Claudia Meininger Gold, writing in the Boston Globe, offers an alternative to psychotropic drugs for children. She says parents need help accepting and understanding their children with attention and behavior problems. If parents can manage their own frustration with their children, she says, they can better help children manage their behavior.

Too often, she says, children are put on medications for reasons having to do with pharmaceutical marketing, time constraints on primary care doctors, and “our society’s expectation of a quick fix.”

Studies have shown that a parent’s capacity to think about and understand a child’s experience from the child’s perspective is associated with a child’s increased cognitive resourcefulness, greater social skills, and better capacity to regulate emotions. Healthcare policy, and the education of pediatricians and mental health professionals, must move toward giving our full support to parents of young children in this way. Only then can we hope to improve the mental health of the next generation.

Claudia Meininger Gold is a pediatrician in Great Barrington, MA

Associated Press on WDAM-TV [New Orleans NBC affiliate] and the [New Orleans] Times-Picayune:

A report released by a non-profit group shows that children in group homes licensed by the state of Louisiana aren’t properly protected, and are placed in facilities that in many cases have been repeatedly cited for safety and health violations.

The Advocacy Center says in its report that children … too often aren’t given the mental health treatment, medical care and protection they should receive.

… Currently, the state has no power to issue civil fines against care providers that fail to meet minimum licensing standards, according to the report. This has led to some homes being cited year after year for similar violations.

From the New York Times:

Kendall Bailey, a 19-year-old breaststroker who has cerebral palsy and autism, qualified to represent the United States in the Beijing Paralympics this fall. But the U.S. Paralympics organization then formally requested that he be declared ineligible to compete because he has intellectual as well as physical disabilities — a request that was withdrawn after Connie Shaw, his mother strongly objected.

Mrs. Shaw has been left with questions similar to those of other parents who fight bureaucracies they think are interfering with their disabled children’s rights and dreams. Was U.S. Paralympics really trying to protect Kendall when it formally requested that he be rendered ineligible for the Beijing Games? Or did team officials file the appeal simply not wanting the distraction of handling a 6-foot-6-inch 19-year-old with an elementary-school mind and a nursery-school temperament?

Mrs. Shaw said she thinks the U.S. Olympic Committee was acting out of ignorance.

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From the Washington Post:

Several schools in suburban Washington’s Montgomery County have programs for children with Asperger’s syndrome. They focus on teaching students to recognize and cope with their symptoms, as well as including them into general education classes to the greatest extent appropriate.

The Montgomery County program is one of only a handful at public schools across the country. Before her son entered it, one mother said, “I couldn’t see my child as anything. I couldn’t imagine him having a normal life. And now, my child has a personality. He’s funny. I can see him as an engineer. I can see him as an architect. I can see his life.”

Two weeks after a young man with autism and challenging behaviors was barred from a church in Minnesota, today’s Boston Globe carries a story about efforts by a community of faith in Massachusetts to include a young man with autism.

Joshua Aaron Krane (left) made his Bar Mitzvah with the help of a program called Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, which offers religious training to more than 145 young people with learning disabilities.

Gateway arranged for Josh’s ceremony to be held in a classroom on a Thursday afternoon, because he is extremely sensitive to distraction or breaks in his regular routine. It also helped him to use nontraditional technology. He led the congregation in prayer with a Powerpoint presentation on a laptop computer.

Widely quoted in the article is Bill Gaventa, a minister and director of community and congregational supports for the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. Gaventa and former Pennsylvania First Lady Ginny Thornburgh will be the keynote speakers at a Philadelphia-area conference this week on including people with disabilities in communities of faith.

Many thanks to Pam Wilson of Bellaonline for sharing information on the conference!

See also: News and commentary about the documentary Praying with Lior.

Police: Teacher’s aide attacks autistic student. A Coconut Creek, Florida, teacher’s aide is under investigation after an autistic student was attacked with a metal chair at school earlier this month, police said. From NBC6-TV in South Florida.

Phila. mom angered over treatment of son with autism. A mother says her son’s school did not properly care for him when it took the rest of his classmates on a field trip and left him in the care of an untrained bus assistant. From CBS3-TV in Philadelphia.

Autistic man labelled ‘mental retard’. The UK’s Boots pharmacy chain apologized to a man after one of its store clerks said he didn’t deserve service because he was a “mental retard.” From the Bath Chronicle.

Earlier posts here and here.

Stephen Kuusisto, professor, University of Iowa: Letter to the principal ‘On being Alex Barton’

I still carry deep under my skin the barbs and taunts of mean spirited public school classmates who found ways to bully me simply because of my disability … Like many “baby boomers” with disabilities who helped to pioneer the concept of mainstreaming for disabled kids I keep hoping that the vicious and ignorant behavior that I experienced in public schools will at last become a thing of the past.

… I hope it’s not too much to ask that your school district will now take this opportunity to think hard about disability with a renewed sense that kids with disabilities are real citizens too.

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