Quirky Kids Understanding & Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit in When to Worry & When Not to Worry

"My Kid Is Different" So what do you do when you're worried about your child? You wonder and agonize, you scope out other children, you read books on child development and parenting magazines, and you go looking for help on the Internet. You talk to your spouse or your best friend or your own parents or your day-care teacher. Maybe you lock up all the worry inside and say nothing to anyone, because you can't help feeling that by speaking the words, you will make them come true. Finally, usually, you ask your child's doctor. Maybe you make a special appointment and come in to discuss your concerns, or maybe you just wait for the next regular checkup and then you mention it, more or less in passing, needing to say it, hoping to be reassured. As pediatricians, part of our job is to look over babies and young children and decide whether their development is proceeding normally and on schedule. We see our patients for short, busy interludes, often at moments when they are feeling more than a little bit stressed-out. Think of the one-year-old, cranky after a long stint in the waiting room, less than eager to be handled by a stranger, maybe remembering all too well that this too-chilly room is a place where they stick you with needles. So, as pediatricians, we examine kids and watch how they behave, but we rely most of all on parents to tell us what's going on. We know that many behavioral and developmental problems are subtle and hard to judge, and we worry that we may be missing something. On the other hand, part of our job is to reassure. If we sent every child who takes a little longer to walk for a full orthopedic, neurological, and developmental assessment, we would hardly be doing anyone any favorsnot to mention what would happen if everyone who was a little slow to talk got a full oral-motor workup and a brain scan. Is Something Really Wrong? All children have bad hours and bad days and even bad weeks. Many children have difficult developmental stages or particular developmental tasks that they find frustrating and even miserable. Many parents who find themselves sufficiently and persistently worried enough to request diagnostic workups and medical and developmental evaluations end up looking back on something that turned out to be nothing more than a difficult episode in an otherwise straightforward childhood. A persistent worry doesn't tell you what the end result is going to be, but it does signal a need to pay attention and ask the right questions. Medical students famously diagnose themselves with every syndrome they study. And as parents, reading about children and the various things that can go wrong in their health or development, we measure our own children against the most ominous medical syndromes. But if you've picked up this book, your concern is more than the occasional reflex anxiety that falls under the heading of parental love. You may be worried that your child is somehow developmentally different in a significant way. You may already have started making your way through the maze of diagnosis and assessment, and you may in fact already have had a diagnosisor a label or a formulationassigned to your child. But wherever you and your child are in this journey, it probably all began with some worries that somehow he was different: worries that didn't go away with the morning sun or disappear when teething ended or move to the back burner when you found a better day-care center. The First Signs For many parents, this nagging worry that something is wrong comes early in the child's life. Maybe it's an unusually intense expression of a standard baby stage: the infant whose colic doesn't end at twelve weeks or the toddler whose tantrums reflect an underlying frustration out of proportion to theKlass, Perri is the author of 'Quirky Kids Understanding & Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit in When to Worry & When Not to Worry', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345451422 and ISBN 0345451422.