Category: Health

Reactive hypoglycemia

Posted on by Suki

PLEASE NOTE: This is a very old post. Comments are closed. Please do not message me to ask my advice—I haven’t done any further research on this subject and have no leads for you. I do know what you’re going through, though, and I know it’s rough. Hang in there!

Some gifted children experience a reactive hypoglycemia — a need for body fuel — that causes them stress. They usually function well until mid- or late-morning. Then, suddenly, they are emotionally over-reactive, irritable, and experience intense stress. Once they have eaten, their functioning and stress levels are fine again for several hours.

– A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children
Webb, et al

You can’t imagine my relief at reading this dry bit of prose. Excitedly, I typed it into an e-mail for my husband. I believe the subject line was, “So we weren’t making it up!”

Your average kid, like your average adult, can get cranky when hungry. This isn’t what we’re talking about here. When our son was about three years old, he started to exhibit a pattern that we couldn’t find in any child-rearing manual. He’d be fine, perfectly fine. He was a charming, funny little guy, rather unusual and very sensitive, but that in itself wasn’t distressing, given his parentage.

But without warning, he would start to change into a different child. He would become oppositional, irrational. He’d say crazy things. Most of all, he’d refuse to eat. Pretty soon we figured out food was the key.

Every morning, if I hadn’t fed him his after-breakfast meal, he went insane.

We had one kid; we had one major problem. It wasn’t so hard to take care of: I fed him before the problem came on. It caused us the most trouble on unusual days: weekends, when we were traveling, family get-togethers. We’d forget that we’d had a timechange, or we’d get sidetracked chatting with someone, and suddenly our little boy would have turned into a monster. Eventually we had to teach his teachers about the problem, and it usually took only one episode for them actually to believe me. That boy has to eat.

But I wasn’t reading “A Parent’s Guide” because of my son. It was my daughter who’d driven me to typing that dreaded word, “Gifted,” into Google. With one kid, we were willing to say that he was just a little different. With the second, we had to admit something was going on.

The thing is, of all the troubles we had with our daughter, reactive hypoglycemia wasn’t one! I was happy to see it mentioned because other people had always thought we were so strange when we asked if their kids went insane when they were hungry. Not just a little cranky, mind you, but bonkers, complete with a change of personality and adoption of conspiracy theories. (As you might guess, a four-year-old’s conspiracy theories always start…and end…with his parents.)

Our son has always been very thin — 90th percentile in height, 10th in weight. Our daughter has always been right down the middle. In comparison to her brother, I thought of her as a little plump. And I chalked her resistance to reactive hypoglycemia up to that — she didn’t need as much fuel.

I was wrong, but it took eight years to come out. All of a sudden, sometime last year, we started to notice that many of her fits were preceded with hunger. We started to notice that if we let her get hungry, she’d become so irrational she couldn’t eat. I started to give in to whims like ramen for breakfast only because I knew if I could get her started eating, I might be able to continue the eating into something healthy.

As with all things juvenile, there is no one-to-one correlation here. Not all kids deemed “gifted” have reactive hypoglycemia. And I’m sure there are some kids who aren’t thinkies* like my kids who have this problem.

*I just saw someone refer to that term today and I love it. My kids are thinkies! It’s the intensity of their thinking that makes them who they are. I think I may adopt that term permanently.

What made an impression on me, those four incredibly short, unbelievably long years ago when I read that paragraph, was that we weren’t alone. There were other people who wouldn’t look at me like I was the crazy one for saying that my kids went completely insane when they were hungry. There were people out there who would say, “Oh, yeah, that. We always carry peanut butter pretzels with us, and if he starts to go off we just start stuffing them in.”

I don’t think it’s at all necessary to label kids. But finding a general area where you can locate your unusual kids is incredibly comforting. Not one other parent of a thinkie has been able to chart a course for me. But occasionally, they’ve thrown me a very welcome lifeline and called out, “I’ve been there, too!”

Reactive hypoglycemia: Just the words were enough.

Also read:

NOTE: Comments are now closed in this thread. Thanks for all your passionate responses!

Going green, going cheap

Posted on by Suki

A friend and I were talking about how all this emphasis on “going green” was getting her down. Her family is presently in reduced economic circumstances, and she said, “I feel like we can’t afford to be green!”

So we started to talk about all the ways in which her family is actually living a “green” lifestyle. There are plenty of ways to live a lifestyle that has less impact on our Earth and also save money. Here are a few we came up with:

1. Reduce the number of vehicles you use, and/or use public transportation or good old-fashioned muscle power

My friend’s family made a conscious decision years ago to only have one car. For a family, this is a big decision. I know a few families who have done this, and it has had a great impact on their lives. On one hand, they lose convenience and the ability to make spur-of-the-moment decisions like “Hey, let’s go to Monterey today!” On the green side, they are forced to make conscious decisions about how they use their vehicle and whether it’s worth the trouble. One spouse usually rides his bike, which saves us from that much more pollution. (Even if you don’t believe in global warming, you can agree that this is a net benefit. Not to mention the fact that he’s probably a lot healthier and will thus take up fewer health care dollars as he ages.) And if they both need to get somewhere in a vehicle, one takes public transportation or finds a carpool. These days, most families with kids don’t even bother to carpool. If you’re forced to consider it, you end up getting used to doing it and saving gas even when you don’t need to. And on the upside, you get to chat with your friends all the way to Monterey!

2. Fix rather than buy new

My friend’s family has fixed their dishwasher twice when in the past they would probably have bought a new one. That’s saving the landfill from another fixable dishwasher. My husband is great at trying to get new parts when something breaks. I have to admit I’m not so great at it. But amazingly, he has nursed along the Cuisinart I bought in the late 1980’s by buying a new insert for it (even more amazing: they keep manufacturing that same bowl), he updated our mini-Cuisinart (which we use more often) three times before they stopped making the parts, he’s fixed our bread machine (which we use heavily to make dough) more times than I can count, and he got our rice maker at least ten more years of life by buying new parts. Each time he does this, it doesn’t necessarily save us a lot of money. But it does save us enough to make it worth it, and it saves the earth lots in terms of things not thrown away.

3. Reuse rather than recycle

Recycling is great. We recycle everything we can. However, not everything can be recycled. And things that can be recycled often can be reused a number of times before you give up on them. My friend is a teacher and goes to the wonderful RAFT in San Jose, where they take in all manner of refuse from Silicon Valley companies (stickers, backpacks with event names stamped on them, CD-ROMs of obsolete software, coasters with event names stamped on them, resources such as glue that are a little past their prime, carpet samples from the revamping of the headquarters of some high-flying start-up, the spools that all those CD-ROMs came on…). RAFT then takes this… garbage… and turns it into teaching materials, teacher supplies, and enormous bins of what-have-you that teachers might be able to use. Teachers go in there and shop away. They come out with a year’s worth of supplies — plus that new computer backpack they needed — for $50. Not only is this a great deal for one of our more beleaguered groups of professionals, but it saves all this stuff from going to the landfill. For my part, I got sick of trying to find new uses for more and more plastic yogurt containers, and I started to make my own yogurt. Yes, there are trade-offs (gas to go to the store vs. energy to run the yogurt maker), but the net benefit is that I reuse my yogurt containers over and over, and seldom put one into the recycling bin.

4.Grow and process your own food

My friend spent a few weeks this last autumn offering her friends an apple count. “So far,” she’d announce on a Monday, “I have made 6 gallons of apple cider.” And then, “this weekend I dried ten pounds of apple slices.” I see her kids still munching on those apple slices months later, so I know that they are not going to waste. If you think my friend is a farmer and making some special effort, well, you couldn’t be further off. They live in the city. Their apple trees need little care. They sit on the edge of their small property and give the fruits of their labor yearly and freely. It takes little thought to plant a fruit tree in a spot where you want some shade, or to fill your flower beds with cabbage or snow peas. If you’re going to use the water anyway, why not bear fruit with it? When I was a child, we grew huge amounts of stuff on our 5 acres. I have such fond memories of canning days. I’m sure my mother doesn’t, but these days, even she is relenting. She mentioned to me just the other day that she was so astounded by how much she’d just paid for a jar of something, “I’d better get back into canning.” My parents have a farm, and we try to be good, but we end up throwing away embarrassing amounts of rotten food. We do get some of it to Second Harvest, and much of it appears on our friends’ doorsteps, but the rest really should get itself into cans and the freezer so that we can store away the little bits of energy and water that went into the harvest.

5. Be conscious of your choices, but not draconian

I can name one very conscious choice I have made in our food habits: I no longer buy something that’s wildly out of season here that has been shipped in from the other side of the world. In my case, this boils down to one particular thing: I love asparagus. But frankly, the asparagus I wait for in California is so much sweeter because of its absence the rest of the year. I see the asparagus from Chile available in September, and I remember that if I bide my time, local asparagus will be all that much sweeter. But on the other hand, I have to admit that I don’t deny my family an occasional mango. The ability to get a mango far from the tropics is one of the benefits of our modern life. I don’t go overboard, but since I can’t wait for mango season to come to Northern California, I’m happy to bend the rules a bit to bring that sweetness into our lives.

Let’s be serious here: few of us are going to go back to Little House on the Prairie for our lifestyle. You, dear readers, may be vegan locavores or back to simple self-sustainers, but the rest of us are here in this modern life. We’re not going to be perfect. But that doesn’t mean that our little choices are meaningless.

So today, my message is that you can make a small difference, and it’s not worthless. Go ahead: buy the cabbage instead of the asparagus. Go ahead and feel good about it. I’m giving you permission. Save a little money, and save a little bit of our future.

A problem of definition

Posted on by Suki

I have two wonderful and rather intense children. Our days can often be quite lovely. Often there’s a lot of argument and obstinacy. But all in all, we make it through our days pretty well.

This is not how I would have described my family a few years ago. When my daughter hit the toddler stage, it was as if our family had been sucked into a hurricane. All the wisdom written about in parenting manuals and all the advice from highly experienced early childhood teachers just simply did not apply. Something seemed wrong.

It all came to a head when it became clear that school was not a place our daughter was going to thrive. In fact, it seemed to be a fight to the bitter end: either school would destroy her, or she would destroy the school.

All of this led us to the office of a well-regarded child psychiatrist, who, with very little attention paid to the little girl in front of her, started talking about “rapid onset bipolar disorder.” We left the office feeling like something was wrong. After some discussion and reading, we decided not to return.

I’d read enough about this so-called disorder to smell a skunk. Parents like us are desperate, yes. We find no help in traditional parenting techniques, certainly. Our lives are turned upside-down by one person, definitely. But to say that our brilliant, wonderful, creative daughter was mentally ill? This was a step we just couldn’t take. We didn’t go any further than that, and here we are today. Our days can actually be pleasant and sometimes even border on serene.

A lot of parents are taking that other route, but I don’t blame them. A well-respected professional tells them that their child has a mental disorder. Their lives have been sucked into a hurricane. There is even a drug the child can take! A return to normalcy is promised.

Problem is, it’s all based on misinformation and misunderstandings, and I’m not the person telling you this. It’s the person who wrote the book on mental disorders.

There is an excellent article in Wired Magazine this month about Allen Frances and his crusade against DSM-5, the upcoming update to what our nation’s psychiatrists define as mental illness. Though the article spans many topics having to do with DSM-5, the paragraph that caught my eye concerned Frances’ dismay over how the DSM-IV, of which he was lead editor, affected one particular mental illness that hadn’t even existed before:

Shortly after the book (DSM-IV) came out, doctors began to declare children bipolar even if they had never had a manic episode and were too young to have shown the pattern of mood change associated with the disease. Within a dozen years, bipolar diagnoses among children had increased 40-fold. Many of these kids were put on antipsychotic drugs, whose effects on the developing brain are poorly understood but which are known to cause obesity and diabetes.

The article goes on to point out that the most influential advocate for diagnosing bipolar in children had been paid by Johnson & Johnson, the maker of the drug used to treat it.

The Wired article is not online yet, but you can read Frances’ argument in Psychiatric Times. Reading this doesn’t make me feel smug; it makes me feel ill. I am so sad for all those families whose real problems were caught up in a fad. I am so sad for all those kids who are being left with lifelong health problems from the drugs they took. I’m especially sad that even if they choose to stop today, what’s been done to them cannot be undone.

Dealing with a difficult and unusual child is never easy. Perhaps the answer will involve drug treatment, though it doesn’t always. I’ve written before about the various steps we’ve taken, and how it has affected our lives both good and bad. The process has been infuriating, isolating, depressing, maddening. The route we chose to take was slow-moving and indefinite. But at every point on this slow-moving journey, we could have turned onto a new path. We could, and did, question the choices we were making. We made a choice to let our child be who she was, to work with what we had, and see if we could find a healthy path for her.

The drugs, we knew, would always be there if we chose to use them. But we could never look at drug therapy with the cavalier attitude of that psychiatrist, who seemed only to be thinking about pacifying the hurricane now, not how to work with it longterm.

I’m so glad that Allen Frances is sticking his neck out for all those other kids, whose parents didn’t feel they had a choice. And I hope that the people writing the new DSM-5 understand the awesome responsibility that comes with defining those parts of children’s behavior that are mental illness. I hope that they look down on the floor and really see that little girl they are fitting into their box.

Getting there on time

Posted on by Suki

The thing I worried about most when I first left my son with strangers was getting back on time.

Until he started going to preschool two mornings a week, I’d never left him with anyone who wasn’t related to me. The preschool had hours: 9 a.m. drop-off, 1 p.m. pickup. This seemed very reasonable.

Until I left the first day. He was crying, of course.

My standard joke is this: When my son was born, the doctor gave my husband scissors to cut the umbilical cord. But really, she should have left it to a professional.

I didn’t leave my son without him bursting into tears for years after that. To this day, he has to have a clear picture of where I am going and what I am doing and when I will be back. That umbilical cord has stretched in length, but it’s still as strong as ever.

So, on the first day I left him with strangers, he was crying. His teacher was very kind. She was a former lawyer named Marie who had decided to be a preschool teacher while she spent time raising her kids. I bet she’s a lawyer again. Being a preschool teacher had to be much more stressful!

My son cried, and she said, “It’s OK, Mom. Just go ahead and honk when you drive by!”

She had a smile on her face. I’m sure that mine was tragic. She probably thought I was worried about him, but I wasn’t.

I was worried about the 1 p.m. pickup time.

What would happen if I was late? What if I got stuck in traffic? What if I just plain forgot? I was known to do things like that.

I had spent my life making sure that helpless people didn’t depend on me. I didn’t think I was quite dependable enough for that. I had been a teacher, but I taught adults only. Children? I just couldn’t trust myself not to ruin their lives the way mine had ruined my life! Well, OK, not my whole life, but being mocked by your seventh grade math teacher about your weird name in front of the whole class is, I would say, rather limiting.

For the next six years, I made everyone call me “Sue.”

What if my son made everyone call him “Bob”?

What if he learned that he couldn’t trust me?

What if his teacher had to drive him home in her ballet shoes?

OK, that was something else that happened to me. My mother did forget me, just once that I remember. I was at ballet class, and one by one, all the other girls left, and there I waited. Finally, my teacher called my mom, and and afterwards she hung up and told me that she was going to drive me home.

Shocking! Ballet teachers don’t drive! They dance!

Plié. Pirouette. En pointe!

Could I trust her to get a car from her house to mine? Apparently I could, though I remember that she was the first person I ever knew to:

  1. drive in ballet shoes (not toe shoes, thank goodness)
  2. drive two-footed, the left on one the brake, the right one on the accelerator.

But I don’t think I was scarred by this experience. I remember it, but it didn’t have any of the life-changing effects of being mocked about my name. (I have to give my mom credit here: She had 5 kids, and she forgot me only once. I had only one child for the first four years, and I was petrified that I’d forget him, over and over!)

I didn’t, come to think of it, become a ballerina. But there may have been more practical reasons for that, such as the fact that I have two left feet.

I do, however, drive one-footed, and my heavy right foot blasted down Soquel Drive toward the preschool. I got there, the first day, by 1 p.m. And with a few exceptions, I got there before 1 p.m. for the next three years.

But still, it amazes me that I was so concerned. I could make a doctor’s appointment on time. I could make a hair appointment on time. (Unless I forgot it, which was not uncommon.) I could certainly make a movie on time. So why was I worried?

It must have been the reality of that sweet, dependent little body. That unusual feeling I had that someone needed me. Needed me and only me. A teacher, in ballet shoes or otherwise, wouldn’t suffice. Even a teacher with a J.D.

One o’clock in the afternoon. Do you know where your child is?

Still, to this day, it amazes me that I left him at all. Perhaps, in retrospect, the doctor should have handed me those scissors.

Clearly, I needed them.

Winning and losing

Posted on by Suki

My son’s class had a banner year last year, as far as winning goes. Their environmental video project won a few big prizes and lots of kudos. Not only did they get on the free stuff train (Disney logo-gear!), but they got articles in the newspaper and money for the classroom. The same year, my son had his first experience in entering but winning nothing in the science fair.

My sons classic towering redwoods photo
One of my son's classic towering redwoods photos

My daughter entered the science fair as well, with a really great project, but we forgot part of it, had to return home to get it, and were late for the judging. She was so flustered, she forgot to show the judge the most interesting part of what she did. The judges’ comments made it clear that they had no idea what her project was actually about, yet she got a respectable third place.

She said she was happy she didn’t win first because she didn’t only want to have blue ribbons!

This year both kids entered the county fair for the first time. My son entered one thing: a really gorgeous and unusual photo he took. I thought he would enter a redwoods classic: the towering redwoods with sunlight coming through them. But his choice of a close-up of a leaf had a mystery and depth unusual for an 11-year-old.

My daughter, ever the big producer, entered three things: An excellent pair of dragon pants she sewed, a vegetable creature made of deformed corn she named “Franken-corn,” and a watercolor of the Monterey Bay with sailboats at sunset.

The results were mixed: My son’s photo got an honorable mention. My daughter’s pants won first place (how could dragon pants not win something?), her vegetable creature won third, and she didn’t get a mention for her watercolor.

My son said he was pleased to get an honorable mention—I think he sensed that his choice was unusual but liked that they had acknowledged his work.

Ever the rationalist, my daughter explained to me that had the judges known that her painting was modeled on Monet, they would have given her a prize. And she immediately perked up at seeing that her best friend from her homeschool program had won first prize for her watercolor mounted directly above my daughter’s.

This is the photo my son entered in the fair.
This is the photo my son entered in the fair.

It’s interesting to me to watch how my two children react so differently to winning and losing. My daughter’s interest in contests is very energetic: she loves to toss things in and see what the judges think, and then she moves on to her next interest, not dwelling too much on results.

My son thinks carefully about his submissions and never wants to do the obvious thing. At the science fair last year, we counted at least five entries about testing hand sanitizer. He was amused by this, but perplexed why any of them would get a prize. Like me, he values the originality of an idea and the intent. It’s hard for him to get judging that doesn’t value the same things. Like me, he sees each of his efforts as an individual to be nurtured. Winning and losing is, necessarily, more personal than it is to my daughter.

I think that contests are great for kids for a variety of reasons:

  • When you do something and throw it in a drawer, it doesn’t achieve the sort of finality and finished quality that it does when you see it hanging in a show or displayed in a hall.
  • When there’s a goal to work toward, kids tend to do a more thorough job.
  • The experience of submitting something and, in the case of the science fair, having to explain it is a much deeper learning experience than just doing it and moving on.

Most importantly, though, winning and losing really are a part of life. And part of raising a child is teaching him or her to be able to understand what losing means, and by extension, what winning really means.

My daughters dragon pants
My daughter's dragon pants

My daughter studies Judo, and her sensei says that one of the most important parts of learning Judo is learning to be completely in yourself. He’s a former champion, yet what he talks about is losing: How everyone will lose at some point, and when you lose, you learn an important thing about winning. That important thing is that your effort is yours and isn’t diminished or canceled out by the winner’s effort. When you know that you did your best, you can have respect and admiration for the opponent who beat you. When you know that you didn’t do your best, you can’t blame your opponent. Instead, you need to question: Why didn’t I do my best? What can I do to improve?

My daughter is about to compete in her first Judo tournament, which should be interesting. She is very, very good at Judo, but there’s probably another 7-year-old out there who’s better, and who knows? They might meet up on a mat this weekend.

My son is starting to contemplate entering various other contests this year, including the science fair. I am sure that what he does will be meaningful and important to him, and despite what the judges decide, he will win. Because if he goes about his other contests as he did his photo, he’s going to look inside himself to find something new and surprising.

In any case, I hope that they both find contests inspiring and meaningful, even when the ribbon isn’t blue.

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