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.

Is It Worth It To Get Small Kids' Eyes Tested?

12/03/2009

I was just steering Punk out of his classroom after school the other day when his teacher called out to me with that there's-something-you-ought-to-know-about-your-kid-and-if-you-don't-do-something-about-it-you're-a-bad-parent voice.

"Ms. LAW?"

"Yes?" I prepare to hear that he's been wandering the classroom again during circle time, that his pants keep falling down, or that he didn't eat his lunch.

Instead she says, "Have you had his eyesight checked? We think he's looking funny at the TV screen."

What the??

 
Punk is only four years old. Isn't this way too young for a kid to have vision problems? I mean, I thought I was way too young when my eyesight started going at age 23.

 
I found out, after I couldn't read a giant road sign, that I was myopic, or nearsighted—meaning that I can easily see objects up close, but they're blurred when farther away.

I blamed it all on a Kafkaesque job I had writing 200-word summaries of scientific journal articles on a glaring computer screen. To meet quota, I had to write at least 10 before lunch and another 10 before quitting time. It was right out of Joe Versus the Volcano, when he's toiling away in a concrete room lit only by a single, naked bulb.

But, really, my sight decline likely had nothing to do with my job. Nearsightedness is hereditary and usually manifests during or after adolescence, when the eye is fully formed. So early 20s is right in the ballpark.

Which is part of the reason I was so surprised when Punk's teacher alerted me to a possible vision problem.

Who knows. My husband's myopia set in when he was 13, and that's fairly standard. So I suppose it's possible for it to show up before the age of five.

 
Another possibility is that Punk is far-sighted, or hypermetropic, which we usually associate with getting older—you know, bifocals and reading glasses. And yes, farsightedness does usually affect older people, as their eyes lose their ability to focus.

But farsightedness can also show up in young kids, in which case it's usually present from birth. That said, most kids outgrow it.

Yet another possibility is that Punk has astigmatism, in which the cornea—or the lens—of the eye is curved irregularly, interfering with focus. Though sometimes caused by eye injury, astigmatism is usually congenital, so it's quite possible Punk has this.

Also, both his father and I have it, upping the odds that he does too.

But really, if he had a bad case of any of these things, wouldn't he be bumping into walls and tripping down stairs? He does fall quite a bit but I think that's just because, like a puppy, his feet and head are out of whack with the rest of him.

 
If you sit him down with a book, he seems to follow along with the words and pictures just fine.

So, I'm wondering if it's worth getting his eyes tested. We've gone ahead and made the appointment, but does it make sense to put him through all that?

 
Anyone have any kid and eyesight problem experiences to share?

There’s One Key Way to Keep Holiday Stress at Bay—Here’s How I Figured It Out

11/26/2009

Ah, the holidays are here: Cosy fires. Candles in the window. Roasting turkeys. Towers of presents. Outrageous desserts. Family togetherness.

And tension, discord, and stress.

So how to minimize the misery and maximize the fun? I have an answer of sorts, but before I reveal it, let’s, Scrooge-style, take a tour of several holidays past:

Thanksgiving 1996
I’m not sure why, but it was decided that I and my then-boyfriend would host my sister and her new husband, my mother, his mother, and his brother and her girlfriend in our tiny Arlington, Va., apartment.

My sister and husband showed up with a surprise guest— their rambunctious lab puppy—and it immediately became clear that the dog had no use for floors. It leapt from one piece of furniture to the next, sending lamps, vases, purses, tchotchkes, whatever, flying in every direction. My boyfriend demanded that the dog be taken to my sister’s hotel (where it wasn’t allowed to be, but oh well), leaving my sister grumpy for the rest of the holiday.

My boyfriend’s mother (who I’ll now refer to as MBM) had insisted on bringing a turkey, despite the fact that my boyfriend was a vegetarian who ate seafood—"no land animals, nothing with feet!"

So for dinner, I had prepared a bean dish for me and my boyfried, while the others tucked into MBM’s turkey. She eyed me, smirking, “Well, just look at her salivating over that turkey.”

After dinner, my sister decided it was time to try bonding with MBM,  so she hauled out her wedding album. As my sister thumbed through it, MBM glanced over suspiciously, taking in the lacey dress, the long curled blonde hair.

“Well,” she said, “Weren’t WE the Southern belle!”

That was the last time I ever hosted a holiday.
 

Christmas  1997
My parents had rented a place right on the beach at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape Hatteras. The evening I arrived with my ex (we were newly married), everything was going swimmingly – tree-decorating, cake-eating, drinks before bed – and then my sister and her husband arrived.

My ex, never a fan of my sister, refused to get out of bed to greet them.

“I’m not dealing with your West Virginia diva sister and her brain-damaged, spasmodic dog. This is ridiculous. I’m staying HERE.”

Things progressed from there: My ex commented that my brother-in-law’s peanut soup vaguely resembled puke and ended up having cake for dinner.

And then, to top everything off, my sister announced that she was knocked up—by way of a positive-pregnancy test placed on the tree. My ex stormed out the room, raging that "This is just a typical drama-queen move on the part of your sister!" Reflecting back, I could have noted that his response was a typical drama-king move. Ah, hindsight.

Thanksgiving 1999
My parents were planning to spend the holiday with my sister’s in-laws four hours away, and my mother was obsessing over what to bring. Then, scanning the paper one day, she saw it: German chocolate sauerkraut cake! Perfect.

Only problem was, she somehow quadrupled the amount of sauerkraut called for in the recipe—putting in something like four cups of it instead of ¾ cups.

When it came time to cut the cake, the knife got stuck. The way my father tells it, they had to put the cake down on the floor and have someone step on it while another person sawed it into pieces.

Christmas 2008
My mother had gathered together my husband and me, our three-year-old  twins, my sister and her husband and their seven- and eleven-year-olds—at the West Virginia homestead for a tranquil Christmas Eve.

She was hell-bent on getting us all to sing carols by the tree before Christmas dinner, but the plan kept going awry.  For example, Punk, not yet potty-trained, peed on the floor. T-Rex slammed his fingers in the sliding door. And my nephew hit his sister on the head during a wrestling match.

Meanwhile four dogs—my mother’s Yorkshire terrier, my sister’s golden retriever, our miniature dachshund and our pound mutt—chased each other around the house, leaving their own deposits throughout. My father it seemed, was always the one to step in these deposits, yelling, “For God’s sake! Not another bloody pile of dog[expletive]!?”

Throughout all this, the adults took generous hits from the punchbowl. And then the doorbell rang.

Assuming it was the kids’ pizza, my mother ran for the door, and shoved a couple of $20s at the man standing there.

“I’m sorry, m’am….I don’t think you think I’m….”

“You’re not the pizza guy?”

“No. Uh. Sorry, but my mother just backed into your car.”

Yep. The neighbor's 90-year-old mother, after one too many eggnogs, had wrecked my sister’s car. That definitely put the kibosh on the Christmas carols.

Later that evening—I guess we hadn’t yet had enough—it was decided we would open some presents. It was the usual mayhem, with the kids shrieking, shredding wrapping paper, grabbing, and throwing presents. And then my sister and I were handed two identical gifts from my mother.

Simultaneously, we unwrapped nondescript brown boxes, stuffed with foam. I pulled out a long metal thing. Then another longer metal thing. And then a rounded black rubber hose thing.

“Good God,” said my father. “What have you given them? They’ve both got husbands you know!”

Turned out that they were self-standing hairdryers—they were attached to a movable stalk so that you could blow-dry your hair without having to hold the dryer.

“I saw it on an infomercial,” explained my mother, somewhat defensively. “I thought it looked, well, useful.”

I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I just laughed and laughed and laughed. I had finally discovered the one and only true key to de-stressing the holidays—realize that it’s all theater of the absurd and laugh ’til it hurts.

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.

Tired of Worrying? Make a Date With It

08/27/2009

We’ve all been there—up at 3 a.m. obsessing about every little problem. Here's my brain stream from a few nights ago:   How do I get the boys to stop peeing against neighbors’ trees? Man, that one woman looked mad. There's no way I'm going to find size-three yellow tops and green bottoms (ewww) in time for their first day of school.

Whoa. Did I pay my credit-card bill? Those late payments are evil. Dog hair. Way too much dog hair in the house. We're all wearing it like an accessory. Did I just miss a dentist appointment? God, hope I didn't hit reply-all on that e-mail where I called the sender a blowhard.

Is it time for a new toothbrush? Got to be time for a new toothbrush. Still not sure what I think about these newfangled motorized ones. Wonder if Saddam Hussein really is dead. What if health-care reform drags on through 2011? Got to figure out how to block those "grow your penis" e-mails. I'm not exactly the target audience. I swear someone used "geek" as a verb in one e-mail today. "He's geeking on that app." Guess we just verbed another noun.

Stop me any time. Just recalling this list is making me start worrying again. As it was, my mind seemed to revel in it. The more I fretted, the more I fretted, my brain darting from worry to worry like a frenzied mosquito: Hope self-tanner doesn't cause cancer. Are you supposed to recycle shampoo bottles?

Finally, I’d had enough. It was time for desperate measures: sheep-counting. Problem is, that technique has never worked for me. So I went with dachshunds instead. Bad move. The thought of all those wiener dogs brought up the 2006 Superbowl commercial where a farmer with lousy cell reception orders 200 oxen and instead gets 200 dachshunds (stampede!). Was that Sprint or Verizon? I couldn’t remember, so I was back to obsessing.

Turns out all my worry-induced insomnia could have been avoided. The next day I stumbled on a blog post that stopped me short: In it, clinical psychology graduate student Michael D. Anestis, of Florida State University, makes the case that a good way to stop yourself from worrying is to schedule time for—worrying.

Again, what the…?

Seems more than a little counterintuitive.   But according to clinical psychologists—and based on research—the technique can actually help conquer worry. Why? Because you control the worry, instead of the other way around. It’s like you’re saying, “Look worry, you miserable excuse for a human emotion, you need to stop getting all up in my grille. Just back right on down. And I’ll let YOU know when you get your 30 minutes.”

Now for some people, whom I envy a good deal, worrying is just not an issue. They do things, they move on, and that's it. Our dog, Simba, is a good model of this. You scold her for jumping on the couch—she's not going to worry that you don't like her any more. She just gets off the couch, and as soon as you leave the room, she jumps right back on it.

Worriers, on the other hand, can't stop freaking about what could possibly go wrong. So, if Simba were a worrier, her main concern would probably be, "OK, so just because they've BEEN feeding me doesn't mean they'll keep doing it. What if they suddenly stop? Where would I get my Alpo? OMG. OMG. OMG." But, no, Simba's totally focused on right now— "Food. Eat. Good." Also, well, she's a dog, so she's not burdened by an overdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the über hub of human worry.

Now, of course, there is a spectrum of worriers, from mild cases to the extreme form, Generalized Anxiety Disorder. And in the lingo of psychologists, worry—concern about "what ifs"—really should be distinguished from rumination—obsessing about past events and revisiting problems. Regardless, both forms of self-torture are more common among women. And both forms can wreak havoc on your health, interfering with sleep, eating, and energy levels. In fact, a study just out this month and led by Purdue University 's Daniel K. Mroczek, found an association between chronic worrying and early death.

Nice.

Hence, it appears that worry-containment techniques, like scheduling time to do it, can actually keep you alive longer. (And all this time I thought it was just about eating more broccoli.)

How does worry scheduling work? Worriers are pretty attached to the worry—in a worrier's mind, fixating on problems is how they get fixed. So you can't just cut off the worry cold turkey. But if you set aside, say, 20 to 30 minutes a day to worry, you still get to do it, albeit in concentrated form.

There is, however, an important rule to be obeyed: No worrying between worrying sessions!   No fretting at work, kvetching at family-members, or tossing and turning allowed. During the worry sessions, it's just the opposite: Think only the most negative, worrisome thoughts, and banish all positive ones. Initially, you'll make yourself completely miserable each session, experts say. But, ultimately, you'll get bored and run out of worries.

Mission accomplished. You essentially worry yourself out of worrying. And I'll bet it works a lot better than trying to count dachshunds.