7 ms·

It's so easy for parents (and teachers) to misdiagnose strange child behaviors. TFA is a wonderful example. Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar

It's so easy for parents (and teachers) to misdiagnose strange child behaviors. TFA is a wonderful example. Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. Young children will not figure these things out by themselves. Parents need to "debug" these problems. Doctors may not be able to help until you have some idea. It might be interesting to collate a compendium of strange child behaviors with simple explanations, and other problems to watch out for.

dfgert 8y ago
I don't understand when will medicine recognize the cause of all health complications instead of trying to individually path each and every problem. People can then start correct precautionary measures. All health issues that we see on rise today were virtually absent in pre-industrial era and are directly result of our newly adopted habits and environment. We are paying so much of cost to live in a "modern" world.
- brazzy 8y ago
  The world is not that simple.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  We also have higher life expectancy rates and lower infant mortality. No need to go tin foil hat philosophical about all things scary and ‘modern’, it paints a black and white view of the world, progress, and the general concept of change.
- benj111 8y ago
  We already know the causes and cures for most common ailments. People aren't exactly queuing up to do more exercise, eat healthily etc, etc.
  - arkey 8y ago
    Yes and no. I think parent has a point in the fact that the predominant idea seems to be to patch a "current ailment" and get on with life (reactive mentality), instead of actually investigating a root cause of whatever causes that "current ailment" (proactive mentality). For example, I'm having my sixth pharyngitis in less than a year. When I go to the doctor, the doctor only thinks "pharyngitis -> Pills A and B -> here, take these pills". This will fix the problem. For now. What will happen in less than two months? I'll be back, to repeat the same procedure. Is this how the rest of my life looks? Shouldn't the doctor try and discover what's the root cause of this? Pollution, some allergy, stress, what would i know...? This is my personal case and it's becoming frustrating, but the problem is i know about many other similar cases. I really can't complain about the health service in my country (Spain, Barcelona specifically) because you will get the attention you need to not die, whatever happens to you, unlike many other places. But for things that are not critical as a punctured lung? "Take these pills and get out me office."
- Jolter 8y ago
  Are you saying dry skin on a child is caused by a modern lifestyle? That sounds a bit far fetched, to say the least.
- Retra 8y ago
  The pre-industrial era didn't have modern diagnostics & healthcare, so why would you expect to see the same ailments or the same desire to have them treated professionally?
warent 8y ago
> "It might be interesting to collate a compendium of strange child behaviors with simple explanations, and other problems to watch out for." I couldn't disagree more. This seems like a step in the wrong direction. The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." Actually, even saying that parents need to "debug" these problems may be going too far. Humans are much more complicated than a machine that must work "just so."
- Faark 8y ago
  > The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." I couldn't disagree more. Having had a proper manual for my human body would have been amazing. I had a less intense but somewhat similar issue to OP's child. I was licking my lips and therefor got bullied for using "lipstick". Both stopped only after on one of those occasions a kid in their mentioned licking can cause it, while i pretended to ignore them. I'm quite thankful to him and wish i could help others just like that. Another is being lactose-intolerant. No idea when I became that, must have happened quite late. But it took me embarrassingly long (mid twenties) to figure out, change my diet and thus get rid of those messy bowel movements. I see little value in not having those kind of knowledge available and instead having to find out yourself. And parenting would hardly be possible without understanding your child's behavior. If you have a problem with calling it "strange" or "debug", I'm fine with calling it something else. But i doub't many here care about (those) labels.
  - gugagore 8y ago
    I don't believe you replied to the spirit of the parent comment, since having red lips, and having messy bowel movements are not human behaviors, but are symptoms. I bet what the parent has in mind is, for example, behaviors such as stimming.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Stimming = self-stimulating. I didn't know that word (but knew the sorts of [repititive] behaviours -- like rocking, hand waving -- as an indicator for ASD.
jrochkind1 8y ago
To me, the point of the essay was the opposite of what you just said, instead: listen to and trust your child.
- PakG1 8y ago
  I think you're both right. By listening and trusting your child, you'll be able to successfully and properly debug. That's what happened in the blog post.
  - cryptonector 8y ago
    Exactly. The point of a compendium would be -more than anything- to teach parents that things are not always what they seem. The hand-licking behavior might seem like misbehavior, but if you stop and think about why it happens, you might understand that there may be a much better explanation.
pdpi 8y ago
> Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. But this attitude is precisely the issue! Most of those problems are mild and fairly benign, and not all that common. We've gotten ourselves into this terrible mindset that allowing children to experience any little discomfort is a sign of bad parenting, while ignoring the damage our overbearing vigilance is causing — both physical, as with auto-immune diseases that seem to be linked to excessive hygiene, and psychological (in all sort of fun and destructive ways).
- cryptonector 8y ago
  I think you missed the point. For example, as a young child I hated meat, and it wasn't until years later that I figured out that it was because my jaw got sore very quickly when having to chew a lot. My parents tried very hard to get me to eat meat back then, but if they had not pushed me, but instead let me be and listened to me, they might have figured it out. This one sounds a lot like the hand-licking case in TFA. For another example, as a child I sugar-lowed very often. More than once I went to my parents feeling very sick and my dad just took my temperature and said "you're fine" when in fact the temp. was rather low and a sign of sugar lowing. It would have been very nice to have figured this out years earlier than I eventually did. The worst sugar low I remember happened while I was 16 and driving home from a movie theater (where I'd had a huge candy bar and soda), and I had no idea what was up. At one point I was driving on a long, windy, hilly, busy two-way street, with a passenger, and I felt like I was going to die at any moment. I could have killed someone because of something trivial that no one stopped to think about. Here's another: I used have episodes of losing eyesight for a few seconds. My dad actually took me to an ophtalmologist's office where they did a battery of tests on me and never found the issue. Eventually I figured it out one time when I passed out after a blood draw: I was having low blood pressure episodes. This one is a case where doctors were unable to figure out something rather trivial. Here's another: as a kid my mom used to be punished for what turned out to be bad eyesight. What the heck! Books like "What to Expect While Expecting" and "What to Expect the First Year" are fantastic and very useful to parents. Imagine a "Debugging for Parents" book that taught, among other things, not to see every odd behavior as misbehavior. Wouldn't that be fantastic?! I think it would be.
nicoburns 8y ago
Seems to me that far more often the problem is one that the young child has figured out and even articulates to the adult, but the adults ignore it because they wouldn't find that same issue a problem, and they don't understand why the child does.

dfgert 8y ago

I don't understand when will medicine recognize the cause of all health complications instead of trying to individually path each and every problem. People can then start correct precautionary measures. All health issues that we see on rise today were virtually absent in pre-industrial era and are directly result of our newly adopted habits and environment. We are paying so much of cost to live in a "modern" world.

brazzy 8y ago
The world is not that simple.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zapzupnz 8y ago
We also have higher life expectancy rates and lower infant mortality. No need to go tin foil hat philosophical about all things scary and ‘modern’, it paints a black and white view of the world, progress, and the general concept of change.
benj111 8y ago
We already know the causes and cures for most common ailments. People aren't exactly queuing up to do more exercise, eat healthily etc, etc.
- arkey 8y ago
  Yes and no. I think parent has a point in the fact that the predominant idea seems to be to patch a "current ailment" and get on with life (reactive mentality), instead of actually investigating a root cause of whatever causes that "current ailment" (proactive mentality). For example, I'm having my sixth pharyngitis in less than a year. When I go to the doctor, the doctor only thinks "pharyngitis -> Pills A and B -> here, take these pills". This will fix the problem. For now. What will happen in less than two months? I'll be back, to repeat the same procedure. Is this how the rest of my life looks? Shouldn't the doctor try and discover what's the root cause of this? Pollution, some allergy, stress, what would i know...? This is my personal case and it's becoming frustrating, but the problem is i know about many other similar cases. I really can't complain about the health service in my country (Spain, Barcelona specifically) because you will get the attention you need to not die, whatever happens to you, unlike many other places. But for things that are not critical as a punctured lung? "Take these pills and get out me office."
Jolter 8y ago
Are you saying dry skin on a child is caused by a modern lifestyle? That sounds a bit far fetched, to say the least.
Retra 8y ago
The pre-industrial era didn't have modern diagnostics & healthcare, so why would you expect to see the same ailments or the same desire to have them treated professionally?

warent 8y ago

> "It might be interesting to collate a compendium of strange child behaviors with simple explanations, and other problems to watch out for." I couldn't disagree more. This seems like a step in the wrong direction. The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." Actually, even saying that parents need to "debug" these problems may be going too far. Humans are much more complicated than a machine that must work "just so."

Faark 8y ago
> The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." I couldn't disagree more. Having had a proper manual for my human body would have been amazing. I had a less intense but somewhat similar issue to OP's child. I was licking my lips and therefor got bullied for using "lipstick". Both stopped only after on one of those occasions a kid in their mentioned licking can cause it, while i pretended to ignore them. I'm quite thankful to him and wish i could help others just like that. Another is being lactose-intolerant. No idea when I became that, must have happened quite late. But it took me embarrassingly long (mid twenties) to figure out, change my diet and thus get rid of those messy bowel movements. I see little value in not having those kind of knowledge available and instead having to find out yourself. And parenting would hardly be possible without understanding your child's behavior. If you have a problem with calling it "strange" or "debug", I'm fine with calling it something else. But i doub't many here care about (those) labels.
- gugagore 8y ago
  I don't believe you replied to the spirit of the parent comment, since having red lips, and having messy bowel movements are not human behaviors, but are symptoms. I bet what the parent has in mind is, for example, behaviors such as stimming.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Stimming = self-stimulating. I didn't know that word (but knew the sorts of [repititive] behaviours -- like rocking, hand waving -- as an indicator for ASD.

jrochkind1 8y ago

To me, the point of the essay was the opposite of what you just said, instead: listen to and trust your child.

PakG1 8y ago
I think you're both right. By listening and trusting your child, you'll be able to successfully and properly debug. That's what happened in the blog post.
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Exactly. The point of a compendium would be -more than anything- to teach parents that things are not always what they seem. The hand-licking behavior might seem like misbehavior, but if you stop and think about why it happens, you might understand that there may be a much better explanation.

pdpi 8y ago

> Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. But this attitude is precisely the issue! Most of those problems are mild and fairly benign, and not all that common. We've gotten ourselves into this terrible mindset that allowing children to experience any little discomfort is a sign of bad parenting, while ignoring the damage our overbearing vigilance is causing — both physical, as with auto-immune diseases that seem to be linked to excessive hygiene, and psychological (in all sort of fun and destructive ways).

cryptonector 8y ago
I think you missed the point. For example, as a young child I hated meat, and it wasn't until years later that I figured out that it was because my jaw got sore very quickly when having to chew a lot. My parents tried very hard to get me to eat meat back then, but if they had not pushed me, but instead let me be and listened to me, they might have figured it out. This one sounds a lot like the hand-licking case in TFA. For another example, as a child I sugar-lowed very often. More than once I went to my parents feeling very sick and my dad just took my temperature and said "you're fine" when in fact the temp. was rather low and a sign of sugar lowing. It would have been very nice to have figured this out years earlier than I eventually did. The worst sugar low I remember happened while I was 16 and driving home from a movie theater (where I'd had a huge candy bar and soda), and I had no idea what was up. At one point I was driving on a long, windy, hilly, busy two-way street, with a passenger, and I felt like I was going to die at any moment. I could have killed someone because of something trivial that no one stopped to think about. Here's another: I used have episodes of losing eyesight for a few seconds. My dad actually took me to an ophtalmologist's office where they did a battery of tests on me and never found the issue. Eventually I figured it out one time when I passed out after a blood draw: I was having low blood pressure episodes. This one is a case where doctors were unable to figure out something rather trivial. Here's another: as a kid my mom used to be punished for what turned out to be bad eyesight. What the heck! Books like "What to Expect While Expecting" and "What to Expect the First Year" are fantastic and very useful to parents. Imagine a "Debugging for Parents" book that taught, among other things, not to see every odd behavior as misbehavior. Wouldn't that be fantastic?! I think it would be.

nicoburns 8y ago

Seems to me that far more often the problem is one that the young child has figured out and even articulates to the adult, but the adults ignore it because they wouldn't find that same issue a problem, and they don't understand why the child does.