Category: Psychology

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.

There are times when I’m sitting with other moms and we’re talking about one of the standard subjects: If there’s a mom with a baby, we’re talking about nursing or sleeping. If there’s a mom with a toddler, we’re talking about a house full of mayhem. Any kid-related topic that comes up gets us talking about that subject, even if we’re long past it in our child-rearing lives.

Those times are wonderful and create such a great bonding experience, especially between moms. But then, occasionally, it occurs to me that we could actually be talking about something else. The thing is, we may know very little about the other parents amongst us outside of their child-rearing lives. Do we know what she thought she’d be doing as an adult when she was a teen? Do we know the bawdiest story she has from her days working as a barrista? Do we know about her former passion for roller derby? Do we have any idea what she used to talk about before she had kids?

That’s why I’m a big advocate of moms getting out of their mom circle and into the wider world. Even if the subject matter still involves kids, being with other adults passionate about the same thing feeds our inner lives and makes us much better parents.

This weekend I went to a children’s writing conference in Big Sur. Now, this may not sound so far from hanging out with a group of moms, and in some ways, it wasn’t. Though the majority of participants were female, and the majority of those were moms (and grandmas), we spent very little time exchanging information about our kids. Number and gender were the most common pieces of information, and possibly an anecdote or two would follow. But for the most part, we talked about our own passion for stories.

Many of the participants were probably like me: I’ve always loved children’s stories, but it was only as a mom that I started getting interested in writing them. But a fair amount of the participants were not yet parents, or were parents whose interest in children’s writing pre-dated parenthood. In any case, it was a weekend of intense talking about something that only tangentially related to our mom-lives, and the combined creative energy was invigorating.

For a few days, I handed my mom life off to my dad (since my mom was off being a mom to one of my siblings) and then my husband. As soon as I stepped out the door alone, I had that liberating feeling of being responsible for my self only. It’s not that I dislike being responsible for my kids, but when I step out of that life I feel like I’m a professional jockey on a horse bareback or a ballerina who kicks off her toe shoes and goes for pure personal expression. Just like the rider and the ballerina, I’m going to come back to my real life. But striking out on my own for a few days reminds me who I am, separate from my kids.

No matter what your interest, I recommend that you make a commitment to get out and do it occasionally without your kids. When you come home, I promise that you’ll be that much better of a parent, and that much happier of a person.

I know that this is an experience common to many parents, though we parents of “quirky” kids experience it more often.

I was sitting and watching my daughter’s soccer game with dismay. This is a girl who has great skills in practice, who simply falls apart on the field. Or rather, she becomes hypnotized. That day, she had pulled up a handful of grass and was fingering it, watching it fall from her hands, as the ball and 7 charging girls whizzed by her. She didn’t even notice.

This is the same girl who can get in the 99th percentile on a math test, but can’t sit through a math class. It’s so frustrating to see unfulfilled potential. Even more frustrating to know that there’s no worn path I can follow to help her approach her potential.

As I sat watching the game, a man came by handing out flyers. It was Bill Trimpi, who runs Santa Cruz Soccer Camp, an amazing program we stumbled upon some years ago. Bill and I did a double-take and then I explained what I was doing there. My daughter was sitting out for the moment so he couldn’t see her playing, but I explained my misery.

“But Suki,” Bill said in his patient way, “You have to remember that it’s such an achievement that she’s out there at all.”

He’s right, of course. The first time I spoke to him, I was sure that she wasn’t going to be able to handle camp. She was six years old and all fired up to play soccer, but I didn’t think she’d be able to follow their schedule, get along with the other kids, and be willing to work on the skills they were teaching.

In time, she has learned to do all of those things. Last summer she did three weeks of camp, and though she had her up and down days, she really did it. She was there and she was present in mind and body.

Talking to Bill got me focused on the goal: To get her to come out of herself and at least try to take part in things that I know she very much wants to take part in. So after the game, I pointed out to her that she’d spent much of her time on the field studying grass rather than watching the ball. We talked about how it was disrespectful of her teammates to do that, and that if she wanted to be on a team, she needed to support the team. This all made sense to her. So I issued a challenge: I said it is not important how well she plays soccer, but it is important that she enjoy it and that she be there to support her team. She had been wanting to go back to the science store to buy a little robot she’d fallen in love with, so I told her that if she stayed present in her next game, she’d get to do that.

Now really, this wasn’t such a grand motivation—she would have gotten to do that anyway, and she wanted to use her own money. But by tying soccer to something she’d been obsessing about, I got her attention, which was what she needed. At the next game, she succeeded in staying present in the first half, but did lots of grass contemplation in the second half. To her dismay and anger, I said it wasn’t time to visit the science store. All I asked, I reminded her, was that when she was out on the field she stay present in the game and support her teammates.

At the next game, I made sure to remind her before the game and at halftime. And she was on. She had a specific goal and she knew how to get there. Now, she in no way got anywhere near her potential on the field. She still was largely passive and watched her teaammates play, sometimes jumping out of the way rather than going for the ball when it was coming towards her. But she did something important, and she knew it. When one of her teammates got a goal, I watched as the other girls piled on and hugged her. My daughter kept her distance, but then in a pause a few minutes later in the game, she gave her a high-five. She was present, and that was the prize.

Yes, she got her little robot. And it will amuse her for a while. But she also got the feeling of actually being in a game, which was much more important.

I’ve come to the conclusion that good parenting without others to support us is probably nearly impossible, at least for us mere mortal moms. And when our kids throw us special challenges, as they all do at some point, we need others even more. My daughter’s coach has been outstanding in welcoming her to the team; her teammates, who must find her baffling, have been kind; I hear other parents cheering her on. On top of that, there’s Bill to happen by and reset my expectations. All of this is part of how we support each other in the hardest, most important job we’ve got.