Minibabble: Pointing the finger at moms

[00:00:26] Rebecca: The behaviors at that point were very, volatile, a lot of tantruming, kicking, you know, very difficult to get them in a seatbelt in the car without having to like hold them down.

[00:00:39] Wendy: All of a sudden, once I was that parent, I felt so much shame for judging other people.

[00:00:48] Rebecca: It was just a lot of really volatile behavior and then just unusual behavior with other kids just didn’t play the same way, was kind of awkward in play situations that made other kids feel uncomfortable.

[00:01:05] Suki Wessling: Have you been there? I have. I was there once as the mom of a model preschooler, watching another kid misbehave and thinking to myself, that parent needs some parenting lessons. Then I was the mom of that misbehaving kid, knowing exactly what the other moms were thinking as they turned their backs and hustled their kids away.

[00:01:25] I felt as if my family had brought a nasty communicable disease to school. I’m your host, Suki Wessling, and I was once the model mom. Then I was the devil mom. With our first kid, we received such effusive praise at how well we were raising them. our second, another adult literally mused that perhaps our child was possessed.

[00:01:52] My kids are grown, and I’ll tell you the happy ending to the story right now. They are both perfectly, wonderfully, imperfect people, both thriving, neither of them, as far as I know, possessed by the devil. But in the throes of parenting, we parents can do some really awful stuff to each other.

[00:02:09] And much of that stuff revolves around birthday parties.

[00:02:13] Rebecca: Throughout my child’s childhood, I would find my child being the one that didn’t want to be invited to the birthday party. That, you know, ‘oh, that kid’s a problem. We don’t want to be around them.’

[00:02:24] And then I found myself even having had like a group of families kind of in the preschool arena, within a year or two, they were just, pulling away.

[00:02:34] Suki Wessling: The voices you’re hearing are Rebecca and Wendy, two moms of young adult children who suffered from invisible disabilities that were expressed in behavioral differences when they were small. And you don’t have to take Rebecca’s word for it.

[00:02:47] Birthday parties are huge for the preschool set, and the pain of not being invited or being invited but not welcomed is shared by both the child and the parent, often the mom, who may be trying to build a social support system with her fellow parents. I feel lucky now that my second child disabused me of the notion that my parenting skills were all that hot. But the pain of having a child who seems healthy, but different, is not fun at the time.

[00:03:15] Here’s Wendy.

[00:03:16] Wendy: After my daughter was born, it was pretty much obvious at the very get go. I’m an elementary school teacher, and I have experience in the preschool realm as well, and I knew almost within three months of her birth, that she was struggling significantly, and as she grew, those challenges grew with her. One time she tantrumed for eight hours straight, banging her head, till she caused herself to have a bloody nose. Just uncontrollable emotional overload.

[00:03:57] Rebecca: My child was adopted at a week old and, was a beautiful baby and the apple of my eye for, um, the first couple years with the exception of having really extreme sleep issues. So I remember it being just excruciating. My husband worked nights, so I was at home alone with this baby, and I even remember climbing in their crib with them one night thinking that that would help console them.

[00:04:28] And then when they, got into preschool, it became apparent that they didn’t play the same as the other kids. And the preschool teachers, and I began having conversations.

[00:04:41] Suki Wessling: Oh yes, the preschool conversations. That was Rebecca, whose description triggered a sort of PTSD in me. Suddenly, I remembered the sweet, compassionate face of a preschool teacher, her hand on my arm, the, I just wanted to check in with you about today, statement. Rebecca describes the extreme tantruming, and I remember holding a bedroom door closed and listening to the shrieking and banging on the other side, questioning whether I was going to be able to handle the challenge I was being presented with.

[00:05:13] That questioning is common not only because moms are taught to take on blame for our children’s behavior, but because mom shaming is at the very root of the science of child behavior. There was the cold mother syndrome, the mommy attachment problem, the hyper vigilant mom.

[00:05:31] Mom behavior has been blamed for autism, gender dysphoria, depression, pretty much every behavioral, social, and psychological problem ever exhibited by a child.

[00:05:42] When disabilities aren’t physically apparent, the problem of diagnosis can be fraught.

[00:05:48] Rebecca: My child was probably three years old at that point, and they assessed that, yes, there were some kind of behavioral challenges and some social challenges received a diagnosis by the first psychiatrist who started seeing a PDD NOS. which is , pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.

[00:06:11] Wendy: I don’t think I’ve ever heard diagnosis that I’m comfortable with. We did get when she was five that she is high functioning autism spectrum. And, um, I think there’s a lot of validity to that. So in terms of comfort, yes, I think that fits in many ways. Then there was mood disorder possible bipolar or other types of disorders, I’ve heard oppositional defiance disorder. I mean the, the, that’s always changing. And I think inevitably she’s now a young adult and I’ve learned I have to let her take ownership of that because she has to figure out how to manage.

[00:06:59] Rebecca: And then also ADHD and at a very early age, put my child on ADHD meds, which ended up exacerbating problems, particularly when the ADHD meds would wear off and then the meltdowns would be incredibly explosive. Um, just almost not really being able to control at all, banging their head. You know, kicking car seats, just really completely melting down.

[00:07:27] So we did you know, begin in those early days with a lot of interventions. We did speech therapy, group speech therapy, social skills therapy. We did OT , regular therapy.

[00:07:40] Suki Wessling: And even after a diagnosis, parents find extreme resistance to accepting the diagnosis on the part of other parents, teachers, and even other professionals. Here’s Rebecca explaining what her family went through trying to get an appropriate educational environment for their child.

[00:07:55] Rebecca: They fought us tooth and nail when we got a, um, autism, diagnosis basically said that wasn’t correct. And then we eventually, the behaviors became so difficult that we knew we had to send our child to residential and, um, the school district would not agree that that was necessary and we ended up having to go to court to prove that our child needed this treatment, needed to be in a, an environment where people understood them and could work with them and educate them in a way that the public school wasn’t able to.

[00:08:33] Suki Wessling: The reason I started out calling these hidden disabilities is that for professionals who often have little to go on outside of questionnaires filled out by teachers and parents, it’s often easier to blame the parent than to admit that they actually have no idea what’s going on.

[00:08:49] Of course, there are children who are clearly and rightly diagnosed with such neurologically based issues as autism and ADHD, but there are so many children whose diagnosis is, in the words of a developmental pediatrician I once talked to, a number you can give the insurance company.

[00:09:06] So many children with behavioral differences can’t be diagnosed or their diagnoses change depending on the specialty of the professional examining them. I already told you my happy ending. Our child received some numbers on charts that were convenient for insurance companies, but in the end they grew up and their brain more or less sorted itself out the way most brains more or less sort themselves out after the turbulence of the teen years.

[00:09:32] But for Wendy and Rebecca, whose children’s challenges persist into young adulthood, the pain of raising children in this gray area between physical disability, mental illness, and parenting has left scars, and also a deep understanding of the way each of us has to face our own individual challenges.

[00:09:55] Wendy: I think as a young teacher, I had a lot of preconceived notions of parenting in general, and a lot of opinions. And I actually remember thinking when I saw parents walking out of the classroom with kids who behaved well, for me, inside the four walls of my class, and as soon as they went with the parent, they would fall apart.

[00:10:22] And I remember thinking that parent needs some better skills. Then all of a sudden, once I was that parent, all of that came back to me and I felt so much shame for judging other people.

[00:10:39] And I don’t think until you’ve walked in those shoes, you can’t, absolutely cannot have that understanding.

[00:10:48] Rebecca: I was in love with that baby. the joy of my life. I mean, I had never been so happy to have that little person in my life, you know? I think one of the things that became really hard is when that realization when that joy is turned to some sadness that this child is not going to be who you thought they were going to be, that there is grief in, you know, the loss of what you thought you were going to experience.

[00:11:22] Wendy: I just stayed home with her a lot and we, we got a lot of interventions, right, when she was five, I think we got in home therapy and the therapist told me that I, I myself was not expressing anger and that was maybe causing her to have problems.

[00:11:42] And that was a common theme throughout her childhood. there were always professionals at the table looking to point the finger at me and what I was causing. And in effect, you know, she’s 24 now and I can in earnest claim that this is not my doing. That it genetics, I’m sure some environmental elements to that as well, but we don’t cause these things in our kids.

[00:12:13] it evolves and we have input and influence, but we don’t create and we don’t fix. We are not in control.

[00:12:23] Special thanks to Rebecca and Wendy for sharing their lives. They formed their friendship through a support group run by NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Learn more at N A M I dot org. You have been listening to a Minibabble. Find the full episode at B A B B L E R Y dot com. That’s BABBLERY.com.

[00:12:49] The lovely music is by Australian composer Dorothea Baker. The Babblery is produced with support from KSQD in Santa Cruz, California.

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