Category: Psychology

In general, I’m a proponent of “moderation in everything.” I believe, as my parents did, that allowing not necessarily healthy but pleasurable activities, as long as they’re balanced with healthy ones, is a good thing. In raising kids, this translates to a household where:

• We eat sugar, but not as a replacement for healthy calories
• We let kids play and explore the world, even when it replaces academic pursuits
• We watch movies, but as a treat instead of a way of life.

The place where I’ve had trouble with this approach in my parenting is with activities that are completely a waste of my kids’ time, and which have addicting qualities. So we simply have never turned on commercial TV, and I don’t think that’s hurt our lives at all. And my kids don’t drink soda at all, except for the very occasional (real) ginger ale (with no high fructose corn syrup). Again, I think my kids have missed nothing by missing out on Coca-Cola.

We’ve also avoided video games almost entirely. When they were small, I didn’t think they needed to be staring at a screen when they could be interacting with the real world. Now that they’re getting older, I don’t like the violence and sexism of games, and research is showing more and more that the addictive quality of games is something we should be paying attention to. Since my husband and I aren’t gamers, it wasn’t hard to keep them out of our house.

Then the Minecraft party happened. A friend’s son wanted a treasure hunt for his birthday, but  a huge rainstorm was expected that day. So his dad programmed a treasure hunt in the interactive game Minecraft, and my son got his first taste of online video game playing.

Minecraft is a world made up of blocks. Each player is a character in the world, which can be run locally or on a server so others can join in remotely. Players can choose to play in a world that has dangers, such as evil beings called Creepers, or they can play in “peaceful mode,” where there is no random violence. (I’m pleased to note that “peaceful” is my kids’ default choice.) The main pursuit in Minecraft is crafting—building things. The kids build castles, lakes, houses, shops…. whatever occurs to them. They can also destroy things (which my daughter and a friend are doing right now as I type, with virtual TNT!). But mostly, the game (as my kids play it) emphasizes creativity.

We’ve had some really positive changes in our household that come directly from Minecraft. First of all, social changes. Our son had a rough first year of homeschooling. He’s slow to warm up to other kids, and since he wasn’t seeing other students all day, every day, he hadn’t really warmed up to any of the kids we were meeting. Minecraft allowed him to connect with some other kids, and all of a sudden he relaxed around them.

Our daughter has problems with social situations and understanding interactions with other kids. Once she started on Minecraft, she found a world where she could make mistakes and learn from them in a much more forgiving environment. She and her brother, who had been warring for years, suddenly had an interest in common. One day as we were walking behind our kids, who were intent on a Minecraft conversation, my husband and I remarked to each other, “They’re actually talking to each other!” This was news.

Another great thing that has happened is the creativity. My daughter is endlessly creative in the real world, producing piles of pictures, signs, inventions, and machines that I have to sift through before we get buried in them. Similarly, she loves the creative aspect of Minecraft. She and her brother talk endlessly about new things they are creating, and all the different qualities these things will have.

My son has taken it to a different level. One day he announced to me, “I decompiled Minecraft so I could play with the code.” He’s been taking an online Java programming class through Cabrillo College, and he decided that programming in Minecraft was how he was going to learn. Looking at other people’s code and altering it is, I know from experience, a great way to learn. When I started learning web design in the 90s, there was one book about web design. (That is: 1) The way I learned how to write HTML was by looking at other people’s code and altering it for my own use. My son is now doing that in a world full of textbooks… and learning a lot more.

So far, my son has created a “mod” (modification) that allows people to float if they can catch a chicken and place it on their head. Also, he and a friend are now collaborating on whole new aspects to their world, creating things that don’t exist in this world and giving them specific properties. Yes, the online Java class is fine. But no, it’s not inspiring him. Minecraft is inspiring him.

I haven’t gone all the way over to the other side. I don’t kid myself that most games inspire creativity and improved social skills. Most games — like most entertainment — are aimed at the lowest common denominator. They exist to sell, not to inspire.

Also, I have noticed that the addictive quality of games is very real, and very hard to combat. My son, the more compliant of my two children, will play at any chance he gets, and grumbles when I force him off. My daughter, who displays a greater tendency toward addictive behaviors, has been much more difficult to work with. She has a terrible time regulating herself. When I give her a five-minute warning, the words just fizzle away in her brain. When I give her a one-minute warning, she becomes frantic, working harder and harder to achieve goals that she’ll never reach. More often than not, in the beginning, I had to remove her hands from the keyboard and close the computer. If I had to do that, she would lose privileges for a few days. Lately, she’s regulating better because I imposed consequences outside of herself. I’d like to think that this is teaching her to be able to regulate her own behavior, though I can’t say that for sure. Most former addicts I know of have had to force themselves never to imbibe their addictive substance again. When their brains are receiving those endorphins and screaming for more, no amount of internal pressure can overcome it. In the end, it seems, addicts need to acknowledge their inability to partake in the addictive substance and move on. Perhaps this will be my daughter’s experience — there’s no way to know at this point.

But I do acknowledge that, once again, moderation has been the key. My kids are not going to start playing violent video games under my roof, no matter how creative anyone tells me they are. We still have our boundaries, and we’re sticking to them. But in smaller amounts, video gaming has brought some positive changes into our lives. Just like fine chocolate, real ginger ale, and an occasional great movie, a moderate amount of gaming suits us just fine.

It’s that time of year again: School has started up. Families are getting busy doing whatever they do. And the holidays are marching toward us.

It’s an especially hard time of year for those who have children with special needs. First of all, we’re dealing with our kids’ education. Some of us are fighting for services. Others are fighting to get our kids out of special classes. Many of us are breaking in new teachers. All of us are dealing with the daily grind of having a kid who doesn’t fit in.

During the summer, it looks like a long time between the start of the school year and the pile of holidays that are coming, but suddenly it’s not even October and the stores are full of Halloween. Thanksgiving is just around the corner.

When you’re a parent with an unusual kid, it’s hard ever to be prepared for the stuff that keeps coming at you these few months. Holidays bring their own special kind of stress.

I’m most familiar with the plight of families who have kids with behavioral differences—autism, ADHD, and whatever-you-want-to-call-it kids who have what we like to call their “quirks.” I’m sure families with kids of other kinds of special needs have similar stories—feel free to chime in.

But for those of us with quirky kids, here’s how it works:

First of all, the holidays themselves. Holidays are exciting. Excitement is unsettling. Our kids are hard enough to deal with when they’re settled. The other day my daughter had a major meltdown because I agreed (oh, mommy, will you never learn?) to check if our local party store was going to have Voldemort costumes. All of a sudden it was all so overwhelming: What is a girl to do when she could be Voldemort (though they didn’t, it turned out, plan to carry a costume), or buy a better Gryffindor robe and be Harry (she did, after all, just get those super-cute Harry Potter glasses), or – or – or…

Quirky kid brain on meltdown. It’s not pretty. I had to drag her to the car and banished all talk of Halloween until it’s actually October.

The other thing that comes with holidays is get-togethers. Dinners, parties, all sorts of fun with other people. Our quirky kids want to have fun, too. The thing is, their idea of how to have fun might not go so well with societal expectations. Family members and friends, well-meaning as they think they are, generally just don’t get how hard we’re working to get through an evening.

Take the kids’ table. At family functions, this is often a given. The kids sit together and get to be kids. The grown-ups sit together and talk about boring stuff, without kids to interrupt them and tell them how boring they’re being.

My kids, however, have never handled the kids’ table very well. Child #1 was always more interested in talking to adults than to children. He’d rather sit next to his parents listening to talk about world events or the latest fumble a tech company has made than sit at the kids’ table and do… whatever it is they do at kids’ tables. He was never terribly interested in kids, unless they were kids like him who liked to talk about computers, high tech companies, and sushi.

Child #2 has a different set of needs. She loves being with other kids, but she knows that she easily gets out of control in groups. We’ve been working on life skills, with the help and understanding of the other adults she spends time with. At school, she is allowed to go hang out with the office manager if she feels like she needs a break from being in groups. The office manager puts her to work sorting library books, or just chats with her about whatever is going on. When she’s ready, she goes back to the group activities, recentered.

My parents have been helping as well. She is their unusual grandchild. When she spends time at their house, she likes to have a purpose. They give her jobs like helping out in the garden or taking care of the cats. At big family gatherings, however, she is often at loose ends. And when she’s at loose ends, her self-control starts to unravel. Soon she finds herself doing things that she knows she shouldn’t do. Later, she agrees that she should have behaved differently, but in the heat of the moment, it’s like a switch gets flipped, and she loses control.

I know that it’s hard all around: My siblings see us treating her differently, and they worry that their kids will feel that she’s being given special treatment. But on the other hand, I know that if she is going to navigate a family gathering successfully, she in fact does have to be given special treatment. It’s not special treatment that caters to her desires, but rather special treatment that caters to her needs. If we gave in to her desires, she’d be at the kids’ table more often than not. She’s a kid who wants to be a kid. She wants to be normal.

But while she hasn’t gained complete self-control, she has gained a lot of self-understanding. She has learned, at school, to say “I need to go to the office.” She has learned, at parties or other gatherings, to say “I need to be with my mom or dad.” More and more I see her being able to remove herself from a difficult situation and calm herself before coming back and trying again.

The thing is, our quirky kids aren’t going to just become normal for other people’s comfort. And some adults seem to think that’s an option. They think that our kids’ repetitive noises or behaviors, their hypersensitive ears, or their unusual fears are somehow under their control. Parents with usual kids sometimes seem to think that no one has ever told our kids to stop, as if they have a magic touch and it’s just a case of lax parenting that has led to this unusual child.

I’m sure that people want to help—I can’t imagine that they’re intervening out of a wish to cause the parents greater distress. But those who want to help should consider simple acceptance. Most people simply have no idea what it’s like to raise a child with special needs. They don’t see the enormity of difference between parenting, which is incredibly hard, and parenting an unusual child.

Those who want to help need to accept that this child is different, and will be different no matter what. They need to support the parents, because the parents’ job is hard enough without the judgment and criticism they get in tough situations.

It’s a dangerous season for quirky kids. Do a good deed today and give their parents a break.

We’ve always been pretty restrictive of screen time for our kids. The first studies showing the ill effects of screen time were just coming out when my son was a baby, and TV has never become a part of our family’s life. We simply forget to turn it on.

Computers, however, are another thing altogether. My husband and I both work on computers, and our son was interested in programming from quite a young age. Our daughter mostly used the computer to send e-mail to Grandma and to watch Magic School Bus videos.

But this summer, something new happened: Minecraft.

For those of you not in the know, Minecraft is a cooperative game in which users get together in a “world” they build. The world is made of blocks, and after that, the rules and the point of the game are wholly determined by the players. I would never have given in except for the social aspect of it: the kids who were playing it were not only creating their own little society within the game — they were actually talking to each other outside of the game world.

This is a big thing, given that our son was having trouble connecting with other kids once he started homeschooling. All of a sudden he had a way in to their conversations.

Then the connection spread: Our daughter wanted to play, and for the first time in their lives, our kids were spending extended time playing — not fighting — together. It was really quite extraordinary.

But then we came right back to the screentime issue. My kids would have been happy spending their lovely summer inside, in a world where they can build houses from diamonds and if it becomes nighttime when they don’t want it to, they can just bring the sun back up.

I, however, would not have been happy. So I sat down with the kids, a bunch of colored markers, and a sheet of nice paper. At the top I wrote “To earn computer time, choose two.”

Then, I had the kids suggest non-computer activities that could earn them computer time. Here’s what they came up with (with just a few suggestions from me):

Playing piano
Play outside
Gardening
Clean room (requires parent sign-off)
Ride bike/scooter
Read
Cook
Hike to stream
Paint/art
Learn something new
Sing 4 songs (in a nice voice, with words, not to anger anyone, no poopie words)
Touch typing practice
1 full board game (no shortcuts)
Non-screen activity out of house
*Complaints cancel activity

Now, perhaps you don’t have a household that resembles the Supreme Court. Ours, however, makes the Supreme Court look like child’s play. So we had to add little notes and reasonable amounts of time to each activity to forestall the inevitable arguments.

The amazing thing is that it’s working. The other day, my son played piano in order to buy computer time. Afterwards he said to me with this amazed expression on his face, “That was fun!” Yeah, kids. You can have fun in the real world, not just in Minecraft. What a concept!

The great part of this is that along with the “Our Fun Summer” poster we always make, which has all of our summer goals on it, we can make sure that we get out and do things in the real world.

This week we had some of the kids they play Minecraft with online over for a party. One of the siblings professes to hate Minecraft, and I was commiserating with her that she didn’t have anyone to play with. “Why don’t you like Minecraft?” I asked her.

“Because it’s not real,” she said. “You spend all this time building something, but then it’s stuck inside the computer and you don’t have anything to show for all your work.”

Good point, kid. That’s why I like our contract. Along with Minecrafting, my kids have spent the summer playing with Legos, making music, taking photos, hiking in the woods, and helping me create a garden. Though not all of these activities has a tangible product, they are each valuable in their own way, and they balance the time my kids are spending inside their computer world, learning to get along.

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:

• Fish oil: More than just memory
  
• A behavioral diet toolkit

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