Is My Child Normal?
The Perspective Principle, Part 1
What Is “Normal?”
I remember my first child’s very first tantrum. She was 14 months old. Not uncoincidentally, I had just found out I was pregnant and we were basking in the glory of growing our family. The three of us walking on our block on a sunny Saturday in Pasadena, and the chubby-cheeked light of my life lost it. Screaming, crying, writhing in her stroller straps, red-faced and full of rage. I laugh at my former innocent mama self, who was wondering what had gone horribly wrong – did we forget to feed her? Was she suffering some invisible sudden illness?
No. She was having a tantrum. Like all toddlers do. Maybe she was on the young side, but she’s always wanted to grow up fast. As you already know, this was the first of about a million. I felt as if she waited until we tricked ourselves into giving her a sister before she really let loose. Ha ha! Fooled you!
My sweet baby had turned.
The moral of this story is that even as a child psychologist, I questioned if a very normal behavior was a sign of something terrible. A side effect of being a child psychologist in social settings is regularly being asked, “do you think it’s normal that my kid (fill in the blank.)“ So, I know that even wondering about “normal” is very, well, normal.
The parent version of wondering about normal looks more like: “I’m the worst parent.” No, you’re not. You are like every other parent feeling insecure and unsure, and seeing regular missteps as a sign of failure.
Fortunately for my perspective, but unfortunately for my sensitive heart, I spent years working in the child protection system. I know even on my hardest days as a mother, I am not inflicting the harm of abuse and neglect that I have witnessed first-hand. That is not “normal,” and definitely causes harm.
I am a bit obsessed with true crime and serial killers and let me tell you, the parents of serial killers ARE the worst parents. I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I can pretty much promise you that having a day with too many moments of losing your cool does not qualify you as the parent of a serial killer.
See? Perspective.
Bell Curve Parenting
I’m reminding us of the extremes to give us balance in our perspectives. I like the image of the bell curve as a visual to keep us all grounded.
“‘Abnormal’ may mean a diagnosis in mental health, but in real life it can mean extraordinary, what we might even want for our child. ”
Hopefully you remember the bell curve from some class someday way back. (Those of us who went to psychology school had to become one with it.) Feeling controlling at home today? Where is that on the bell curve? Well, the huge mess my children refuse to clean up is inching me toward the end of “very high controlling.”
The bell curve represents the large continuum of “normal” when examining the distribution of some aspect of a large population, like height, weight, IQ, salaries. Quick overview: 68.2% of data points fall in the “average” range; the farther from the halfway point of the curve, the fewer people have that data point. It’s the whole idea behind “curving” a test grade based on how the class does.
I’m not even close to a statistician (although I was a grad school stats class T.A. for a horrifying semester), and of course there are many parts of life that don’t fit neatly into a bell curve, but the concept can be helpful when we ask ourselves if our child is “normal,” or if our parenting is “normal.”
Is My Child Normal?
You know those developmental questionnaires you fill out at pediatrician visits? They score those based on the bell curve of where a large sample of children of your child’s age fall. Those scores take into account a wide range of average, which is why your doctor will tell you it’s fine if your 1-year-old isn’t walking yet. But this bell-curve scoring also alerts to “at-risk” ranges, which is how children get early intervention services.
Beyond these first few years of developmental milestones, however, it’s not as clean. The DSM (psychiatry’s “bible” for diagnosing disorders) includes a very important criterion to go along with all the symptoms of different diagnoses: “do the symptoms significantly impair daily functioning?”
In real-life language, “does whatever you are worried about cause significant problems in daily life?” Some ways to think about how to answer this question:
Social comparison can be a good thing! Ask yourself, “If I told my friends about my child’s behavior, what would they think?” (And then tell them, and when you hear similar tales, you can feel reassured.)
Is whatever you’re worried about causing problems at school? Either by report of a frustrated/concerned teacher, or have you seen it get in the way of learning?
Is it somehow a problem with your child making and/or keeping friends?
Is it causing a level of stress and upheaval at home that feels unsustainable?
With the expanded knowledge and awareness about children’s emotional and behavioral health, chances are that at some point in your parenting journey, you may need professional support. If in doubt, even scheduling an evaluation with a mental health professional can either give you peace of mind, or move you toward getting the help your child needs. So, even as we should work on accepting that what counts as “normal” is wide and diverse, I hope we can also accept that needing help along the way of our child’s growth has also become more and more normal.
Am I a Normal Parent?
I’m going to be really honest about the science of parenting: much of what happens in our day-to-day lives does not have real science behind it. At least partially because it takes a lot of resources to carry out solid research, and limited research money often goes toward addressing problems, not normal life. The answer about your own parenting, however, is most likely that yes, it falls in the large bell curve of “normal.” The problem is it doesn’t feel like it because of how our culture approaches parenting.
In the expansive field of landmines called Parenting Guidance, I am afraid we have lost the bell curve. We have come to see parenting as an infinite and complex series of miniscule acts that if we mess up along the way, we are sure to have failed. This crunches the bell curve normal into a tiny sliver with most of us being assured we are falling on the outlier of abnormal because of our lack of precision. It’s just not true.
Short of abuse and neglect, which is an extremely small portion of the population (like .009%, so even considering unreported cases, still relatively very low), and raising a serial killer (even lower odds), we most likely fall in the range of “normal parent.” This does not mean we stop learning and growing as parents, but I think we can stop stressing so much about if we are good enough. The less we stress about it, the more we can actually enjoy parenting, and that helps us do it even better!
The Best Kind of Not Normal
I actually stay away from the word “normal” in my work as a psychologist because I think it carries judgment. What does “normal” even mean? Even on our imaginary parenting life bell curve, “normal” covers a wide range of experiences. Maybe you already know there is something about your child that somehow qualifies as “not normal.” According to the CDC, 17.4% of children ages 2-8 have been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. Rates of childhood anxiety have been increasing.
Asking “is this normal” is useful in getting our children support when they need it, but not useful when asking and answering the question comes with guilt and shame. As a therapist who works daily with insightful and inspiring children who have to qualify as outside “normal” to see me by way of diagnosis for insurance companies, I hope we can all work on stressing less about it.
“Abnormal” may mean a diagnosis in mental health, but in real life it can mean extraordinary, what we might even want for our child. (In fact, having a diagnosis absolutely does not preclude being extraordinary.) Our job as parents is to find the extraordinary within each of our children, and celebrate it as the best kind of “not normal.”