Failure to thrive

        A label by definition is “a short word or phrase descriptive of a person, group, intellectual movement, etc.”

Instructive labels: wash in cold water; this side up; do not remove tag; descriptive labels: she’s got really long hair, blue eyes, and well manicured hands; he’s always chewing on a fake cigarette and he smells of lemons.

Within the first year of my birth, I was labelled/diagnosed with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy and failure to thrive. In brief, cerebral palsy of the type with which I live is a fixed neurological condition.

Failure to thrive is often found in infants diagnosed with cerebral palsy, no matter the type and it implies an inability to gain and sustain weight or grow to expected height. I am still labeled failure to thrive. 

I also see failure to thrive in another way - a way that has nothing to do with physical growth patterns. I believe that many of today’s children, and dare I say quite a few adults experience a failure to thrive because of psycho-social or socio-economic circumstance. As a consequence they are very often penalized with inappropriate and totally unacceptable labels. This is a particular problem during the formative years, with the grade school student.

Some students may not have all the ‘best’ stuff, designer this and designer that and as a consequence be perceived as having less value, or even no value as a ‘friend’ or a team mate or dating material. 

Through no fault of their own, those ‘have not’ students are unwittingly set on a path of persecution and denial of inclusion because of preconceived notions about them and their ‘status’ which sets the stage for the currently popular coping mechanism - bullying. The ‘popular kid’ bullies out of a misguided sense of entitlement borne out of a self-importance that was designed in the home in which he lives and learns. Often, they feel they are ‘above’ their classmates because they have nicer clothes, designer sports gear, new car, and on and on. To be fair and to be real, this is not true for all such children of ‘privilege’. Children of ‘lower’ socio-economic status bully out of the sheer frustration of ‘not having’.

Upon closer examination, the common ‘I’m  better than you’ mindset has been unwittingly reinforced by parents whose socio-economic position and successes finances their child’s ‘status’. Giving in to their child’s every whim has advanced a ‘failure to thrive’ in that young person. Make no mistake, that is not something parents want to hear. Sadly, some parents equate giving their children ‘stuff’ on par with ‘effective/good parenting’. Their child has failed to thrive in ‘selling’ himself based on what he knows, how he behaves, what he thinks about and what is important to him outside the tangibles; the electronics, the things that money buys. Again, this is not the case for all such children.

  In this age of instant gratification, lost is the art of conversation and written communication that people of my era learned and still utilize as much today as in decades past; it is not such a strong skill in young people. Our current literacy rates speak to a huge problem. 

There is help! Parents must commit to saying NO to technology at evening meal, if meals are a shared family time. Engaging in meaningful, non-combative conversation is a confidence builder when opinions of youngsters are acknowledged/heard/respected/valued. Those ‘quality time’ experiences are easily transitioned outside the home into other interactions.

Teachers can help children of all ages overcome failure to thrive by discarding that long-held practice of judging a book by its cover. Many will admit they tend to treat the better dressed, more language-capable student with higher regard, thus pushing those who need more time and attention to the back burner. Teachers have attached a label without benefit of knowing the full history of the child, and if not handled appropriately, a ‘wrongly’ labelled child will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and act on how he’s treated. 

Ultimately the label that will be the most important tells us to ‘handle with C.A.R.E’

C.A.R.E. — COMPASSION, ACCEPTANCE, RESPECT, ENCOURAGEMENT.

Carla MacInnis Rockwell is a freelance writer and disability rights advocate living outside Fredericton, NB with her aging Australian silky terrier and a rambunctious Maltese. She can be reached via email at carmacrockwell@xplornet.ca