Unrealistic expectations

I still have little Alex Barton on my mind--this morning I woke up thinking about something I read in an article entitled Florida kindergarten teacher defends having class vote 5-year-old out.

After students shared their view, Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo had them vote, but said the vote was only to keep Alex Barton out of class for the day, not for good.

"Portillo said she did this as she felt that if (Alex) heard from his classmates how his behavior affected them that it would make a bigger difference to him, rather than just hearing it from adults," according to a report released Thursday morning by the Port St. Lucie Police Department.

Wow. A five year old is expected to have the emotional maturity and capacity for self-reflection to be able to profit from this exercise? Forget for just a moment that we are talking about a child with Asperger's Syndrome-- (his diagnosis has now been confirmed) she was expecting a level of insight that would be exceedingly rare in any child of Alex's age. This is developmentally inappropriate practice.

It reminded me of something I read years ago, before I ever had kids. The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood

The growing acceptance of childhood as a distinct phenomenon is reflected in the proposed inclusion of the syndrome in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, or DSM-IV, of the American Psychiatric Association (1990). Clinicians are still in disagreement about the significant clinical features of childhood, but the proposed DSM-IV will almost certainly include the following core features:

1. Congenital onset
2. Dwarfism
3. Emotional lability and immaturity
4. Knowledge deficits
5. Legume anorexia

Having posted that excerpt, I hope that it does not cause the discussion to go into the territory of "Kids are overdiagnosed and overmedicated". While that is true in some cases, people often tend to make sweeping generalizations that may be hurtful (or at least unhelpful) to people who are dealing with these issues.

Obviously the piece is satire. Behavior and characteristics common to childhood would be seen as "abnormal" if observed in an adult. But rather than seeing these things as "disordered", many adults see them as "bad", leading them to select an entirely inappropriate strategy for dealing with problems that arise.

More later--I need to leave for work now.

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