"Back to Normal" by Enrico Gnaulati, PHD

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.