To label or not to label
When you have a suspicion your child may have a specific difficulty, it can be difficult to know whether to go through the hoops to get a diagnosis and if you do, whether to share that diagnosis with your child.
I have my own thoughts about diagnosis, for us, explained in a ‘this is a reason not an excuse’ manner, it has only been helpful. And I know other families make other choices.
A book that has been insightful in my understanding of some of my childrens’ challenges, is The Explosive Child by Dr Ross Greene. Dr Greene presents the diagnosis in an interesting context. The main premise of his argument, is that diagnosis don’t direct. Diagnosis such as ADHD, ODD, Bipolar Disorder, ASD, reactive attachment disorder, mood regulation disorder, depression doesn’t provide information about the skills that make life difficult. Consequently, they can cause too much focus on the behaviour rather than the skills that are lagging for the child and the problems they are unable to solve.
He believes that a diagnosis may result in a view that the problems lie with the child, as they are the ones with the diagnosis when in reality the challenges are for the adults around them. Our responses are essential to helping these children. When we accept that the skills they need to navigate life’s challenges are not yet as developed as peers of the same age, it helps us to understand their responses. Our understanding that in some situations those sills are present, and in other situations, they struggle, means we can go one further and anticipate when challenges might occur.
For me, this is a bit like being told you have diabetes, and the prognosis, without really being given any help on how to manage your blood sugar, what food to eat, how to exercise and how, given the right profile and action, it is possible to reverse diabetes. The label of diabetes, tells us nothing about what needs to change.
Soon after our son’s ASC diagnosis we enrolled on the Early Bird Plus course (a National Autistic Society course run by our Local Education department). Although we had the diagnosis, and by this time had read a lot about what that meant and why our son had such a diagnosis, we were just at the start of discovering what we needed to change to make life possible for our son. The Early Bird Plus course was trans formative in that it helped us to understand not just the challenges he faced, it also helped us with practical things we could do to better support him. One of those was the use of visual stories. Almost overnight we went from kicking and screaming every time we tried to leave the house to go somewhere new, to a calm departure with plenty of time to spare. The trick was simply to understand that he didn’t have the skills to share that he was worried, or scared or didn’t really understand where we were going. Once he had seen a picture of where we were going, and was able to visualise and connect with the outing, he was no longer worried, and life became far, far easier. It wasn’t the anxiety that was the problem, that hasn’t gone away, it was his lack of ability to share his anxiety that we had to tackle.
If you have a child with explosive behaviour, even occasionally, it is well worth a read.
