Navigating Autism Services Part 1: The Weird World of Applied Behavioral Analysis

   

As soon as you get a diagnosis of Autism you will begin hearing the term ABA, short for Applied Behavioral Analysis. ABA is the treatment/therapy for autism that has the highest rate of documented efficacy. That just means it’s the only thing that’s been proven to help. And the earlier

the ABA therapy begins and the more hours of therapy the child receives the better it works. Earlier and more = better lifelong outcomes. Because of this fact which the medical and autism community knows, ABA, an utterly foreign and seemingly bizarre therapy gets pushed really aggressively on parents at a time when they are disoriented, likely ignorant (as I was) and likely ferociously protective (as I was) of their newly diagnosed child. Parents at this stage have probably read online about diet solutions, probiotics, all kinds of medical and “curative” stuff and they likely want to pursue these strategies (nothin’ wrong with it), but the doctors and therapists sort of slap their hands and say, “NO! This obscure thing called ABA! Lots of it, immediately!” And all the while the clock is audibly ticking to help your child for the rest of their lives. It’s an anxiety inducing situation.

So I’m writing this little piece about ABA as a parent to a parent (because doctor’s, in my experience, mostly suck at communicating with parents and are mostly clueless about autism) having been through it and seen the good and the bad and having come out the other side with really amazing outcomes that I would want for every parent who receives an autism diagnosis. There are some important things to know, though, that can help you navigate ABA quickly and successfully.

First, what is ABA? I could go on for a long time, but suffice it to say that ABA is a method of changing behavior by rewarding the behaviors we want to see more of, with the ultimate goal of rerouting the circuitry of the brain so that those more adaptive behaviors become natural to the child. What I didn’t realize at the time, is that this is how all of us learn already. Babies jerk their little limbs around and put things in their mouths specifically for the opportunity to have a rewarding sensory experience, which they will then repeat. When a baby jerks its crazy little arms and hits a bobbly-doo on a mobile, there is a dazzling flash of color, perhaps a little tinkle of bells, or the crunch crunch of that weird crunchy material they make baby stuff out of, and these fantastic rewards get the baby to reach out and explore their world, so more learning can happen. When a baby’s face spasms into an approximation of a smile, all the adults in the room go nuts and start smiling and cooing, and baby learns to do more of that.

Now I know a flood of counter arguments are probably rushing to your mind about negative responses and how those shape behavior too. That’s getting into some higher level theory of ABA and there’s literature to go into that stuff, but I can promise you that, when practiced by skilled therapists, this method is insanely successful. It just is.

My first encounters with ABA, though, were not good, and they made me very skeptical of the whole practice. My son, who, at the time of diagnosis, was echolalic (he just repeated language and didn’t generate original language himself) was enrolling at a language acquisition preschool at University of Kansas, where I was a graduate student. Just across the courtyard from the Language Acquisition Preschool was an ABA preschool, and I toured it. It was an awful, depressing, hellish tour. I was only there for about thirty minutes, and maybe they do great life-changing work. I don’t mean to poop on them, but from my perspective, it was dehumanizing and frightening. Dead-eyed children were being led around like dogs by their therapists who were alarmingly young, cold, and barked orders at them over and over until they complied. I almost ran out of the building, and you can be damn sure that I sooner would have handed my child over to a cult leader than to that preschool.

Later still, I signed on with a dubious ABA provider recommended by my insurance, who came to our home to provide services. Similar issues occurred: a rotation of wildly unqualified therapists basically just tormented my kid (and me because I had to witness it all). One, fresh-out-of-undergrad, first-day-as-an-ABA-therapist girl, stood over my son, who was crying and plugging his ears on the couch and said, over and over, in a monotone at fifteen second intervals, “touch your nose...touch your nose...touch your nose.” I mean creepy, weird, 100% unhelpful shit. Even the BCBA (Board Certified Behavior Analyst) who is basically the boss of the therapists on the team and is supposed to be an expert, was terrible.

Perhaps you, sharp reader that you are, already noticed the discrepancies between my description of ABA and my experiences with the preschool and the dubious provider. You noticed perhaps, that this therapy doesn’t seem very “rewarding.” DING, DING, DING!

   

By a series of miraculous events, we found and got into The Kansas City Autism Training Center which runs Astra Day School. Oh Astra Day School, if I could but spend the rest of my life singing your wondrous praises. Beautiful school, beautiful teachers and administration, blessed, blessed, blessed are you among schools.

This school showed me what good ABA is and changed my kids life forever. So here’s what good ABA is:

1. GOOD ABA IS FUN!

One helpful thing to keep in mind is that good ABA therapy looks good and bad ABA

therapy looks bad. Yay! Something simple in the anything-but-simple world of Autism! Providers will try to convince you that something that looks bad is actually good (you just don’t get it). Nope! They don’t get it. If you are considering an ABA service you absolutely must observe it in action and you must look for FUN! Fun is rewarding to children. Fun changes behaviors. Kids with autism have many aversions and aversions keep children (all children) from learning and changing in positive ways. If there isn’t some silly, off-the-wall fun happening, if there aren’t children and teachers with big grins on their faces and laughter coming out of their mouths on a pretty regular basis, move on!

2.     GOOD ABA USES REWARDS OTHER THAN FOOD

Many ABA providers use food as rewards. I am not against the occasional use of cereal puffs, but I think we can all see the problematic nature of exclusively relying on food to reward children. First of all, your child will (duh!) get full and cease making progress. Then they will have an unhealthy relationship with food and get fat. If a provider is relying exclusively on food rewards it means they are uncreative, small-box thinkers and can’t imagine anything more rewarding than food. If kids are having fun, they are already being rewarded. Astra Day School rewarded kids with things that were therapeutically beneficial as well, like jumping on a trampoline (my super goofy son particularly loved when his teachers would peg him with red rubber balls while he was jumping on a trampoline), getting to play a board game, getting tossed up in the air, being tickled (if the child likes that), having a paper airplane throwing competition, running three-legged races, wearing a crown, the list goes on and on and on! This is the stuff you need to be looking for: creativity, fun, organic social interaction.

3. GOOD ABA PROVIDERS (drumroll)... LIKE KIDS! AND ARE GOOD WITH THEM!

I’ll be real candid, ABA is a highly structured, systematic operation and it’s practice, especially becoming an expert BCBA (which involves massive amounts of theory, knowledge, and real world problem-solving) appeals to Type A people. And thank God because only Type A people would be good at it. BUT  that type A-ness must be balanced by massive amounts of compassion, humility, and just genuine affection for children. If your BCBA’s jaw visibly clenches when your child is not playing into their treatment plan as they had hoped, if their eyes narrow in determination when they look at your child, if they seem to see your child as a challenge to be conquered rather than a precious little person with potential to unlock, if they don’t seem to obviously, openly, unabashedly care for your kid or kids in general, move on!

We experienced some bad ones and the results were zero to potentially negative. Then we hit the jackpot with Megan Carmen at Astra Day School and she became almost a part of our family. She was our son’s second biggest advocate and champion (Who has two thumbs and is number one? This chica👍👍 ). She was creative, attentive, determined and worked tirelessly on his behalf, and she was always open to parent input, viewing us as her biggest resource for knowing what our son really needed. And all of our son’s seven-plus therapists at the school (Emily, Ana, the Laura’s,Cassie, and so many others!) were so fun and loving and dedicated to him, and he ADORED them. And it wasn’t just our team. Every BCBA and therapist at that school was beloved by their kiddos and was deeply invested in those kid’s futures. It was just the culture of the place. So when our son graduated from Astra Day School and headed off to enter a mainstream first grade classroom with minimal supports, team Holland was passing around the box of tissues.

3. GOOD ABA PROVIDERS COMMUNICATE WITH YOU.

You are an asset. You are the one who lives with your child day in and day out. You see their eating, sleeping, pooping, socializing, grooming habits. All of it! And you are the one who is able to articulate it as your child cannot. You are the most important source of information. You are how a therapist knows what to program for. You are how they know if their results are making it home and to other contexts. Your BCBA should openly rely on you and seek your input. Your BCBA should also be constantly letting you know what is being worked on and what you can be doing at home to assist in progress. They should have a binder of graphs that chart, in clear, no-interpretation-needed, up-to-the-minute data how your child is improving (or not), and they should be able to show you this data upon request. You should feel like a team. If you ever feel in the dark about what is being worked on with your child or how they are progressing, say something, and if after you say something you still feel uninformed, let them know that communication is a problem and you need that problem addressed. If it doesn’t get remedied, consider moving on, unless, of course, you are so dazzled with the results that you’re willing to sacrifice being in the know.

4. GOOD ABA PROVIDERS ARE TRANSPARENT

It is common for center-based ABA providers to have double-sided windows so that parents can observe their children without being observed and potentially distracting them. Astra Day School welcomed and even encouraged parents to come into the school, classrooms, wherever! To observe sessions and to learn how to work with their own children in effective ways. You should be able to observe in-home therapy and you should be welcome at your child’s school.

Let’s be real, children with special needs are among the most vulnerable human beings in society. Children with intellectual impairments are as much as 4.5 times as likely to be victims of sexual violence or abuse. As a parent of a special needs kid you need to face that. Face it. Take a deep breath and face it. Did you face it? Okay, we can continue.

Our culture doesn’t like to talk about. You will be seen as neurotic and suspicious for even asking questions that suggest you are concerned about the safety of your child. TOO BAD, SO SAD. Reality is on your side. You have to protect your statistically vulnerable child and NOBODY ELSE is going to do it for you. Don’t allow your statistically vulnerable child to be in situations where there are no measures to protect them against abuse. I, personally, would never choose a center-based provider who did not allow me to stop by and see to the safety and well-being of my child at ANY time, and I would not allow an in home therapist to request or have privacy with my statistically vulnerable child. In the next room with the door open, sure, fine. And that can change as your relationship with the provider changes. By the second year at Astra Day School, I would have trusted my son’s providers to take him in a rocket to the moon. But never, ever go against your gut. If something feels secretive, or if parents seem unwelcome, then there is probably something they don’t want you to see. It’s probably not horrific abuse, it’s probably just bad therapy. Either way, transparency is healthy and essential.

I realize that Astra Day School is a really special gem. Not every experience is going to be that magically perfect, but the closer to magically perfect you can find, the better.You have to weigh things for yourself. As a rule of thumb, I would say no therapy is better than bad therapy (both are terrible), middling therapy is better than no therapy, but don’t be content with middling therapy. Start there if that’s what you can find, but keep seeking out the best. The stakes are so high and you will never get those precious years of neuroplasticity back. It’s frightening to acknowledge, but the quality and amount of therapy you do in your child’s younger years will determine the quality of the rest of their lives... and yours. It’s the most important investment you will ever make.

I also realize that in most cases the quality of therapy correlates to cost and the cost of high quality ABA can financially ruin a family. This is a horrible reality. I got the absolute highest quality therapy for my son and lots of it and my husband and I NEVER (there’s an important exception with FIT LEARNING, which I’ll talk about another time) PAID A CENT. Yeah, you read that correctly. We paid zero dollars and zero cents. My husband works for Trader Joe’s, (blessed, blessed company!) and Trader Joe’s insanely affordable insurance covers autism services at 100%. Yes that’s right, 100%. Copay? Nope, 100%

I hesitate to share the secret because I’m kind of afraid Trader Joe’s will change their policy, but F it. If you can’t afford autism services for your child, go get a job at Trader Joe’s. If you are over-qualified, get a management job at Trader Joe’s. They make good money and it’s pretty fun. I’m sure other companies have similar insurance policies for their employees. If you know of one, please feel free to mention it in a comment. And if you have any other questions about ABA, please ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer. There is SO much more to discuss, but this is already long.

Good luck parent warriors!

The A(utism) Word

        A while back I wrote a post about my concern that our son was developing a stutter (click here to read that essay). Now, a little over a year later, we have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. 

Um, hi God. I'm sorry I complained. We'll just go ahead and take the stutter if that's alright with you.         

When you receive an ASD diagnosis the first choice you have to make is how to feel about it. This isn't the chicken pox or the flu, an illness one endures in the body and then gets past with their essential self intact. The decision is actually an incredibly complex one that depends on what you know about autism, what you believe about it and what attitude towards it you think will best serve your child. This decision is quickly brought to a fine point, the first time a situation arises where you have to choose whether or not to use the word, autism, in your child's presence.  

To use the A word or not to use the A word. This is a tough decision to make as a parent of an autistic child, and I want to say right up front that I don't think there is one right choice. Every parent has to search their own soul and do what they believe is best for their child and their family. But your attitude towards the word can be in some ways representative of your attitude towards the disorder and towards the future.    

        For a while I thought that my willingness, and even comfort, using the word "autistic" was a gage of my level of acceptance, acceptance of the diagnosis, and more importantly acceptance of my son as something other than what we all hope our children will be, healthy, whole, unlimited in potential. I thought that perhaps if we just said it like it was no big deal, like being left-handed, that it would seem like no big deal to him and to us, and it would lose its power to inflict pain.   

In an effort to "accept" and prepare for an "inevitable" future with autism, I started reading books about autism in later life. These books were meticulous in their avoidance of hopeful language. They never spoke of healing, they never spoke of improvement, they never spoke of potential or independence, they never acknowledged the possibility that autism could be anything but incurable. In horribly no-nonsense language the chapters went on about assisted living and the best types of savings accounts for preparing to financially support your child for the rest of their lives. The autistic child was, and always would be, a hopeless burden. Accept it. Those books were advising me to box in my son’s life in the name of practicality, realism. According to those books acceptance seems to equal letting go of hope for him, for his future and the fullness of his life. To hell with that.  

       

There are a lot of people in the autism community who want to tell you not to get your hopes up. Some have the attitude that you should just be zen about it and "accept" what is. Don't waste time searching for a cure, just put a positive spin on things as they are. There's the movement for "neurological diversity," that suggests that autism doesn't need a cure, that autism isn't worse than "normal," it's just different. There are the bumper stickers some tote on their cars that say "Autism is Ausome!" Perhaps if you think of all autistic individuals as being savants like Rain man (as movies and television like to portray them) autism might seem "Ausome," but the reality is that only 10% of autistic individuals demonstrate any savant talents, and that talent is usually something as useless as being able to recite the December, 1989 TV guide from memory. On the other hand, twenty-five percent of autistic individuals are non-verbal. Only 17 percent of autistic individuals, ages 21-25, ever even attempt to live independently. Autistic children are victims of abuse and even homicide at a rate that far exceeds that of typically developing children. Many, if not most, individuals on the spectrum struggle to have human relationships. They don't like to be touched, they don't like to be hugged, they don't bond with their family members. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound awesome to me, no matter how you spell it.  

Others, often in reaction to the "I'm ok, you're ok" bumper sticker rockin', delusional pep squad, go too far the other way. They urge parents to face the grim facts. To accept that it's a hard, painful, devastating condition that brings suffering on entire families. They get angry when fad therapies emerge, or some new study makes news and "gets everyone's hopes up." One side says, everything's A-okay! Who needs a cure? The other says, everything is awful, and talk of a cure is cruel.  

I get both impulses, really I do. Autism is terrifying and heartbreaking, and the only thing scarier than the disease itself, is the hope that you can rescue your child from it. Hope is scary and painful. Hope does not deny what is, put a positive spin on it, say it's not that bad, but it also refuses to accept it as unalterable. Hope focuses, not on what is, but on what can be. It puts all its eggs in a basket that very well might get smashed to shit, and it knows it, and it does it anyway because hope is only for the strong and the brave. What I want to tell those people who abhor hope in one fashion or another, is, if you want to be zen about your  own challenges and struggles, or if you want to lay down and die in the face of adversity, go for it. But no one has the right to do that for someone else and especially not for their child. If you're a parent, you don't have the right to give up hope because a child will never have more hope and determination than their parent. So you go cry in your closet when you need to and then you wash your face and you get back out there and you hope, dammit.    

Autism is a really twisted, gnarly maze, but there is a way out, and it's my job to get in there with my kid, take his hand, search unceasingly for that way out, and hum a song while we do it, so that he's not afraid. I don't have time for anyone who tells me to just leave him in the maze, or to throw him a pillow so he can get comfortable because there's no way out. I'm not leaving him and I'm not throwing him any pillows. We're getting the hell out of there.

  

My aunt was born with her umbilical cord strangling her. She was brain damaged, and the doctor's told my grandmother it would be best to institutionalize her. My Grandmother said, very politely and in not so many words, screw that. She took her baby home and she raised her just as she raised the rest of her ten (!) children. She never lowered the bar for her, and she never allowed anyone to stick any limiting labels on her. She got her some therapies, but put her in regular school, regular sports and expected her to abide by the regular rules. My aunt today has a full time job, owns a home that she paid for, is a fully functioning autonomous woman, and to this day doesn't think of herself as disabled. My aunt grew up just assuming that she could do what everyone around her could do and that she would go on to do the same things as them in the future. Assumptions are powerful stuff.  

It doesn't seem like a little old word should matter that much. A rose by any other name, and all that, but words do matter. Words and labels have incredible power, and all I see this particular word as offering my child, at least at this point in his life, is excuses, crutches, reasons to fail, lowered expectations, brochures for a lifetime of assisted living. I want him to assume that he can do the same things other kids can. I want him to grow up assuming he will have a family, he will have a career, he will go places and do things and affect people and make a difference. And while he's doing that, I'm going to assume that there are answers out there and that I'm going to find them and he will be a success story. We have nothing to lose but hope, and hope isn't hope unless it's being gambled.

Wanting the Worst for Your Children

           Every parent wishes good things for their children. If you’re a Christian, likely, you pray for them. It is, of course, a temptation to pray that your child will have friends, be successful in their endeavors and careers, be kept from harm and spared from illness or disaster. Perhaps the most tempting and popular prayer of any parent for their child is keep him safe. It’s a prayer that transcends religion. If there are no atheists in foxholes, I imagine there are equally few atheists with teenagers out past their curfew.

Since my son, Henry, was born I have tried to pray for the best things I could imagine for him. I’ve resisted the temptation to pray for election to prom court, football scholarships or perfect dental hygiene. Instead, I have prayed that he would be loving. I have prayed that he would be wise, that he would love God more than anything else, and that he would be brave and compassionate and just. Those are long term prayers, prayers that I may not see come to fruition for a decade or maybe not at all in my lifetime. God willing, though, I will see some of the seeds, some of the tender little shoots springing up from the ground that will grow into the fruits I have prayed for. But just as the first tiny sprig of a sapling bears no resemblance whatever to the peach or pear it will one day produce, the raw materials of character are rarely recognizable as such. So the question is, will I recognize them? Further, will I have the perception and the wisdom not to pray with all my strength against those little seedlings when they appear because they will look nothing like the fruits they portend, instead they will be small and vulnerable, easily crushed and terrifying in their fragility. Will they frighten me? And thus will I uproot them, clip them, throw them aside as weeds?

Henry is developing a stutter. It might be absolutely nothing. It might disappear in three months, replaced by the graceful, fluency of Tom Brockaw. Or it might get worse. It might blossom into an all-consuming handicap that makes him self-conscious and self-hating, socially isolated, angry and withdrawn, the next Dylan Claybold. The mind of a parent tends toward the morbid in regard to their children, like Steve Martin, in Parenthood, imagining his son one day spraying bullets from the top of a bell tower because he had to wear a retainer at age eight.

At first it was infrequent and cute. He was a very late talker, not saying more than a few words well past two-years-old. Now three, he talks a little more, but it’s still mostly set phrases. He tends to repeat questions rather than answer them. He’s not conversational. And now the stutter. It used to just be the occasional odd phoneme that tripped him up. The S sound was a common culprit. But now it’s spreading. His favorite book at the moment is, Maurice Sendak's, In The Night Kitchen. We read it multiple times a day, and every time he asks for it, he struggles, eyes closed, tongue pushing strenuously against his teeth:

Ni-ni-ni-ni-ni,

pause, try again, 

Ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-ni-night Kitchen, please?

Speaking is starting to look, for him, like a cardio workout. It doesn’t seem to bother him, thank God. And Peter and I don’t act as though we notice it at all, but the truth is, sometimes it looks painful. Sometimes, watching his head bow under this invisible opponent’s strength, it almost makes me cry. It hardly seems like a malady worthy of a mother's tears. Worse things could happen to a child, but at the center of my mother self, the truth is, I don’t want anything, ANYTHING, to be hard or painful for my son. Perhaps, more importantly, the problem is that I, like most human beings, have trouble recognizing fruit before it’s fruit.

                  

                                                             ***

Charlie-something, or maybe it was Charles: the kid in first grade, with the stutter. Looking back, as an adult, I can recall that he was actually quite a cute kid, a nice one too, well-behaved and gentle. If he hadn’t had a stutter he might have been popular, whatever that means in first grade, basically he might have been chased by a lot of little girls at recess. Instead, he was the kid with the stutter.

I remember him mostly for the moments when he was trying his hardest to be unmemorable, to step back out of some spotlight, to fade into the background. Popcorn reading, is a particularly clear recollection. The class would sit in a circle, and we'd take turns reading from a gigantic and unappealing textbook with some stuffy name like New Horizons in Reading. Plenty of the kids had trouble reading. They labored over unfamiliar words, fumbled over the odd multi-syllabic riddle, yet they lurched wearily on across the page, heads lowered and beleaguered like convicts in a chain gang. Then, always last, when there was no one else to call on, it would be Charlie’s turn.

It’s amazing at what an early age the human specimen becomes acutely aware of the slightest variances in social dynamics. We, some twenty first-graders, would all collectively brace ourselves, as Charlie opened his mouth and froze that way. It looked as though he were coughing silently, head jerking back and forth gently, eyes pressing closed. Then it was more like choking. The muscles in his jaw and neck would strain, standing out like rigging on a ship’s mast caught in a gale, until he finally spit a word out. We would all let out a breath, as exhausted by the effort as he was. Charlie would read two, maybe three words, and though none of the rest of us could get away with such a skimpy contribution, the teacher never objected when Charlie at last, and with mysterious fluency, called the name of another kid to continue reading. We were all relieved when he was done. I don’t believe any of us felt what could be called compassion. We were too young, too primal. We felt irritation, or anxiety, or discomfort. Some rolled their eyes or silently snickered to friends across the circle. For my part, reading was the special area where I excelled. I was impatient with the reading of all the other kids, and driven near batty by Charlie’s torturous performances, though I at least had the raising not to let it show on my face.

As that year of school passed, and we each accepted the labels and roles pinned on our lapels by one another, there emerged a sort of tacit arrangement that Charlie would pretend to be invisible, and the rest of us would pretend he wasn't there. It wasn’t just reading time either. Speaking is a pretty pervasive element of all human activity, so Charlie had to be pretty thoroughly wiped from existence. He could swing a bat or kick a red rubber ball in the wordless realm of sports and P.E., but that was about it.

Of course Charlie comes back to me now, and of course, I recall him now with new eyes, the eyes of a mother, his mother even. I think about her anguish over him, her concern with how he was fitting in socially, progressing academically, how his confidence or self-esteem might have been suffering. I think about how, to her, Charlie’s stutter was just this one stupid, peripheral thing about her son, as meaningful as a hangnail, how she saw his whole life and every vast facet of his personality and interests, how to her he was so much more than a speech impediment, but to us that’s all he was, and perhaps, as time went by, it's all he felt he was too. I imagine how frightening and infuriating that would have been for her. I wonder now if Charlie ever got past his stutter. I wonder what he sees when he looks back at those elementary school years, how it affected him to grow up in the center of an unspoken agreement that it was better for everyone, including him, if he just wasn’t there. I wonder if for him his suffering was eventually a blessing, like it was for me, if eventually, his mother was able to see a great value in the years of pain her son, and thus vicariously she, went through.

I never had any obvious egregious disabilities. No cleft palate, no stammer, no weight problem or horrific acne, which in some way may have made it harder. The confused plea of my adolescence was, what is wrong with me? I never fit in. I was always on the outside looking in. I had always just missed the drawing up of teams. During those early years, my mom took a proactive approach, and I went along with it. I remember at the beginning of each year in elementary school looking over the roster of my new classmates with her, singling out potential candidates for friendship. Maybe Megan Lathey, she seems nice? Or what about Chelsea Appel? No, she’s already got two best friends in the class. Mom's tend toward the proactive when it comes to their children's pain. We want to eradicate it, annihilate it, watch it wither, shrieking, like the weeds in the herbicide commercials. We want to pluck it out with tweezers like a splinter, see the offending shard slide out in tact. All gone, all better, no more pain, off you go to play with a kiss on the head and pat on the back. If that pain is caused by disease we will scour the earth for a cure. If it is other children causing that pain we will swoop in for parent conferences, consider restraining orders, and, in our darker fantasies, hit men.

There was nothing, ultimately, that my mom could do. There is often very little that we mom's can actually do. My elementary school years passed in tears, both mine and hers, leading into worse junior high years, and eventually sinking to their nadir in high school. All she could do was listen and cry. And pray. Those were twelve rough years. Who they were harder on, between my mom and I, I'm not sure. But. Looking back, without a doubt whatever portion of compassion the Lord has worked in me, whatever humility, whatever wisdom, whatever capacity to love, was born to some extent from those horrible hard years. And if my mom ever prayed that the Lord would make me good, and not just happy, some of those days spent wandering the playground alone, hiding out in the school bathroom at lunch or later in my car, were surely the long slow beginning of a granted prayer. How she must have worn herself out pounding her fists against God's seemingly locked and barricaded door while it was happening? How quickly would she have obliterated my struggles had it been in her power? And what a great cost to my soul if she had?

 

I wonder what Charlie gained by stuttering that he couldn’t have gained any other way? What wisdom or compassion, humility or sense of humor? The truth is that wanting the best things for your child might also mean wanting some of the worst, or at least being prepared for them in the bargain. It doesn't mean you can't help or ease the pain. It doesn't mean there aren't time when children truly need rescuing, but I have to remember that if I want my child to be courageous then he will have to face danger. If I want him to be compassionate he will have to be hurt. If I wish him to be humble he'll have to be broken. If I want him to love he will have to experience loss. And I'll have to remember that, to really hold it close, so that when the danger comes, or the hurt or the pain or the loss, I won't go charging into the fray like Rambo, waging war on anything that stands against my child, and so that, inevitably failing that, I am not so blinded by fear that I end up distrusting God, mistaking for weeds the tender shoots of prayers being answered slowly.