Category: Health

Existential angst

Posted on by Suki

One of the talks I went to at the conference last weekend was about how intense adults who spend a lot of time in their heads can struggle with bouts of existential depression throughout their lifetimes.

As one woman I talked with afterward said, “That was a great talk, but now I’m SO depressed!”

The speaker was James T. Webb, the wonderful publisher of Great Potential Press and the founder of SENG, the organization that gave me the psychological tools to start understanding what might be going on with my daughter. And with my son. And with my husband.

And with me.

During the talk, Webb asked us to define the major roles in our lives, and then he asked us to strip them away one by one and consider who we really are. There I was, stripping myself bare of mother, wife, writer…

As parents, I know that our roles are so important that sometimes they can take over. When I talk to parents, their complaints often fall into a pretty common set of categories:

“Our kids take up so much energy my husband and I don’t even know each other anymore.”

“It’s such a relief to go to work and not to have to worry about my kids.”

“I’m concerned that I do too much/too little for my child and this is causing the problems he’s having.”

We are the first generation that brought many of our kids into the world “with aforethought.” It took the combination of widely available birth control, thoughtful living, and progressive gender roles to bring this about. Very many of us (I don’t know the number but I bet someone does!) now actually think about having children, or not having children, before we do so. As the bumper sticker says, “A child is not a choice,” but having a child certainly is.

So we thought this all through before we did it, or at least we thought we thought it through! And then along it comes and it’s so very different than what we had imagined. Our children are people we could never have made up. Our spouses change — they will never again be someone who has not raised children. Our relationships to our spouses change — we are now partners in supporting another human life!

Really, there’s no way we could have known how intense this would all be. And as the sort of person Webb was talking about, someone who has always questioned my roles and my place in this world, having children has been, well, life-changing. When he asked me to strip myself of that role, I wondered if I really could.

Before I had children, I occasionally inserted a minor character into my fiction who had children. But the main characters were children, either literally or in the roles they were playing in their lives. Now, I occasionally sit myself down to write fiction, none of which gets finished. And in that fiction, all of the characters have children, and the way I approach the child characters has been indelibly changed by the experience of being a parent myself.

But mostly what I’m doing in my writing now is writing about children and parenting, so really, all three of my major roles are tied into one. I can imagine my husband and I once again living without children in our house, as ours grow up and move away, but I can’t imagine us as we were before we raised children.

In the past, I always liked feeling like I could just up and change my life if I wanted to. At one point I decided to take the LSAT and apply to law schools. I have to say that from my present vantage-point, I think it’s highly likely I never intended to go. I just wanted the option to do something radically different.

But having children changes all that. Anywhere we go, we have to go in a car that has four seats. Even if the trip is just for me, or just for my husband, or just for one of our children, we are all intrinsically involved. I don’t know that there is anything else in life that can change us so deeply and so finally.

We chose to have children, and thus we became parents. And there’s no standardized test that can get me out of this one.

Here I am. Here we go!

A conference for people who work with kids with special needs

Posted on by Suki

I spent the weekend at the California Association for the Gifted Conference in Sacramento. This isn’t a conference for people who doubt what “gifted” means, though I would guess that most people at the conference dislike the term as much as I do because of its implication of a value judgment. The conference focuses on the needs — psychological, educational, social — of kids that present a large number of common characteristics. [See the NAGC’s FAQ page for specifics.] Let’s call them accelerated learners.

It’s clear to anyone who has worked with them that such learners have special needs. I remember when my four-year-old daughter’s therapist recommended, “You should refer to her at her school as a child with special needs.” I was initially shocked — that term is most commonly applied to kids on the other end of the learning spectrum.

But these days I totally get what she means. And so did pretty much everyone at the conference. Whether they were parents of these kids, teachers of these kids, or therapists of these kids, they could see the group as clearly as special education teachers see kids with Down Syndrome.

The aspect of this group of kids that interests many of the people at the conference is not the fact that they can learn quickly. That’s like saying that those who care for and educate kids with Down Syndrome are focused on their slower learning pace. Their learning rate is part of the whole package.

What many people who are working with these kids are interested in is the fact that not all these kids are doing well. Yes, there are kids like that straight-A student, captain of the football team, president of the student council. But most kids who present the characteristics of this group have unrecognized problems. Many of them are unlikely to be designed “gifted” in school — not a small percentage of them are put into remedial learning. Many of them are not socially adept and end up lonely and confused. Estimates of how many of them drop out of high school range from 10 to 20 percent.

So although there were some talks aimed at what these kids can do, most of what I heard was about what we need to change to help these kids negotiate the minefield they were born into. I went there determined to wear my reporter hat and go to lots of “schooly” talks about GATE funding and the differentiated classroom. However, I found myself drawn again and again to the psychologists who are learning why these kids are like they are, how they can reach their potential, how we can keep them from falling into those negative statistics quoted above.

[I did go to some “schooly” talks and will be writing about those soon.]

The various developmental theories that are being developed attempt to explain why a child who learns to read at 3 can’t seem to get along in a social environment till she’s 8. Or why a child who can do math in his head just can’t seem to get himself to write it down. Why some children start out fast and then slow way, way down. Why accelerated learners can present symptoms of ADHD, bipolar, dysgraphia, sensory integration disorder, etc. [See Hughes.]

No matter what approach they take, psychologists see an usual progression of development in the brain. These kids seem to be getting more signals into the lower brain — there were many knowing chuckles in the audience when one presenter mentioned the kids who are annoyed by their socks, the sound of the lights, a smell no one else notices. It’s also clear that they seem to be developing the frontal lobes (the reasoning area) long before they are developing the parts of their brains that usually develop first, such as emotional and social skills. [See NIH News.]

So what you end up with is kids who present differently but are treated similarly. The kid who presents ADHD excels in a faster, hands-on learning environment. The kid who can’t get along with other four-year-olds gets along just fine with older kids with a higher academic level. The kid who hates school and gets awful grades loves her “gifted” program and does even more work than is assigned. [See Grobman.]

This is hard for other parents to understand sometimes, and can lead to conflict. Many kids would do better in a GATE program than they do in our test-obsessed, repetition-heavy classrooms. But not all kids would. The average kid designated “gifted” needs around 2 repetitions to learn a skill. The average kid needs 8-10.  So in the perfect world, each student would get what she needs in any classroom, and none of them would be bored. But in our world of finite resources and test-obsessed administrations, we’re having to choose who gets which services and which learning environments.

What’s clear to me is that the “they don’t need any help” attitude is not serving these kids at all. Sure, some of them excel, but the CAG Conference was full of people working with and studying even more kids who don’t. They do have special needs. Yes, all children have gifts, but accelerated learners need the disabilities that can accompany their gift to be acknowledged and understood in order for them to live successful, fulfilling lives.

What is gifted? And why?

Posted on by Suki

I was talking to a friend recently about my work on Examiner.com concerning gifted children. What is gifted? she asked. A very reasonable question, and one that no one has completely defined yet – to my satisfaction, at least.

I’m planning an article on Examiner.com about all the various definitions of “gifted,” but here I can address my personal reasons for getting into all this in the first place! (If you want to know when I publish that article, or if you want to read my articles in general, click on “Subscribe” on either of my Examiner pages. You’ll get e-mail whenever I publish anything, and I get paid a higher rate with more subscribers!)

There’s the part of “gifted” that most people are familiar with: my son is a good example. Very smart boy, very sensitive, not into sports. Very good in school. Until he was nearly 9, I had no interest in knowing more or applying the label. Frankly, although it was obvious he was smart, I didn’t think anything more of it. I’m sure I have written before of the experience I had when he was in first grade and a dad said to me, “I wish my son could read as well as yours.” And I wanted to (but didn’t) answer, “I wish my son could hit a baseball!”

Because of course, we get the kid we get, and if we’re good parents we give up on the idea that our kids are going to be Tiger Woods and settle for who they actually are, the magical, amazing person they came out as. (Actually, I was probably more hoping that our son would be Buckaroo Banzai!)

But then along came our daughter. She was amazing as well, but incredibly frustrating. We just didn’t understand her. Nothing I read, no one I consulted with, could tell me anything that rang true for her. After pulling her from kindergarten in frustration, some little bug in the back of my brain spoke up. Gifted. What was it that I had read about difficult gifted children?

So I went on the path that you can read in past posts. I hired someone to work with her who was well-versed in the variety of gifted kids out there, and she gave me some little pushes in the right direction. We went from having a baffling, difficult, unsuccessful child to having  a baffling, difficult, amazing, happy, successful child.

Whether or not the present explanation is correct, there is an explanation that fits my daughter. She showed incredible academic intelligence abilities very early. She showed very weak emotional intelligence. Where other kids were going through those stages that didn’t fit her (and frankly hadn’t fit my son so well, either), she was doing her own thing. The explanation that works for me is that like many people labeled “gifted,” she skipped the normal phase of emotional/social development and went straight to figuring everything out. She couldn’t tell you why she’d thrown the math materials all around the room, but she could figure out real-world math problems with ease.

So yes, I hate the word “gifted.” (Read my post on that if you want the long explanation.) It’s a stupid word that implies value judgment and leaves so much space for ambiguity. Is that kid who could hit a baseball right outta the park in first grade gifted? Of course he is. “Gifted” in the general sense just means that someone was blessed by an ability that they have chosen to develop to the point that other people notice and admire it.

But as a technical educational term, “gifted” is much more specific. And the kids to whom it is most valuable are not necessarily those well-behaved kids sitting the front row with all the answers. It might be the 13-year-old girl getting C’s in middle school so the boys would like her. It might be that totally out-of-control boy who gets medicated for ADHD without an attempt to provide him the right sort of environment to stimulate his unusual brain. It might be that quiet kid in an out-of-control inner city school who gets no notice because her teachers are busy putting out fires.

Those are the gifted kids I’m particularly interested in. They’re the ones that the rest of us don’t recognize, who get stigmatized for their unusual behavior, who get drugged or shoved into remedial classes. They are the unsuccessful gifted kids, but we can help them. As I said in another post, my daughter needed educators who recognized that she needs specialized, not special, education. If I’d put her in public school, she’d have a diagnosis by now, and probably some drugs. I’d have a huge guilt burden that I knew that something was wrong with the diagnosis.

So when my friend asked me, “What is gifted?” and I felt that weird feeling again like using the word was making a value judgment — placing my kid over hers — I just didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what gifted is, really. Researchers are getting closer, but they really can’t tell you for sure, either. But I do know that the label allowed me to access the information I needed to help her get along in the world.

It’s definitely not a value judgment. I treasure my daughter, but all children truly do have gifts to share with us. I loved writing about Lizz Anderson who talks about how her son with Down Syndrome has changed so many lives. There is no way to predict what value any individual will give the world. But as parents, we can do our best to help our child be successful in whatever way that is meaningful.

Some of you out there may have baffling kids as well. If any of this is sounding familiar to you, get yourself over to Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted and start reading. Like me, you may not like the word or the label, but the collected wisdom of lots of parents, educators, and mental health professionals working with these kids might help you as it did me.

The uninvited wedding guest

Posted on by Suki

In this week’s newsletter, Parmalee mentioned that she loves to hear skunk stories. Now that’s a challenge I can’t pass up!

It’s a day after Valentine’s Day, thus 12 years and a day after my husband proposed to me. We were the perfect model of the modern couple: we lived together before we decided to get married, and were planning to discuss it and announce to family when appropriate. The diamond ring? Probably not. White dress in a church or temple? No way!

Croquembouche, though not our croquembouche
Croquembouche, though not our croquembouche

Then we went out for Valentine’s Day to the old Oswald Restaurant, which you may remember was in a very intimate space near the Locust Street parking garage. My hubby confessed later that he’d planned to do the standard thing and propose in the romantic restaurant, but we were literally less than a foot from our neighbors’ backs and he lost his nerve. So on the way to our car, at the entrance to the Locust Street Garage, he popped out a diamond ring.

It was as surprising as it could get for me. He’d recently visited his mom and told her about our plans, and she gave to him the ring that she’d been given by her husband, whose mother had received the ring from her husband, my husband’s grandfather. It was a diamond cut in 1925. Later my husband’s aunt told me about when she was a child in Brooklyn and her mother lost the diamond in a mud puddle! It’s a ring with a history, and I love it.

So with that part done, there was just the deed to do. We thought about just getting it over with, but my father said, “But the landscaping isn’t in yet!” It was our last El Niño year, and it rained and rained and rained. We set the wedding for June at my parents’ new farm, figuring how could a June wedding in Watsonville be rained out? It rained the day before, but our wedding day dawned sunny. The photos show an infant vineyard, now 13 years old, and intensely green hills not seen in June since then.

It was a family affair. My sister’s soon-to-be husband had recently been trained as a pastry chef. He dipped strawberries in chocolate the night before and left them in the garage to cool overnight. He made us an amazing tower of a cake, a Croquembouche. My photographer brother took photos. My younger sister spoke in the ceremony. The judge we hired tried to keep a straight face while reading the vows we’d written, and finally broke off with an aside, “I didn’t write this, you know.”

There was only one hitch: I noticed vaguely amidst my flurry that there was a “Do Not Enter” sign on the door to the garage. I may have noticed that my soon-to-be brother-in-law was dipping a new set of strawberries. It wasn’t until later that I asked why: When my father got up at the crack of dawn and went into the garage, he found an engorged skunk asleep, happily snoring away. He’d eaten all the strawberries.

A sleeping skunk, though not OUR sleeping skunk!

My father hastily locked the catdoor, locked the doors to the garage, and put up the sign. At dusk, he carefully opened the door to the outside and backed away.

For an uninvited guest, I have to say that the skunk behaved himself. Apparently the cats were wise enough to stay away, and soon after the door was opened, the skunk ambled away, probably having noticed that no new feast had been set out for him.

My personal opinion is that no good wedding is without a major hitch, something to make it a more memorable day. I consider that skunk a treasured guest of the day, one who I will never forget though he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures.

All I Want is a Good Night's Sleep

Posted on by Suki

Right now, as I type, my daughter is awake in the living room. She has made a nest on the couch and she is reading a Franklin book. No matter that she could be reading something more…well…elevated. She likes Franklin right now.

It is exactly 38 minutes after her bedtime. Her father is out for the evening, which is when things like this happen. Somehow, kids can smell my weakness. I won’t force them to eat; I won’t force them to pretend to sleep.

My first baby came out skinny and energetic. He turned over for the first time when he was a few days old. When he was a small baby, he was awake for two hours, then asleep for a half an hour. Not just during the day: day and night. Thus I was awake for hours, asleep for very few. After a few months, he switched his nighttime pattern so that he’d sleep two hours at a time.

They do sleep...when you cant!
They do sleep...when you can't!

This lasted until he was approximately three.

I remember one day when he was a toddler and for some reason, my parents had come to my house and then I was going to theirs. I had a moment of lucidity in which I asked my father to drive my car. As he drove onto the one-lane bridge we have to cross to get to their house, another car came around the curve at us, full speed. If I’d been driving, we’d no doubt be dead. I was so sleep deprived I could hardly think.

You’re wondering now we why didn’t use the method you used which was so successful. Well, we used them all. We tried Dr.-Scream-it-out (I have apparently suppressed his name from my memory). We tried Sears’ family bed. My husband bought a book called All I Need is a Good Night’s Sleep. We bought a video on Amazon.com by a Dr. Hull — we called him Dr. Dull but still, we tried his method.

When we flew to Italy when our son was a toddler, we even tried illicit drugs. Some friends gave us a sedative they sell over the counter in France to make kids sleep. Our son slept for 45 minutes and then was up for the rest of the flight, charming the flight attendants, but wearing his parents’ patience thinner yet.

When our son was three, we had been thinking about having another child, and I was joking that I was going to wait till our first one was sleeping through the night. One night I just lost it. I stood outside his room holding the door handle screaming, “Go To Bed! Go To Sleep! Leave Me Alone!”

Did you know that moms can scream in capital letters?

Almost exactly a month after that fateful night when my son finally did figure out that even if he didn’t sleep, he didn’t need to tell me about it, I was pregnant again. Be careful what you joke about.

Our second baby was a parents’ dream. She woke once a night for feeding when she was young. At one year, she never woke us again at night.

Till she did.

Our second one sleeps just fine, as long as everything is in order. You see, a child’s daytime personality is not necessarily her nighttime personality. Our son, so quiet and [occasionally] obedient during the day, was a wild man at night. Our daughter, who seems so full of bravado, not to mention vim and verve, during the day, falls sleep at 8 and sleeps a solid 11 hours.

Unless she doesn’t.

It’s always a disturbance in the routine: dinner at 6, bath at 7, put to bed at 8 by Daddy. If I put her to bed, she’d wake me at night. If we went out to a friend’s house for dinner, if we skipped the evening bath, if she didn’t like dinner. The reasons piled up. During the day, she’s afraid of nothing. At night, we never know. Our daughter, she of the bravado, has nightmares about Casper. (Yes, the friendly ghost!) She had nightmares about The Borrowers, for goodness sake.

It’s not fair to her, but her father and I now have no tolerance for these disturbances. Three years nearly drove us over the edge. Now as I sleep I am still poised, waiting for that baby to cry, the sound of “Mommy!”, the opening of a door. She didn’t get her first three years to disturb us, so she’s making up for it now.

All I want is a good night’s sleep.

And I’ll probably get it, tomorrow.

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