That’s a Good Sign
In their early forties, the couple sitting in my office had adopted twin baby girls from Romania. Now, at two and half, the two little girls were both sturdily built, dark-haired, dimpled—but it was all too easy to tell them apart.
Megan was focused, coordinated, and a precocious talker. She was affectionate, and even in the middle of the Terrible Twos she mostly did what her parents asked, with no fuss about meals or naptimes. She got along well at pre-school.
For Shannon, their other daughter, nothing came easily. She fumbled with small objects and had trouble drawing with crayons or markers. She spoke less clearly, couldn’t focus, couldn’t sit still. At pre-school, she wouldn’t line up, wouldn’t lie down at nap time, and struggled with constant frustration. A particularly alarming behavior, her parents told me, was leaning toward another child, as if preparing to give a kiss, then suddenly biting instead. Not surprising, there were few children willing to play with Shannon.
“We’re careful not to compare the girls to each other,” the mom told me, “but I can tell Shannon’s beginning to feel she’s not as smart or as good at things.” “Shannon’s a difficult child,” her dad said. “She’s really manipulative.”
“That’s a good sign!” I said. “Honestly, it’s the most positive thing you’ve told me, because it indicates intelligence, persistence, acuity. It means she can read people. It’s a skill we can redirect.”
“Another piece of good fortune,” I added, “is that she has a twin. That’s a built-in yardstick for assessing development.” It was much more common, I told them, to see parents worried about a child who had started school and wasn’t keeping up. Before that there would be signs that a child was developmentally delayed, but parents would tell themselves, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it,” or “a lot of children begin to talk late.” But because her parents could tell that Shannon wasn’t keeping pace with her twin, she set off alarm bells years before kindergarten, which was absolutely great. The biggest bang for your buck, when it comes to treatment, is in the early years of life. That’s when the brain is most capable of change and new growth.
At RNBC there were experts ready to address all of Shannon’s problems, and to coordinate treatment so it was most effective.
When the RNBC psychologist discovered Shannon’s strong interest in playing dress up, the cccupational therapist created activities that involved buttoning, lacing, stringing beads and designing dresses for paper dolls and cutting them out.
The speech and language therapist helped her talk about her clothes and what she liked to wear. Shannon also attended group sessions to help learn skills like self-regulation (managing behavior and emotion) and playing with others.
The physical therapist helped her with large motor skills. She no longer ran clumsily. She could kick a ball and was beginning to be able to catch and throw.
The concerted effort worked wonders. Shannon’s speech became clearer and more fluent, and with greater means of expression, her remarkable intelligence became evident. She gained small motor skills, and began to take pleasure in the craft activities her mother had been doing with Megan.
One week when she came to see me, she brought me a necklace of pop-together beads she had made in occupational therapy. A few months before she would have had neither the hand-eye coordination nor the patience for that kind of effort.
By the time Shannon and Megan started kindergarten, a little more than two years later, it was much more difficult to tell them apart. “But I’ve figured out how to do it,” their kindergarten teacher said. The parents held their breath. Would it be that Shannon bit other children, or that only Megan had friends?
“Shannon loves story time. There’s a little girl who likes telling stories over again later, and you’ll see her walking around the playground with Shannon with their arms over each other’s shoulders. Shannon’s absolutely rapt. Megan’s a tomboy. She plays with the boys, she hangs on the junge gym, I’ve never seen her in a dress. Shannon almost always wears a dress.”
What the teacher was telling the twins’ parents amounted to a triumph. There were still developmental differences, which meant that Shannon would continue to have help and to be tutored. But the children were being distinguished not on the basis of Shannon’s shortcomings, but on the basis of each child’s own nature and preferences. Treatment hadn’t really altered Shannon, it had simply allowed her to become herself.