Treat with your eyes, heart, and mind

As you can see with the Anew logo, part of what we stand for is looking differently at the complex child. So often, parents, providers, physicians, teachers, and families get stuck on the one track mind. You have a diagnosis for a child and all the sudden that diagnosis begins to explain every facet of the child's life and behavior. Unfortunately, it is rarely that easy to explain anything in life and certainly one word, one diagnosis, cannot explain something so complex as the human child. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone, anyone, says, "Well you know this child has ___". It is easy, too easy, to lay the blame of every aspect of what you cannot understand or control at the doorstep of the diagnosis. If you find yourself saying this about a child in your care, stop and evaluate the situation. Stop and question. As Cheri Fraker mentioned in the last conference, "Question everything, even what we tell you."

Questioning and digging into the issue is all about complex problem solving. We are all investigators, we are all anthropologists studying and learning from the children we treat and live with. One of my favorite quotes comes from Dr. Oliver Sacks, "So while a single glance may suffice for a clinical diagnosis, if we hope to understand the autistic individual, nothing less than a total biography will do." This of course, applies to all children, not just the autistic child. Truly understanding the child in front of you may take time, may take many conversations with parents and caregivers, may require you to research and network with other professionals and parents, may push you in more ways than you were prepared for in school but you will never regret looking at the child in front of you with your eyes, heart, and mind.

Use your eyes to see what the child sees, get a second set of eyes (or a third and a fourth) by videotaping; use your heart to guide your decisions and be compassionate to the family and their needs; and use your mind to think, question, research, learn more, problem solve, keep an open mind, and know when to ask for help. As Dr. Mark Fishbein stated in our last conference, "Educating our families, our colleagues, and ourselves is the first step." Work as a team, no one person can solve all the problems. Be suspicious of gurus and experts, we all have something to learn--one person cannot know everything. One final word of advice, remember that the person who can teach you the most is the child sitting right in front of you.

I'll leave you with a quote from Kedesdy & Budd (1998): "Many of the issues that complicate research on pediatric feeding problems also make clinical work in the area challenging. The influence of multiple, interacting, etiological variables can produce unique, often puzzling, constellations of clinical features in different children, rendering feeding disorders both intellectually stimulating and humbling to clinicians. Clinical wisdom in this field depends on the continued pursuit of a scientist-practitioner approach, informed by the diverse perspectives of colleagues in multiple disciplines, the personal experience of parents, and mindful observation of the evolving intricacies of child behavior" (382).