Category: Psychology

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.

For me, it was an easy choice, but hard work

Posted on by Suki

My mother (Mary N. Wessling, who’s a medical researcher) pointed me to this article in MedPage Today: Are Physicians Too Quick to Medicate ADHD?

The article posits whether family physicians are prescribing ADHD drugs at a too high rate to kids they see, without referring them to a qualified mental health professional. Clearly, this is the case. And clearly, the medical establishment has abdicated responsibility for it.

When my daughter was a preschooler, I was told by a doctor that it was common knowledge amongst doctors that you can diagnose ADHD by giving stimulants to kids. “If the stimulants work to help them focus, then it’s ADHD.” I believe that this is still a common belief amongst physicians, even though it’s been proven without a doubt not to be the case. Look at the recent New Yorker article about how college kids are taking black market ADHD drugs so that they can focus better when studying for tests. These are not college kids with diagnosed ADHD: these are kids who have always done just fine in school and have never been diagnosed as hyperactive. And surprise, the drugs help them focus, too.

A while back I started to research various theories of behavioral problems. I would have had no problem getting an ADHD diagnosis for my daughter (many doctors fill parent requests for ADHD drugs without much investigation if the parents say the child needs them, especially if a school recommends them). But I didn’t want to drug her. I wanted to figure out what was going on. She was a hyper-smart, funny, loving, creative person who in certain situations (like school) completely lost it.

What I found in my research[1] is that there are two worlds out there: there’s the world of the psychiatrist we saw who didn’t question that she needed drugs; she just wanted to figure out which one. Then there was the other world: practitioners of all sorts of therapies from Western to Eastern, concerned parents, and some Western-trained psychologists were all asking the obvious question: Why do we have ADHD now and not before? What has changed?

The answer is one that any amateur sociologist could have given: Our lifestyle and culture have changed. Our expectations of children have changed. Where we live, what we do, and how long we do it for has changed.

This is how my mother puts it: “We give disease names to behaviors that previously have just been considered difficult. That is not to say that things were better–these children were often the recipients of damaging physical and psychological abuse called ‘discipline’. We now have many more resources  and information available.”

This is how the phenomenon is described by James T. Webb[2], a leading expert on gifted children (who are, he admits, often “quirky” and unusual): “I think our society has become increasingly less tolerant of quirkiness. Our schools, too. … In psychiatry and psychology, the number of diagnoses has proliferated increasingly. … For example, the unruly child is now seen as a diagnosable disorder, Oppositional Disorder . The town drunk now is an alcoholic and that’s a disease. There’s been a redefining. I think it’s been overboard.”

So this change has led to drugging children for what was once considered part of the normal continuum of human behavior. What’s shocking is not the research that revealed the success of therapies including diet change, having unstructured play time, and more time outside. What’s shocking is that our MDs just seem to have missed that boat. They are going happily along in their search for more and better drugs, and totally ignoring all the evidence that says that drugs are not the answer for many or possibly most of these kids.[3]

From the MedPage article: “Teachers and parents are looking for a quick fix,” added Mark D. Smaller, PhD, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Chicago who was not involved in the paper. “They’re reluctant to look at what’s behind that behavior, at what’s going on at home.”

The article cites child abuse as one possible cause of ADHD. Yes, that may be the case, but that rules out all the rest of us: the loving, imperfect parents who are just trying to raise their kids with the knowledge we have. And I don’t think that those parents would react badly if after explaining their child’s schedule to their pediatrician, the pediatrician suggested, “Perhaps you need to cancel tae kwon do one day a week and go for a long walk in the woods.”

Some of the alternative prescriptions for behavioral modification cost money: homeopathy, for example, is usually very expensive and not covered by insurance. Some of them take a lot of time: occupational therapy, for example. Some take a lot of change in the home: parenting changes, diet changes. But most of them are as cheap as a big bottle of fish pills from Costco. An hour walking in the woods with your child, finding out what he’s thinking about, giving him loving advice from the person he knows best.

But things that are hard are sometimes better. Yes, drugs are easy and cheap. But what does your child learn from drugs? That she can’t control her own behavior. That she can’t look at her environment and realize that it’s not good for her. These are not lessons I want my children to learn. I want her to know that she can make herself strong and healthy, that she can depend on herself and trust herself.

Last week one of the teachers in her homeschool program took me aside and said a few words about the changes she’s seen in my daughter.[4] One thing she said really hit me. “With a lot of kids who start behaving well in the classroom, you can see that they’re holding themselves back. They’re stopping themselves from doing things they’ve been told not to do. But your daughter has fundamentally changed. She’s enjoying her time in the classroom and she is doing what comes naturally to her now.”

Or she could be on drugs. I think we made the right choice. [5]

1. My article: Alternative treatments for behavioral problems

2.  My article about James T. Webb and the evolution of knowledge about the particular social/emotional problems of gifted children.

3.  I am well aware that there are children who desperately need medical treatments for real, difficult problems

4.  Some details of the changes we made in our daughter’s lifestyle, including diet and environment

5. My news article on this topic on the Gifted Children Examiner.

The many people our kids might be

Posted on by Suki

A friend and I were talking the other day. I will preface this to say that this friend is fun, funny, outgoing, sarcastic, smart, and a good cook. All the things I like in a friend.

I confessed to her that every time I take one of those personality tests to determine what I should do when I grow up (if ever I grow up), they say that I should be in the category with “rabbi, priest, social worker, therapist.” In other words, nurturing professions where you take care of other people.

What professions have I practiced or considered? Writing, teaching, graphic design, law, music. The only one that comes close to nurturing is teaching, but I should add that before I started homeschooling, I never, ever wanted to teach children! No nurturing for me: just adults who knew what they wanted to be when they grow up.

Back to my friend: She said, “Of course those tests say you should have one of those professions. You’re a people person!”

Back to my description of her: fun, funny, outgoing, sarcastic, smart, and a good cook. Of herself, she says, “I’m shy, I’ve had to learn all the rules of getting along with people as I got older and had to attain those skills.”

In other words, just like me.

What this leads me to thinking about (what else do I think about?) is raising kids. Parents these days (including myself here) are generally pretty analytical about their kids. They watch to see if their babies attain all the milestones, and ponder what it means if they do them early or late. They wonder about the effects of artificial coloring and wheat and high fructose corn syrup. They worry about whether their kids get enough screen time. In other words, they’re paying attention, closer attention than parents probably ever have on the whole. They have a huge amount of resources coming at them over the airwaves. They can find out how people in Tibet parent, how much screentime kids in China get.

We pay so much attention to our kids that we have a good sense of them, often, by the time the start crawling. (Or not crawling: my daughter — and her mother — never did!) We think we have them pegged by kindergarten and we evaluate their potential teachers by the fit they have with our kids’ learning styles. (This is another conversation I’ve had with multiple moms!)

But here we are: my friend and me. We were both shy. I don’t know if this is true of her, but I remember that sometimes when an adult addressed me, I burst into tears. Perhaps this is genetic. My son did, too. Unexpected things, things that made me undefinably uncomfortable. I have pale skin: when I blush, people notice. Sometimes this still happens — it takes me unawares. One time I was asked by another parent to lead a song at a school function; I’m a singer and I long ago got comfortable with the fact that I don’t have a perfect voice. So I said OK. And there I stood in front of all those people, and though I’ve done this on a regular basis since college suddenly I felt that sinking feeling, like I was 13 again and something I was doing just seemed Not Good Enough…

My friend said I’m a people person. And I believe her. But that is definitely not the way anyone would have described me when I was a child. (I recently got back in touch with a close friend from my teen years; perhaps she will confirm this!) I remember myself as awkward and unhappy. I remember that as I got older, I realized what was making me unhappy (self-consciousness and self-critical thoughts) and awkward (worrying about what everyone else was thinking), and I made a conscious decision to change.

And I did. Not 100%. As I said, I stood in front of all those adults, most of whom I knew, and those kids, many of whom I knew, and I had something like a 13-year-old flashback. But fundamentally, I have changed.

And our children can, too. This is what my thoughts led me to: My friend says I’m a people person, and thus I have fundamentally changed. I used to be a cat-person, and a book-person, and a music-person. I was a child who locked herself in a closet with a book and a flashlight. I was a teenager who dyed a lock of her hair pink. I was a 20-some-year-old teaching teenagers and wondering if I had anything to say.

I’ve been many people, while still being fundamentally the same. And our kids will be, too, no matter how well we’ve analyzed them at the age of three. This is my thought for the day.

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