Oh No! My Kid Has Human Childhood Growth Syndrome (HCGS), AKA Being a Four-Year-Old-Boy

12/10/2009

I headed into my first official “parent-teacher” conference with the feeling I was going to get blind-sided, and I was not wrong.

It all started with Punk’s teacher saying, “Well, he does like to go off by himself. He really gets into those books. And then you can’t tear him away. He doesn’t want to participate in class. He just won’t listen.”

“Oh right,” I say, immediately defensive but pretending not to be. “He is such a reader. I’m so glad. I always loved to read….”

“Yes, but he doesn’t listen. He won’t participate when we ask him to.”

“Right right. Not so good. Well sometimes he needs, some, you know…encouragement…”

“Short of bribing him with obscene amounts of candy, nothing is working.”

It goes around and around like this, with me defending, and her, increasingly, well, railing. Until finally, exasperated, I say, “What, do you think he has a problem? ADHD or something?”

She cocks her head like our dog, Simba, does when she’s suddenly interested. “Not ADHD. He’s not hyper enough for that but….”

“What?? Autism?!”

Great. Now I’ve dropped the A-bomb.

“Weeeeell, I’m not a doctor….but,” she says, suddenly all coy.

So I stagger out of there under the weight of the A-bomb, with only a directive to keep an eye on him—“it doesn’t really show up until age five or six”—and to get his eyes tested in case there’s a vision problem, which we’re already doing (see last blog).

So, of course, I’m distracted, miserable, fuming, and completely useless once I get to work. It doesn’t take much for co-workers to hear why—I spill easily. And they respond as I’d hoped—indignantly.

“Oh hello! He’s not listening? He’d rather be doing something else than your classroom activity? What? A four-year-old not listening and wanting to do his own thing? Unheard of. Let’s slap a label on him and make it his problem. His parents’ problem. Not anything, I, the teacher, am doing wrong!”

This is why I love my co-workers. They say exactly what I’m thinking, only better.

I mean, is a four-year-old naturally inclined to drop everything he’s doing and pay attention to an adult? I think not. A four-year-old just wants to be a four-year-old—fiddling, fidgeting, splashing, breaking stuff, throwing—whatever it is that gets him going. Not adhering to adult-sanctioned classroom activities in 15-minute time blocks.

This whole business of indoor society, with its desks, schedules, and seat time, is a relatively new invention, after all, and is hard enough for adults to stick to—think of all those people at work who wander the halls and take endless smoke breaks.

It wasn’t that many centuries ago that we were all out on the plains stalking our next meal. We adults all had an obvious sense of purpose—putting buffalo on the table.

So there was no worry about finding a vocation and no worry about our kids getting bored, misbehaving, or manifesting some behavioral disability. Like a lioness’s cubs, they ran after us when we hunted or gathered berries, and frolicked around us when we napped, getting the occasional swat when they got too irritating.

OK, I got a bit off track there, but here's the thing: I think we’ve just gotten too civilized, and in the process gone way overboard in pathologizing our kids.

Nevertheless, being a cyberchondriac, I of course have to go online and research the Autism Spectrum Disorders—there's a whole range from mild to severe, all involving social withdrawal and repetitive behaviors.

If you want to know the truth, I see more of myself than my son in this diagnosis. Since becoming a parent, my social life is down the tubes—I spend more time with my nose in a book than talking to people. Socializing is now limited to Facebook. And all day long I type on a keyboard and stare at a computer screen. If that's not a repetitive behavior, I don't know what is.

What I do know is Punk is the most affectionate kid I've ever seen. When I get home from work, he runs up, throws he arms around me and declares, "Mommee, I love you!" Not even our dogs give me that kind of greeting (one pees; the other knocks me over.) I also know he's crazy about music. Nothing gets him dancing and grinning like Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds," or "I Like to Move It," from the movie Madagascar.

Lest I be accused of being in denial, I've gone ahead and made two pediatrician appointments for him in the New Year—one with a general ped, the other with a developmental ped.

And yes, I should go ahead and have him evaluated by the school district. Because, as my mother wisely points out, if he does need special services, you can't get them without the {cough, hairball} label.

But I'm skeptical. Very skeptical. Because to me, Punk is Punk. And he's perfect just the way he is.

Child Growth Charts—Just Another Means of Making Parents Feel Like Doofuses

10/07/2009

It's a universal law of siblings that if one likes a particular food, the other detests it. My three-year-olds are no exception.

This makes preparing any meal for them a complex mathematical equation, and I'm no math genius. Just ask my friends. Ever since I lost my tip-calculator cheat-sheet, I'm a wreck when the restaurant check comes.

But there I stand in the kitchen each night at dinner time. Head on the fridge. Calculating.

"Now, let's see. If I give them carrots, Punk will eat them but not T-Rex. Better throw in corn or T-Rex won't get a vegetable. Wait. Last time he didn't eat his corn. Crud. Well, they both like hot dogs. If I put sauerkraut on there, that would count as a vegetable, right? What am I thinking? No WAY either of them would eat sauerkraut. Plus Punk doesn't like the bun. Or ketchup directly on the wiener. Has to be on the side…."

It goes on like this until I finally hit a combo that will render each kid roughly enough food. Then I act fast, before I forget it.

But if one of them throws off my equation—like Punk did last night when he sent back his chicken and strawberries, yes, strawberries!—it sends me into a tizzy.

I'm all: Oh no, he didn't get his protein, or his fruit, or his vegetable. He's going to be malnourished. He's going to get rickets or something. Maybe scurvy. Or worse, pellagra. Like that case I read about in Deadly Medical Mysteries, where orphans down South went crazy and spasmodic from lack of niacin.

 
Oh Lord, has Punk got a niacin deficiency? He’s losing more baby fat every day. Aside from the old-man potbelly, he's getting downright skeletal. Any minute Child Services is going to haul me off for starving my child.

But the real test comes in the pediatrician's office, when they drag out those height/weight charts with all the percentiles showing how your kid relates to the norm. You know the ones with the tiny sets of numbers down both sides and a bunch of squiggly lines in between.

One glance, and I get flashbacks to the part of high school geometry where they lost me. And then the pediatrician jabs her finger somewhere in the jumble and declares, "Your kid is right THERE."

I'm sorry, where?

All these charts do is confuse the pants off most parents, who, according to a recent study, are apparently as math-challenged as I am. Only a third of parents in the study could accurately pinpoint their kid's age, weight, and percentile on the charts.

 
And there's another big problem. The charts fuel what I call parental inadequacy and slacker-phobia syndrome (PISS)—a constant, maddening fear that your poor parenting is causing your child to fall behind.

Extreme sufferers will resort to bribing whoever they can to get their kids into a Cadillac pre-K with Spanish immersion. Otherwise, their kid will surely never graduate junior high.

And these growth charts? These growth charts only perpetuate PISS. Sitting in the pediatrician's office, I tell her, "Look, just give me the quick translation. Are my kids above normal? Below normal? What?"

She won't give me a straight answer.

"Punk is above the 95th percentile for height, 75th to 90th for weight," she says, impassively. "T-Rex is in the 50th percentile for height, 50th to 75th for weight."

"But what does this mean? Is Punk going to be some sort of towering giant? And his weight is way lower. Should I be feeding him loads of cheesy grits or something? Not that he'd eat them."

"And T-Rex? Why is he so much shorter? Is it the asthma treatments? Don't those steroids stunt growth? It's because he doesn't eat his mac 'n cheese or red beans isn't it? Punk always does. I mean it's great that T-Rex likes strawberries, but where's he getting his protein, you know?"

The pediatrician just looks at me.

Stoic.

"The growth charts indicate that both your kids are on a normal growth track relative to their previous readings and the norms for their age group," she parrots.

There's the rub. She just summed up my whole issue with growth charts.

These measures weren't intended to be a PISS-inducing, standardized-test-like gauge of how your kid stacks up. They're meant to guide doctors on whether your kid's individual growth is standard, helping them ensure there isn't a huge discrepancy between height and weight, for example, or a sudden leveling off in height.

So my question is, why even show them to parents? Just tell parents what they need to know: that their kid is or is not growing normally. Done.

Parents already suffer enough neuroses about their children's development. And now we have Web sites out there exploiting the growth-chart paranoia; one site, which I won't name, uses the measures to peddle human growth hormone.

Kid too short? Buy our product.

Blagh.

I, for one, am going to forget I ever heard of these wretched charts. Just doing my daily number crunching on which kid will eat what is math enough for me.