*? I used to worry about what “people” would think.

I don’t know who those people are, but they ruled my life.

Some good things happened in my life:

I married someone who supports me. Even if it’s something he has no interest in himself, he will congratulate me and say I did a good job. Even when I start doing my “negative self-talk,” he’ll tell me I’m full of it. When I think something is no big deal, he’ll make a big deal of it. He points out my successes, when I see that I haven’t yet reached my end goal. He tells me he believes in me.

Another good thing that happened is that I ran out of time. Literally: I just simply don’t have enough time to do everything I need, want, and must do. So a few things had to go. Organized closets? Gone. Clean fingernails? Often not the case. Crippling self-doubt? Don’t have time for that today.

Finally, I became a mom, and the first time you hear your kid doing that negative self-talk thing that you do…. that’s when you realize how awful it is.

I guess I’d say I’m still ‘recovering’ from my crippling self-doubt habit. Tonight I am reading — for the first time ever — at In Celebration of the Muse, a huge Santa Cruz event that celebrates the feminine muse. Years ago, I wanted so desperately to read at the Muse, and was devastated that I wasn’t chosen. This year, I saw the call for entries and I popped something in e-mail. Frankly, when I received the invitation to read, I didn’t remember what I’d submitted! So in that way, I am ‘recovered.’

But as I was dressing, I got out my fabulous red dress, the one I bought second-hand one day when I was feeling fabulous, and I thought, Hm. Can I carry this off? Perhaps I should wear sober black.

But In Celebration of My Muse, and In Celebration of Overcoming Crippling Self-Doubt (for tonight, at least), I am typing this now all dressed up in my red dress.

OK, so I cut out the shoulder pads. I wasn’t feeling quite *that* fabulous.

I hope I will see my friend there, and I will give her a hug, and I will pass her some of my anti-CSD love.

From one busy mom to another: Just do it. When are you ever going to get the chance again, to do today what you want to? Tomorrow, you’ll be on to something else. Something else to love, fear, and conquer.

Ganbatte!

Just about 1/4 mile

Posted on by Suki

My older child has been working on his science fair project. He’s highly motivated this year, having noticed last year how the stakes were raised: they expect more, but they give more. And he’s a computer-obsessed kid who is saving for a new computer. So he’s got this idea that his science fair entry could win him some money to put toward this purpose, and he’s been working on it as much as we have let him.

Since my husband and I both work with computers, we know a thing or two about it. And one thing we know, that we’ve been trying to impart to our kids, is that sometimes the best way to solve a problem you’re having at the computer is… NOT at the computer.

This may be true in general: When you stand at a locked door literally banging your head against the wall to get in, it’s very easy to ignore the open door around the corner.

The thing is, computers have this way of sucking us in. We become hyper-focused, not noticing anything in our surroundings, answering “mm-hm” to pretty much anything someone asks us. (My kids take advantage of this last feature relatively often, knowing that they might get a distracted “mm-hm” to pretty much any question if they ask it when I’m very busy!)

So even though it’s true of any problem that sometimes the best way to solve it is to walk away from it, I think it’s even more true of sedentary, hyperfocused work like computer programming.

That’s one reason I treasure my solitary morning walk: I often “write” more while out on a walk than in front of a computer.

In fact, I composed most of this piece while walking on Sunday morning. In that case, however, it wasn’t my solitary walk. I had convinced my very reluctant boy to tear his focus from the computer screen and ride his bike on my walk.

He was very reluctant. “I’m in the middle of trying to figure out a really hard problem,” he told me. “This isn’t a good time to go for a walk.”

“This is a perfect time to go for a walk,” I assured him. After some cajoling (and perhaps some not-so-veiled threats), I got him out the door. He got on his bike and rode out ahead of me as I walked. He zoomed down the road, then turned and came back to me.

As he approached, I saw the smile on his face.

“I think I figured out my problem!” he said.

We were about 1/4 mile from our house.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. You walk away from the problem, putter in the garden, or take a nap. And then suddenly, the problem that seemed unsolvable only a short time before presents itself fully formed in your mind.

We got back from our walk and I said, “OK, go solve your problem!”

He bounded up the stairs with a smile on his face, some fresh air in his lungs, and freshly stimulated neurons ready to go to work again.

OT Graduate

Posted on by Suki

My daughter just went through one of those little milestones that mean a lot to parents with a quirky kid: She has officially “graduated” from Occupational Therapy.

Before I had kids, I went for adult occupational therapy for a wrist injury. But I remember the first time I heard someone refer to the sort of OT my daughter received. It was a teacher in her preschool, who told me, “Some people recommend occupational therapy for kids like her, but I can’t really tell you what they do.”

That seems to be the point of view of lots of people: I’ve heard of OT, but I’m not sure what the point is.

At its core, pediatric OT is just like adult OT. Because of an injury or birth defect, children need to learn to do things they need to do in their lives. For adults, OT sometimes results from an on-the-job injury, so the “occupation” part of it makes sense. For kids, just consider eating, playing, and socializing their “occupation” and OT plays a similar role. So a classic case for OT would be a child who needs to be taught (or re-taught after an injury) how to feed herself.

The sort of OT my daughter had, however, goes a bit further afield. It starts with an evaluation. The therapist asks the child to do all sorts of things that kids normally do: Playing activities such as balancing on a beam or catching a ball, learning activities like tracing a picture and writing words, and social interaction activities like asking an excited child to suddenly be quiet as a mouse.

Neurotypical children have no problem with these tasks, and though of course all children vary in their skills, the typical mastery of these skills has been charted so that the therapist can see how far off the curve a particular child is. Some kids are just going to be generally behind the curve, and this may not be cause for worry if their development is otherwise normal. Some kids, such as a classic child with autism, will be further behind. Other kids are on the curve or accelerated in some ways, while at the same time wildly behind in others. That’s more like my daughter.

I’ve written before about how frustrating it can be to have a child who is clearly different, but not diagnosable. Depending on who we’d ask, we could come up with an alphabet soup of diagnoses, none of them fitting her any better than the next. The great thing about OT is that although they have to give a diagnosis for insurance purposes, the OTs we worked with over the years never focused on a diagnosis and thus an expected cluster of problems. They always looked directly at the child in front of them.

I loved the guidance I got from our OTs. My daughter had some autistic-like characteristics — toe-walking, lack of understanding of social cues, out-of-proportion emotional responses — but they never just gave her some “autism package” of treatments. When she was a preschooler, I got the great advice that helped us work on some of her more difficult physical behaviors. Our first OT gave me this memorable advice: “If this kid had been born 200 years ago, she’d have been up at the crack of dawn hauling water from the well as soon as she could carry the bucket. Kids need hard, meaningful work.”

Another OT helped me understand her need for tactile stimulation, and we brainstormed ways that she could get what she needed without a) destroying our house, and b) further damaging my fragile back.

As she aged, we got a new OT who started to help her with her fine motor skills such as handwriting and typing, which were keeping her from being able to do the things that she was intellectually ready to do.

My daughter still has stuff to work on. Her most recent OT would love to get her in a group situation where she has to control her responses and practice social cues, but luckily, life provides a fair amount of those. Her handwriting still doesn’t match her academic skills, but that’s what keyboards are for! (And hopefully it will continue to improve as she grows.) But in general, she’s showing positive change in all the areas we were so concerned about.

This sort of graduation is a strange thing. There’s no one event that announces its arrival. Just one day her OT and I realize, pretty much simultaneously, that she’s ready to move on.

Today she asked, “When do I go to OT next?” and I reminded her that she’d graduated.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I wish I could go back and do the zip line.”

And see her wonderful OT, Melissa, who sent her off with a hug and the promise that she’ll be there if we need her again.

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