But that’s a much different issue than parents causing a brain disorder such as schizophrenia or autism.
More empathy, less judgingLarson opens her blog essay with a personal story of how medical personnel in an emergency room made her feel at fault for her three-week-old son’s scary bout with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common virus that’s a major cause of respiratory distress in infants.
One of the doctors implied that she was to blame because she had a cold herself.
Lurk in almost any online parenting chat room and you’ll quickly realize that parents (particularly moms) are being made to feel guilty — often by other parents! — about every illness, every behavioral problem, every developmental delay, no matter how minor or inconsequential.
It’s time we stop being so judgmental about those parents with an 8-year-old who can’t sit still, a 12-year-old who can’t stop washing her hands, or a 15-year-old who’s clinically depressed. so much of what we attribute to good parenting skills is really the luck of the genetic draw.
What we need to be doing instead is providing the resources to help parents — and their children — cope with chronic neurological illnesses and conditions. We should also be spending more, not less, on the search for the underlying neurobiological causes of these conditions and, of course, for effective treatments.
Larson said her experience during that visit with her son to the emergency room changed the way she looks at parents in her psychiatric practice. She’s honest enough to admit, however, that she continues “to struggle to balance a humility about what we don’t know with a confidence in what we do know.”
“I struggle with keeping the tendency to blame parents in check while at the same time calling parents to task about their parenting when necessary,” she writes. “I struggle with identifying what can be changed at the level of an individual and what requires change at the systems level. I struggle to continue to be willing to dig into these systems problems so that I don’t just go home helpless and hopeless about what to do for kids.”
We’ve come a long way from the days of “refrigerator moms,” but we have a long way yet to go.
You can read Larson’s essay here.