When my son was still sick, a child at his preschool came up to me and told me that my son was a “bad kid”. I don’t blame him. If you are four years old then a three year old who bites, pulls hair, won’t talk much, and who walks in circles for half an hour is probably going to seem like a “bad kid”.
But not to Big Charlie.
Big Charlie was a very tall child who was in his last year at the Montessori school my son attended. When my child was three, Charlie was five. When I came to school to read a book, Big Charlie came up to me immediately and said simply. “Something is wrong with your kid. You need to take him to a doctor.”
Big Charlie was wiser at five than most adults I know.
What he saw, is what everyone needs to see. Autism, SPD, and ADHD are not behavioral problems. They are medical conditions with biological causes that effect the brain. Period. We may not yet understand the biochemical mechanism that causes these problems (my rant on that is elsewhere) but we know that things like diet, detox, and fever can sometimes cause sudden and meaningful changes in the condition of a child.
This does not mean that therapeutic interventions are not vitally necessary. Anyone who has had a family member suffer a stroke or a TBI knows that the brain is amazingly plastic and that a big part of recovery from any brain injury is going to be therapy. Therapy is critical. But so is finding the cause. The cures for disease always come after the mechanism for the disease is identified.
In the meantime, we need to stop acting like its a behavioral problem that can be solved exclusively with discipline. We need to be as smart as Big Charlie was and see these conditions for what they are. They are medical conditions with a biochemical cause. They happen to impact the brain. And the parents that I have met who love and fight for these children are almost always amazingly loving and good parents.
We were very lucky that in our case there was a biochemical cure available. I don’t think that the cure is as obvious for most impacted children. I do think that for some meaningful percentage, the cure is somehow related to what they are eating. And I know that there is no money in getting people to eat vegetables and stop eating dairy and gluten, but someone needs to care enough to do the research without needing to get rich.
But in the meantime, we all need to learn from Big Charlie. Its a medical condition. It affects the brain. The behavior is a symptom to be managed. It is not a cause.
