Perri Klass - Quirky Kids: Understanding and Helping Your Child Who Doesnt Fit In--When to Worry and When Not to Worry

A Ballantine Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 2003 by Perri Klass and Eileen Costello

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HarperCollins Publishers Inc.: Submitted excerpt from p. 270 from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Copyright 1960 by Harper Lee; renewed 1968 by Harper Lee.. and Heinemann c/o The Random House Group Limited.

Alfred A. Knopf: From Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, tr. by John E. Woods. Copyright 1993 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. From Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler. Copyright 1974 by Anne Tyler Modarressi.

Steve Silberman: From The Geek Disease published in Wired magazine, Dec. 2001.

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eISBN: 978-0-307-41647-6

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Table of Contents

PART I

A World of Quirky Kids

Introduction

Youre worried about a child you love. Theres something different, something off, something eccentric, something quirky. You want to understand whats going on, and most of all, you want to help. Your job as a parent is to help your child grow and develop and learn and thrive, and to do that job properly, you have to understand your child as an individual, quirks and all. The world is full of quirky kids. They live with us in our housesbut they live in slightly different zones, seeing the world around them through idiosyncratic lenses, walking just a little out of step, marching and even dancing to the beat of different drummers.

Kids we are calling quirky are the ones who do things differently. Maybe youve noticed developmental variationsa child who doesnt talk on time or, alternatively, talks constantly but cant get a point across. Or maybe theres something in your childs temperament that makes daily life a challengea rigid need for absolute routine, a propensity for nuclear tantrums. Or perhaps youre uncomfortably aware of social difficultiesa toddler who always occupies herself alone while the rest of the playgroup lives up to its name. These are the differencesskewed development, temperamental extremes, social complicationsthat define the group of quirky kids. As pediatricians and mothers, we are in contact with kids every day, and we have become interested in the quirky kids among us.

As Aidan got older, I noticed more and more his inability to interact withother kids and his lack of interest in activities. I tried to do a Gymboree class withhim. He had no interest whatsoever. He would not participate. He was more interestedin the lights in the room, the stuff on the bulletin board, the numbers andletters. I felt so mad at him: Why wont he do what the other kids do?

The weekend I decided our son had autismhe was three, we were on CapeCod, and it was too overwhelming for him, and he put his arms around this littletiny tree and shook back and forth the whole weekend long. He was wearing asleeper with feet on it and sneakers, and he was wearing a watch, and he washanging on to this tree. And I said to my husband, I think hes autisticthis is sofar off the curve.

Caitlin is good at math, but she can get completely stuck if there is a typo inthe word problem. Shes idiosyncratic. She cannot stand to estimate; she musthave a precise answer. If the graph paper doesnt have enough lines, she gets stuck.

Trevor is an anxious child who now, at the age of nine, very much wants to belike other kids and wants the other kids to like him. Hes an avid baseball fan andplayer, and that has helped him out in the social area, but he still has some residualautistic-type behaviors, like running in circles when he is excited. He writesor draws in the air when he is bored or feels uncomfortable.

Thirty or forty years ago, these kids would have been thought of as odd or eccentric, but they would not have had medical or psychiatric assessments, and they would not have been given diagnoses. Nowadays, you may find that helping your quirky child grow up will involve coping with a formal diagnosis in fact, often with multiple diagnoses or with diagnoses that shift and change as she grows. This book is not about the children diagnosed with classic autism or with mental retardation or with major mental illnessschizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar illness. They are outside the scope of what we define as quirky, and there is a great deal of very specific expertise out there to help their parents get them the help and support they need. We are talking about a group of children who inhabit a grayer zone, a zone of characteristics also found in normally developing children,a zone of shifting and overlapping diagnoses and rapidly evolving terminology. You may find, for example, that your child will be described as fitting within the autistic spectrum disorders, in particular as having Aspergers syndrome, or alternatively as having pervasive developmental disorder (also sometimes called pervasive developmental delay), nonverbal learning disability, or pragmatic language disorder. Depending on their strengths and weaknesses, as well as on who does the diagnosing, children may also be diagnosed with sensory integration dysfunction or social phobia or attention deficit disorder. Its important to note that these are all relatively recent diagnostic categories, which may be used to describe children who would once have just been called eccentricor maybe harsher school-yard names.

As a group, theyre sometimes called quirky kids. We prefer this term for a reason. Its not pejorative. In fact, its sometimes a compliment. But it does suggest the unusual featureschallenging yet often charmingshared by an increasing number of children in our society.

Parents come to see us at our office with stories, with patterns, habits, and behaviors that theyve noticed in their babies and their toddlers, their preschoolers and their elementary school children, and they ask our opinion: Is this normal? Is something wrong? We hear stories about toddlers whose tantrums seem off the scale by comparison to their siblings, about young children with intense obsessive interests, about children who dont talk on schedule or who do talk but in peculiar ways, about children who dont enjoy the games that delight the other members of the playgroupor the rest of the third graders. We hear about strong preferences and prejudiceschildrens habits and routines that can come to dominate a whole family. All of these parents are looking to us, the professionals who see hundreds and hundreds of different children grow, for a little perspective and often a little help.

And as we watch parents struggle with a multitude of assessments, diagnoses, therapies, and medications, we have come to appreciate that life with a quirky child can be complex and difficult. We wrote this book to help you navigate and to help you do what you most want to do: know and recognize and appreciate your own child and help him grow and thrive. Everything you dolooking for the right diagnosis, investigating different possible therapies, looking for the best possible school, setting guidelines for life at home is done toward that end. It is by that standard that you should judge any advice you getincluding ours. Helping your quirky child become the person she was meant to be will involve getting to know and understand a remarkable individual.