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Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit in - When to Worry and When Not to Worry - Softcover

Costello, Eileen; Klass, Perri

 
9780345451439: Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit in - When to Worry and When Not to Worry
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345451430 ISBN 13: 9780345451439
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

From the fourth-grade girl who never gets invited to a birthday party because classmates think she’s “weird” to the geek who is terrific at math but is failing every other subject, quirky children are different from other kids in ways that they–and their parents–have a hard time understanding. They present a host of challenges that standard parenting books fail to address. Now, in Quirky Kids, seasoned pediatricians Perri Klass and Eileen Costello provide the expert guidance that families with quirky children so desperately need.

Klass and Costello illuminate the confusing list of terms often applied to quirky children–from Asperger’s syndrome and nonverbal learning disability to obsessive-compulsive behavior and sensory integration dysfunction. The authors also discuss various therapy options, coping strategies, and available medications. Most of all, they will help quirky kids lead rich, fulfilling lives at home, at school, even on the playground.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Perri Klass, M.D., and Eileen Costello, M.D., are pediatricians on the staff of Boston University School of Medicine. Both Harvard graduates who trained in pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children’s Hospital, they have practiced pediatrics together at Dorchester House, a community health center in Boston, for ten years. Klass writes frequently for The New York Times, and is a contributing editor at Parenting. She has written both fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Other Women’s Children and the memoir Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician’s Training. Each is the mother of three children, and they both make their homes in the Boston area.


From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

From the fourth-grade girl who never gets invited to a birthday party because classmates think she's "weird" to the geek who is terrific at math but is failing every other subject, quirky children are different from other kids in ways that they-and their parents-have a hard time understanding. They present a host of challenges that standard parenting books fail to address. Now, in "Quirky Kids, seasoned pediatricians Perri Klass and Eileen Costello provide the expert guidance that families with quirky children so desperately need.
Klass and Costello illuminate the confusing list of terms often applied to quirky children-from Asperger's syndrome and nonverbal learning disability to obsessive-compulsive behavior and sensory integration dysfunction. The authors also discuss various therapy options, coping strategies, and available medications. Most of all, they will help quirky kids lead rich, fulfilling lives at home, at school, even on the playground.

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“My Kid Is Different”

So what do you do when you’re worried about your child? You wonder and agonize, you scope out other children, you read books on child development and parenting magazines, and you go looking for help on the Internet. You talk to your spouse or your best friend or your own parents or your day-care teacher. Maybe you lock up all the worry inside and say nothing to anyone, because you can’t help feeling that by speaking the words, you will make them come true. Finally, usually, you ask your child’s doctor. Maybe you make a special appointment and come in to discuss your concerns, or maybe you just wait for the next regular checkup and then you mention it, more or less in passing, needing to say it, hoping to be reassured. As pediatricians, part of our job is to look over babies and young children and decide whether their development is proceeding normally and on schedule.

We see our patients for short, busy interludes, often at moments when they are feeling more than a little bit stressed-out. Think of the one-year-old, cranky after a long stint in the waiting room, less than eager to be handled by a stranger, maybe remembering all too well that this too-chilly room is a place where they stick you with needles. So, as pediatricians, we examine kids and watch how they behave, but we rely most of all on parents to tell us what’s going on. We know that many behavioral and developmental problems are subtle and hard to judge, and we worry that we may be missing something. On the other hand, part of our job is to reassure. If we sent every child who takes a little longer to walk for a full orthopedic, neurological, and developmental assessment, we would hardly be doing anyone any favors—not to mention what would happen if everyone who was a little slow to talk got a full oral-motor workup and a brain scan.

Is Something Really Wrong?

All children have bad hours and bad days and even bad weeks. Many children have difficult developmental stages or particular developmental tasks that they find frustrating and even miserable. Many parents who find themselves sufficiently and persistently worried enough to request diagnostic workups and medical and developmental evaluations end up looking back on something that turned out to be nothing more than a difficult episode in an otherwise straightforward childhood. A persistent worry doesn’t tell you what the end result is going to be, but it does signal a need to pay attention and ask the right questions.

Medical students famously diagnose themselves with every syndrome they study. And as parents, reading about children and the various things that can go wrong in their health or development, we measure our own children against the most ominous medical syndromes.

But if you’ve picked up this book, your concern is more than the occasional reflex anxiety that falls under the heading of parental love. You may be worried that your child is somehow developmentally different in a significant way. You may already have started making your way through the maze of diagnosis and assessment, and you may in fact already have had a diagnosis—or a label or a formulation—assigned to your child. But wherever you and your child are in this journey, it probably all began with some worries that somehow he was different: worries that didn’t go away with the morning sun or disappear when teething ended or move to the back burner when you found a better day-care center.

The First Signs

For many parents, this nagging worry that something is wrong comes early in the child’s life. Maybe it’s an unusually intense expression of a standard baby stage: the infant whose colic doesn’t end at twelve weeks or the toddler whose tantrums reflect an underlying frustration out of proportion to the “average” toddler. Maybe it’s an unusual pattern of behavior or interaction—the baby who won’t make eye contact, the toddler who plays obsessively with only one or two toys. Or maybe you’re looking at developmental delays or differences that are just too numerous or too intense to write off as a variant of normal.

We knew John was different from the beginning. He had a lot of trouble learning how to nurse. I remember this nurse at the hospital saying he’s got a sucking disorder. I knew once I got him home, he would be fine. He was, but he nearly starved to death in the process. It was three or four days before he got the hang of it. Then, for the first four months, it went OK. I went back to work, started giving him some formula. But he couldn’t make the transition to eating. His intake started dwindling. I remember thinking, “It’s because I’ve gone back to work.” With baby food, he couldn’t figure out what to do with it when it was in his mouth, and from four to nine months, he had a totally flat growth curve—didn’t gain any weight at all.

I first noticed differences between Abby and other kids as early as two months. We were in a playgroup, and I felt Abby wasn’t with it to the extent the other babies were. Her fists remained clenched longer than the others, she slept more, her motor milestones were slower even at that early age. Throughout her first year of life, I referred to all the usual books about milestones, and I couldn’t relate to any of them.

These parents, though, are looking back on the infancy of a child who turned out to be genuinely quirky. For most of us, those early anxieties are more nebulous, harder to understand and classify. You have this sense that your child just doesn’t fit—doesn’t fit the books, doesn’t fit the group, doesn’t fit your expectations. You listen to other parents talk, and you feel more and more certain that something in your own home is out of step.

There are comprehensive lists of developmental milestones available for parents who want to check out whether their children are keeping up with the normal trajectories. In this section, we want to take a somewhat more global look at the kinds of concerns that parents often have, which may be less about a particular age-related milestone than about a general sense that something is “off”: usually in the child’s general behavior, in his language and communication skills, or in his social development—and often in all three areas. So we’ll give you a few very basic yardsticks for measuring general development and a Web site to go to for a more detailed tool. We would also encourage you to follow up on your worries even if there is no specific missed milestone on which to pin them. And if your child has actually “lost” milestones—has regressed in his development, so that his speech or his social skills are less advanced than they used to be—that should send you looking for help immediately.

TEMPERAMENT AND BEHAVIOR

Parents may become concerned because a child’s temperament is extreme—unbelievably irritable, as if not quite comfortable in his own skin, desperately needy, chronically frustrated. These are babies who arch, who shriek as if in frequent pain, who never seem to settle down. They’re the fitful, disorganized sleepers, or maybe toddlers who don’t seem to need any sleep at all.

Andrew didn’t sleep. We would walk him around. He was uneasy right from the beginning. He threw up all the time. He wouldn’t eat. He had repetitive behaviors. The early intervention people would come with toys, and he would just open and close the doors but not play with the toys.

I had planned to go back to work when George was six or seven weeks and put him in family day care. I couldn’t actually leave him there. He was just too delicate, and he...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345451430
ISBN 13 
9780345451439
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
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Verantwortliche Person
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