It's always a pleasure to be able to
recommend parenting books that are helpful and encouraging. I just
finished reading Back to Normal by Enrico Gnaulati, PHD. This
is a great book for any parent who is concerned that his or her child
may have a learning disability or emotional disorder, or who has been
approached by the child's teacher with a concern. (Disclaimer: the
author is a friend and colleague – but this is truly a book worth
your time!)
Dr. Gnaulati addresses multiple themes
in his book. The first is that we are a diagnosis-happy,
medication-happy culture. He is so right. And while there is
nothing wrong with labeling certain disorders – for one thing,
that's how kids with legitimate challenges get the interventions they
need – we tend to overuse any new label until it just becomes a
“miscellany section” for kids we don't understand. This what
happened to terms like “hyperactive”/ADD/ADHD in the late
twentieth century, and now it's happening with
autistic/Asperger's/autism spectrum disorder and “bipolar disorder.”
Gnaulati's point is that we have to really look and learn in
order to understand each individual child. Sometimes that wiggly
preschooler actually needs a new and better preschool (more about
that later.) And sometimes that angry teenager needs family therapy,
not just a pill to mute his feelings and make him more convenient to
live with. In our impatience for a quick fix, we are rushing to
diagnose and trying to solve problems with microwave solutions.
Sometimes a long, slow bake in the oven is what's called for.
A second theme developed in this book
is the insidious way that our reporting/evaluating/diagnosing
community has come, over time, to skew female. Preschool and
elementary school teachers, pediatricians and child psychologists are
now predominantly women, in most cases by quite a majority. This
means that children are actually being examined through a female
lens. Should we be surprised that boys come up short under that
lens? In a chapter titled “Abnormalizing Boys,” Gnaulati shows
how this plays out. Girls, it turns out, are better at what he calls
“doing school.”
A third theme is that parenting has
really, really changed. Because of demanding work schedules,
available time to parent has radically shrunken. Academic pressure
is higher than ever before. And technology makes keeping tabs on
one's child a daunting challenge. Gnaulati offers advice in his last
chapter, “Parenting with Authority,” that is realistic, sound,
and up-to-the-minute.
Often citing compelling statistics, he
advances his thesis with thoroughgoing care. (Did you know that
“over 30 percent of children diagnosed as autistic at age two no
longer fit the diagnosis at age four”? I didn't!) I hope lots of
parents will read this book. And I really hope teachers and
administrators will read it too. A preschool that finds itself
referring lots of kids (usually boys, hmmmm...) for evaluation might
want to take a long, hard look at its curriculum. Do kids have
plenty of time to run and climb and move about? Are there choices of
activities, and are kids' play preferences respected? Teachers will
find that kids who get to blow off steam before and after the quiet,
structured times in the day will get more out of the “downtime”
activities because they will be calmer and better-focused. And those
same kids will present less of a behavior-management problem overall.
Gnaulati doesn't confine his critique
of schools to the early years. He has a lot to say about how high
schools fail to meet kids' needs. One big idea is that the 7 AM-to-3
PM schedule followed by most upper schools is completely out of sync
with a teenager's natural circadian rhythm. And yet we know that
teenagers get so much less sleep than they require! The kids are
held hostage to bus schedules and other bureaucratic concerns. How
much teen angst is due to the simple fact that these kids are
horribly, desperately sleep deprived? The irony is that if we made
the schools more age-appropriate and kid-friendly, we would be making
our jobs as parents, teachers and administrators easier too.
Dr. Gnaulati has given us a wonderful
resource. Please have a look at it, and share it with friends and
family. I highly recommend this groundbreaking book to any parent
you know who is worried about his child's demeanor or behavior.
