Category: Psychology

Asynchronicity

Posted on by Suki
It was one of those days.
We were in the midst of a thoroughly normal, peaceful morning. My husband had dropped our son at the bus stop, our daughter had eaten a great breakfast, and we seemed poised for a lovely homeschooling day.
Then came the topknot. I can’t really explain to you, except that sometimes when things go wrong for my daughter, they go really wrong. She wanted me to do a “topknot” in her hair, but apparently I didn’t do it right, so she decided to do it herself. The problem is, she does hair just about as well as you’d expect six-year-old fingers to do.
But in her brain she saw perfection. As she worked harder and harder to realize her desires, she got more and more frustrated.
I have learned to leave her to her own devices in this situation. Generally she gets angry, then she finds some way to give in to imperfection and goes on with her day as if nothing had happened. But today she got more and more frustrated, more and more angry. I went back to try to help her but she was too furious to deal with me.
It was one of those homeschooling days where I was just going to have to give up. She finally calmed herself and listened to stories on Tumblebooks for much of the morning. Then we went and spent a Gayle’s gift card we had had hanging around, and then used a Cost Plus coupon that was going to expire. Then we went to the beach and she sang and made a sand castle. We found two heart-shaped rocks. Art class, pick up brother from the bus, and the day was over before it began. I had very little to show for our homeschooling day. What had we learned?
Cut to dinnertime. Her daddy was talking about something that would take four days. “That would be about a hundred hours,” she said. I asked her how many exactly. “Ninety-six,” she said, not missing a beat.
She’s six. She spent her morning listening to picture books, though she can read chapter books. She would go nuts trying to finish one page of her first grade math book, yet she can compute 24×4 by working backwards from 25×4.
It’s hard to know what to do with a kid like this. Everyone tells me not to worry, but it’s hard to know how to plan a day, much less plan a lesson. I’m so envious of other homeschooling moms who know what their children need to learn next. I don’t even know what my child knows, much less what she needs to learn.
As the day progressed, she came up with ideas for the next subject we should study. Microbiology, she said. Knights and castles. All of this is equally possible and impossible. Possible because in this wonderful networked world we live in, we don’t even have to go to the library to pursue our fancies. I just typed “knights” in the searchbox on Cosmeo.com and came up with a story about knights doing fractions. She’ll love it.
Whether or not she could do fractions on a page, and sit still long enough to fill in bubbles on a standardized test, I don’t know.
Asynchronous development is the fancy word for what’s going on. She’s a six-year-old who has an hourlong meltdown about a hairdo. She’s a six-year-old who can do fourth-grade math in her head. She is perfectly happy sitting alone on a beach digging sand and watching water fill up the hole. She can read anything she wants, yet chooses to read preschool picture books. Her favorite place in the library is at the board books.
Inexplicable things cause her to fritz out. “Why did she do that?” another parent or teacher will ask. If I knew, I’d deserve a Nobel Prize for cracking the mystery of the human brain. No one can tell you why some children’s brains just don’t go the way that other kids’ brains do. But lots of people can tell you that it usually works out OK.
Asynchronous development doesn’t mean non-development. Her emotions, her ability to handle transitions and frustrations, her interactions with other kids — all that is developing…slowly.
Her ability to do math in her head, her reading comprehension, her quick and exact ability to sum up the meaning of an event — all this is running full steam ahead. Sometimes it slows down and the child grows into an adult who is relatively in balance. Sometimes…
We won’t worry about that. We’ll think about knights and microbiology and Tai Kwon Do. It’s all we can do.

Nature Therapy

Posted on by Suki
I just finished writing an article for Growing Up in Santa Cruz about non-drug alternatives for treating behavioral problems in kids. It was a fascinating subject to read about. I have a personal stake, given that we have chosen to work with our daughter’s problems by trying to find the root of them rather than masking them.
This is not to say that I blame the families who have knowingly chosen to use drugs to calm their children. I know that families are facing situations far worse than ours. But I do think that the majority of families whose children are prescribed drugs don’t know that there are alternatives. That’s why I wrote the articles, and I hope they offer food for thought to families who are facing a hard decision.
One of the interesting things about doing the research was how many well-designed scientific studies I found that corroborated what my husband and I have learned through trial and error, talking with other parents, and watching our children and how they react to things.
Something we noticed since our son was a baby was the calming effect of nature. Many parents of colicky babies know this: your baby is fussy and you bring him outside — no matter what the weather — and he calms. Our son was born during a rainstorm that didn’t seem to end for six weeks. I remember those painful six weeks very well, stuck inside with a very fussy baby, in pain for much of the time due to a very difficult birth.
The cool thing is, what we have noticed is now validated in studies, and the study of Nature Therapy has a physical home at the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory. Their studies not only confirm what many parents instinctively sensed, but more: Not only do kids diagnosed with ADHD do better outside, they actually improve in a lasting way when their unstructured time in nature is increased.
The key here is unstructured. Almost everyone who studies the root causes of behavioral problems in children admits that lifestyle is a huge factor. So many of us have scheduled our children into days that resemble an office job more than the life of a child. I remember the first family I knew like this: my parents had neighbors in Berkeley whose children they saw twice a day: early in the morning on the way to daycare and early in the evening on their way back. These children never played in their yard. In fact, they were never outside, even though they were preschoolers in one of the best climates in the world. And, not surprisingly, they were always crying.
I feel that keeping my children’s access to unstructured play time is paramount in our lives, and is a constant struggle. There are so many cool things to DO! Today, point in fact: my son’s school has a short mid-winter break, so he was home. I was doing some school stuff with my daughter (we were charting the number of days seeds took to sprout against the time to germination listed on their packets). My son was sulking and had refused to play a game with us. My daughter was getting frustrated and suddenly without warning tossed a pencil at my face.
Time to do an about-face! I ordered them outside. “I want to go to Blue Balls Park!” my daughter protested. “I want to stay inside,” my son grumbled. “Out!” I commanded. Amazingly, they went. We have the great fortune to be able to walk into Nisene Marks State Park from our backyard, so I herded them down toward the creek. We were out in the dripping wet of the newly rained-upon redwood forest about 30 seconds before their bodies relaxed. Then their voices. Then their faces.
They raced down the hill! They ran up and down a muddy embankment and pretended to fall down a steep hillside. When we got down to the stream, they balanced on rocks and logs. My son, in sneakers, got a soaker. My daughter, in rain boots, waded into water to her knees. Laughter, silliness. They found half a hollowed-out log that tipped back and forth and created waves outward across the stream.
They were happy again. They loved each other again. I loved them again! After we got back, my son worked on his newspaper story for class, and my daughter picked up the pretend “computer” she and her dad made and talked about how it ran MacOSX AND MacOS2 AND Windows.
Nature Therapy. I can’t recommend it more than that.

Capoeira, Whole Body Learning

Posted on by Suki
My daughter’s homeschool program brings in artists through the Spectra program. Usually they are visual artists, but occasionally there’s something different. Papiba and his Capoeira class is definitely Something Different.
The class starts with a little Portuguese lesson, introducing the kids to a few basic words and numbers. Then they stretch, and Papiba introduces more terms as they go. From stretching, he builds up the basic moves that the kids need to know, many of which have colorful Portuguese names that they learn. Once they can do the moves broken down, he starts to put them together. He adds rhythm, the kids partner off, and the dance begins. At the end the children join in a circle, sing a song, and celebrate the little community they formed over an hour.
It’s real whole child education.
My daughter loves it, of course. Well, most of it. Sometimes she gets confused about what is expected of her in social situations, and she starts to pull back. But for the most part, she’s happily yelling out Portuguese words, doing cartwheels, and kicking over her partner’s head, holding hands in the circle, listening intently to this man whose whole attention is focused on a circle of children.
I think there’s a name for Capoeira class in the No Child Left Behind law… It’s called, “Unncessary.” The thing is, it’s the sort of thing that many kids go to school for. Last summer I wrote an article about school funding. One of the people I interviewed was Aptos High choir teacher Meri Pezzoni. She’d just lost her job because they were consolidating more and more of the music positions into one. If Papiba worked at Aptos High, he’d be teaching Capoeira, band, and Physics!
One of the things that Meri told me is that she had students who literally came to school to sing. They didn’t care about any of their other classes, but at least the singing got them onto campus. Once there, it might be possible to get them interested in more. Without the singing, they probably wouldn’t bother to come.
The other thing is that whole body education — things like Capoeira, singing, dance — develops important parts of kids’ brains. One time my choral group, Ariose Singers, did a Meredith Monk piece where we had to do dance movements while singing. I could feel my brain stretching…I swear it was creaking and groaning with the effort! Focusing on three different things at once makes your brain develop the capability of not focusing — being able to feel what comes next rather than having to count and consider. This is something that is part of life in Brasil. In the States, at least amongst those of us brought up in white middle America, it’s something we need to be taught.
And for kids, whether they need to be taught integrating body and mind or not, it’s nothing but good. It helps their brains take in more and different information. At the beginning of the second class today, Papiba asked what the Portuguese word was for a certain move, and a child just yelled it out with no hesitation. The no hesitation part is what’s key: that Portuguese word was right there – no struggling to find it amidst the jumble of information that we have to work to access.
My son laughs at me that sometimes when I know that I need to do something that I will probably forget to do (as I suffer an acute case of “Mommy brain”), I make up a song about it and sing it until I get to the point where I can take care of it. He thinks this is very funny.
But it works! And sometimes I hear him doing it, too. Given that he’s just about ten and starting into that dreamy pre-teen forgetful phase, perhaps he could use it more often. Probably we all could, and just think how much more fun life (and parenting) would be if we just sang and danced through our days.

Behavioral problems: Resources

Posted on by Suki
These are the resources that I used in writing my upcoming articles on non-drug therapies for treating behavioral problems in children. (See previous blog.)
An Alternative View of Behavioral Problems in Children
Resources:
Articles and research:

Books:

  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan, 2007
  • Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses Of Gifted Children And Adults, Webb et al, 2005
  • Ritalin Nation, Richard J. Degrandpre, 1999 (referred to this book but did not use it as a source)
Parent support:

  • Yahoo Groups at http://YahooGroups.com – search for your child’s particular need.
Local practitioners mentioned in the articles:

  • Langdon Roberts, The Center for Transformational Neurophysiology: http://www.santacruzbiofeedback.com/
  • Dr. Jeff Lester: http://lesterclinic.com/
  • Dr. Harry Friedman: http://www.harryfriedmando.com/
  • Lorraine Stern: http://tayodayspa.com/
  • Jennifer Alexander: http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/name/Jennifer__Alexander_MFT_Aptos_California_57328

Sibling Rivalry

Posted on by Suki
My children never fight. My children are so similar that they have little to argue about. We have done such a GOOD job with our children, making sure that they aren’t competitive with each other and they never feel that we favor one over the other.
Yeah, right.
Here’s the truth: Our children, though similar in some ways, are polar opposites in personality. Getting them to get along has been something we’ve been working on since the younger one realized that if she pulled the older one’s hair, something exciting would happen! The younger one loves excitement. The older one always wants to know what’s about to happen, what will happen in fifteen minutes, and what will happen years from now.
I remember a conversation they had in the car one day. The younger one was saying that as soon as she could, she was going to leave home and travel around the world and NEVER live with us again. The older one replied that he wanted to live in our house forever. He never wanted us to sell our house, and if we had to, we should sell it to him.
We have tried lots of things. We have family meetings, we point out their respective important places in our family, we talk with the older one, who is old enough to know about these things, about what we all have to do in our family to get along.
We even tried paying him to get along with his sister.
It worked…for about a week. After the first payment, everything went downhill. Apparently money (which is being saved toward the purchase of Lego Mindstorms NXT), is just not as important as making sure he gets in the last word with his sister.
The older one always has to be right. The younger one always has to know everything. There’s not a lot of room for compromise there.
Today in the car on the home from picking up Mr. Know-it-all, he and his sister started to argue about whether a town near ours was a “city” or a “village.” She maintained it was a city, and said that it was clearly a city because so many people lived there. He maintained it was a village because “everyone knows that it’s a village.”
I declared an end to the conversation and he was relieved. “OK,” he said to his sister. “Now Mommy will tell us whether it’s a city or a village.”
Mommy did no such thing.
These arguments drag out like chameleons, never tiring of their color changes. As I sat upstairs trying to work on the massive healthcare bill we are going to be faced with, I heard the fight escalate. I heard “Ow!!!” from him and “You broke my glasses” from her.
I was tempted to intervene, but I was busy, so I let it slide… into… silence. I finished working on the healthcare problem and went downstairs. They were both nestled into the couch behind the back cushions, each reading a Magic Treehouse book. She loves Magic Treehouse because it’s easy enough to read and full of science. I think he loves Magic Treehouse because she does, and that’s what’s really going on.
They really do love each other. When he’s remorseful, he tearfully tells me how great she is and how impressed he is by her and how very funny her ridiculous, strongly held opinions are.
When she’s calm and he’s not around, she writes love notes to him, draws pictures for him, and tells strangers that we meet all about him. In her eyes, he’s a star.
A vexing, difficult star, but a star nonetheless.
My kids are like Laurel and Hardy, the roadrunner and the coyote, the kitty and Pepe le Peu. They’re forever bonking each other on the heads with 500 pound safes and then making it up after the credits roll. If I make sure not to intrude too much, they can find their peace with each other. But whenever there’s an audience to be entertained…
Someone recently pointed out to me that six-year-olds love to shock their parents by saying things like “You don’t love me anymore,” and “you love my brother more than me.” I felt a little smug that MY six-year-old had never compared my love for her to my love for her brother.
Then today… “You love him more than me!” It was pure, six-year-old drama. I played my part and recited my reassuring lines. She brightened up. As long as we stick with the scripts, it’s going to be OK.

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