What Must People Think?

A friend's status on Facebook tonight...

"Just saw the most ill-behaved children in Best Buy. Sorry, but there is zero excuse for that lack of discipline. Have parents become so afraid of their children that they allow them to do what they want? I got a good whack on the tush and I think I turned out just fine."

I had to learn a new word this week. Proprioceptive.

"Proprio" means "one's own" in Latin, and "ceptive" means "awareness." One's own awareness.

Your awareness of yourself tells you where your body is positioned in relation to yourself, to others, and to the world around you. It's your alignment, if you will. Your internal GPS.

When you sit in a chair, you don't have to keep one eye on your ass the whole time to keep from falling out. Your proprioception does it for you. When you button your shirt, you don't have to look. Proprioception looks for you.

Justin falls out of chairs and can't button his shirt. He isn't well oriented to the world around him without some rather aggressive compensation on his part.

For you and I, proprioception informs us

• where our body or body parts are in space
• how our body parts relate to one another
• how much and how quickly our muscles are stretching
• how fast our body is moving through space
• how our timing is, and
• how much force our muscles put forth (1)

Justin doesn't do any of those things very well. He has a neurological condition in which his nervous system doesn't work like yours and mine.(2) 

You and I can sit on a couch together and know how much space we need to remain comfortable and appropriate in relation to one another. Justin's brain doesn't work that way. For Justin to judge distance, he will more than likely bump into you on purpose, especially as he grows more comfortable with you. He might head butt you. He might reach out and hit you. Like a bat bounce-sending radar so it doesn't hit a wall, he's trying to compensate for what you and I take for granted in a very annoying, but very effective manner.

Read these two paragraphs, because this is what's going on with Justin:

Proprioceptive Seeking - "More!"

The sensory seeking child is a "bumper and a crasher." He craves active movement, pushing, pulling, making "crash landings" by throwing himself to the ground, and lunging into walls, tables, and people. He craves passive input to muscles and joints as well, such as strong bear hugs and being pressed, squeezed or pummeled while roughhousing.

Always seeking more proprioceptive input, the sensory craver may bite, kick, hit and behave in a seemingly aggressive manner. Some sensory cravers will engage in self-stimulation, such as biting their own skin or banging their head against a crib or wall. These children benefit from sensory integration treatment with ample opportunities for vigorous proprioceptive input to decrease their high arousal." (3)

Justin has physical therapy twice a week to work on his "high arousal" state. There are exercises we do at home with him. Things for practice and relief. We roll him up in a Justin Burrito with an afghan from the couch and encourage him to press against it and break free. This is great, giggly fun for him. We do deep pressure movement exercises on his arms, legs and joints. He doesn't like that one quite as much, but he'll let us do it if it means we'll skip a time out. And when he's getting too wild, seeking more, more, more sensory input, sometimes we just have to pick him up and restrain him. That's a bear hug. He doesn't always like that either, but he needs it. It calms him down.

Justin bumps, crashes, head butts, kicks, hits and laughs while he does it. To friends like the one I quoted at the beginning of this blog, (who is not talking about Justin, by the way, I should make that clear, my friend, you were not aiming your comment at us...you're just caught in the crosshairs of my explanation), Justin must look like an awful, awful child. Adam and I must look like awful, awful parents. I'm sorry about that. We didn't build him that way. It came with the package when we volunteered to love him.

You're not narrow-minded at all, my friend, but "have parents become so afraid of their children that they allow them to do what they want?" No, not necessarily. We're not afraid of Justin at all. We love him. We correct him and tell him to shape up all the time. You can't begin to imagine. But as we continue to do that, he is still a special needs child who is out in public exhibiting difficult internal challenges that may look like simple disobedience to you. Simple naughtiness. We could keep him at home 24/7, and shelter him from the quick-to-judge eyes of the world, but then how would he ever learn? Where would he ever practice? That may have been going on with the parents of your Best Buy kids too.

"There is zero excuse for that lack of discipline." Not always true. Sometimes there's every excuse. Sometimes there are two loving parents, one incredibly beautiful child who is trying and learning, and they're playing the hand they were dealt. The fact that you have to see it five minutes in the checkout line is nothing compared to the hours, days or years they've cried about it at home, I promise you.

To the "good whack on the tush" crowd, I'm not against corporal punishment at all. I grew up with a good swat on the ass every now and then, and it was effective for my learning and not at all traumatic. But you may not know this: until our adoption is finalized, it is illegal for us to spank our kids in any way. If we were caught spanking them, they would be taken away from us. That's part of the package, courtesy of your Clark County and State of Nevada lawmakers.

I get it completely, and I don't resent you for thinking it. People like order, and Justin's wiring is out of order. Behaviorally speaking, he's a disorderly child. Some of my friends have flat-out told me they could fix him in five minutes if they could just knock some sense into him. Sorry, you can't. On paper, I'm still his half-dad and he's still a ward of the county. You'd go to jail and I'd lose my son. That's too much to lose to let you spank the disobedience out of him.

There's an additional problem, this is not a little boy ramming his head into my stomach because he's ill-behaved. He's actually a very well-behaved boy for all he's been through. We discipline him appropriately and consistently when he strikes out with malice. He loses privileges, sheds plenty of tears and gets sent to bed early just like your kids when they mess up. Nobody's giving him a free ride, but if you think I should yell at him every time his neurological deficiency makes your Friday night Oneg or your shopping unpleasant, I'm sorry I can't do that. Again, I apologize to you for our sometimes messy public rehearsals as we deal with this one step at a time, but I can't sequester him away until he suddenly turns magically delicious, and you won't see me disclipline him for what you think is "bad behavior" any more than you'll see me yell at a blind girl for walking into walls.

Be patient, friends, when you see an out-of-sync child acting up or acting out in a store or a checkout line. There's almost always more to the story than meets the eye. In two short months, Adam and I have already found solace (and progress) through the help of an early childhood therapist, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist and a neurologist. And it's still incredibly hard on us. Terribly, heartbreakingly, frustratingly hard that Justin doesn't just snap out of it and "work" like other kids do. And most parents of "problem children" don't get the team intervention that we get at all. They have to deal with it completely on their own and they don't even know what "it" is yet.

So, don't be quick to judge. But for the grace of God, there goes your child. Or your friend's child. Or your grandchild. Already in my world, people line up every day to tell me what's wrong with Justin and how easily Adam and I should be able to fix it. Just do this. Just do that. Here's what my dad did to me, and by God, I shaped up pretty damn quick. There are stares and glares from people who are strangers, and that's to be expected, but even sadder, there are plenty from people who are also our friends.

Justin is six. He's good, he's smart, he's bright and he's my son. Crashing, running, hitting and learning, he's doing his best to smash his way through the odds he was born with. It's a confusing life, a constant rehearsal, and it doesn't always look pretty. If you can't watch, look away, but don't paint him bad.

He'll make it work, we'll make it work, one bumpy day at a time.

(1)(3) The Out-of-Sync Child, Recognizing and Coping with Sensory Processing Disorder (Revised Edition), Carol Stock Kranowitz, M.A. Perigree/Penguin 2006
(2) The Out-of-Sync Child Has Fun, Carol Stock Kranowitz, M.A. Perigree/Penguin 2003