Behavioral Disorders: What Moms Need to Know

Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Sunday, March 14 2010

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Melissa Person, 41, is a Merrick, N.Y., preschool teacher, so she was equipped to notice all the red flags raised by the behavior of her daughter, Stephanie, now 11.

“I tried to write it off as her being little; I hate to use the word immature. I thought I was being hard on her,” Person says. “People thought it was me, not my daughter. The school said she was doing well, until the second grade. Then I started getting phone calls from the school that she was defiant and not wanting to participate. It took a lot of energy from people trying to help her there. When the school suggested I put her on medication, I thought they just wanted to make their jobs easier.”

Mothers everywhere can easily relate to Person’s frustration, confusion, and challenges. Generations ago, if children posed some kind of problem in school, whether academic or social, they might have been labeled dumb.

“Parents might have apprenticed them to skilled craftsmen like a blacksmith, giving them a job and a respected place in the community. With the insistence that everyone have the right and responsibility to go to college, the vocational tracks in high school have been radically diminished, making it difficult for the non-academically oriented child to leave school with the skills for a valid career,” says Dr. Linda Nathanson-Lippitt, a pediatrician with Atlanta-based Children’s Habilitation Center. “Now we’re diagnosing more specifically.”

Indeed, nowadays mothers are quite comfortable throwing out terms like ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactive disorder), OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), SPD (sensory processing disorder), and OT (occupational therapy). They are familiar with diagnoses such as autism, Asperger’s disorder, sensory integration disorder, auditory processing disorder, and visual processing disorder. And they are afraid both that their children might be labeled with one of these disorders, and that they might not be, meaning that there’s no apparent explanation for their children’s behavioral or academic problems.

As prevalent as these terms are in mothers’ everyday language, the fact is that experts estimate that only 6 percent to 10 percent of the school-age population in the United States is learning disabled, while nearly 40 percent of the children enrolled in the nation’s special education classes suffer from a learning disability, according to the Foundation for Children With Learning Disabilities.