HOW DO CHILDREN BECOME INSECURE, INDIFFERENT AND INATTENTIVE?

Dr. Tiziana Cristofari is a special educational needs (SEN) teacher and works as an assistant professor at a university in Rome. She is horrified at how quickly institutions label children with all kinds of ‘psychological disorders’, because of which children suffer greatly. Dr. Cristofari draws attention to the increasing number of cases of psychological bullying, which includes labeling children as ‘different’.

The fast-paced and superficial world we live in, combined with a lack of tolerance towards our children, often results in us making rash decisions about their potentials and cognitive abilities. Many parents do this to avoid feeling responsible for their children, especially their children’s development.

‘’Parents often bring children to me who are disheartened, psychologically crushed, lacking motivation and have a terrible self-image. They come and tell me that their children have difficulties learning, that they cry, because they don’t want to study and that they don’t want to go to school anymore. They explain that the teacher discovered their child must have problems with comprehension. These children have generally already had meetings with speech-language therapists, and their doctor has confirmed they have learning difficulties that have resulted in them falling behind. But do you know what? In 99% of these cases the children are completely healthy and fully catch up with all their school work within the year,’’ explains Dr. Tiziana Cristofari. She often wonders if parents ever think about how their children must feel about the false claims against their comprehension abilities.  How do they feel about all the medical testing and discouraging exercises forced upon them, because their handwriting doesn’t look nice?  Maybe one of the doctors, whose prescriptions are impossible to decipher, also has dysgraphia. 

What do these labeled children think? That they are worth less, different, stupid, that they are less capable than their classmates? That is how their psyche/mental state changes and becomes ugly. They lose their self-respect, become sad and scared, they don’t want to draw attention to themselves in school, they don’t feel capable enough and they convince themselves that they’ll be unsuccessful in their future education. They ask themselves why they have to keep learning, why they have to go to school, and what the point is … Why doesn’t the school just burn down!

‘’I am horrified that there are teachers who are didactically unequipped and yet still permit themselves to diagnose children without the proper jurisdiction.  

I am appalled with psychiatrists who try to find deviations from general development, when they should only be taking into account the child’s pace of learning, since their diagnosis is founded purely on statistics (let me remind you that Albert Einstein didn’t show signs of genius before university; he was quite unsuccessful during ‘early testing’, especially in mathematics. Today they say that he had dyslexia, but luckily no one prevented him from believing in himself and becoming who we remember today),’’ dr. Cristofari adds. She also asserts that speech-language therapists destroy children’s mindsets with tedious exercises, that distance them from school. Why? Because they don’t want to admit that their ‘patient’ doesn’t need their help, but instead needs more effective didactic methods which the speech therapists are lacking.

Dr. Cristofari believes that it all comes down to shifting responsibility: teachers lay the responsibility on the parents, the parents on the doctor, the doctor on the speech-language therapists and the therapist on the doctor’s diagnosis, since the therapist can only improve the issue and not cure it. Because there is no cure. Why? Because it’s not, in fact, an illness.

Parents, take time to listen to your children. Let them gain independence and develop their abilities. Allow them to grow, to conquer that small part of school that will belong only to them. Pay attention to the changes that they’ll undergo because of school itself. Try to understand that the true problem might lie in the relationship between your child and yourself, the teachers or classmates. Because the fact remains: the most common causes for problems in school are found in interpersonal relationships.

So, let us not destroy our children’s mindset and vitality! We must gather our courage and evaluate our attitude towards our children, and the relation between them and their teachers. Only then can we proceed to diagnose potential illnesses and disorders that the child allegedly suffers from. We mustn’t forget that what we call dyslexia is mainly the abuse of technology, and the treatment of perfectly healthy children, for the sake of profit. We mustn’t confuse learning disabilities with illnesses that are based purely on statistics and haven’t been appropriately studied. This is how we’ll avoid raising insecure, defiant, aggressive, indifferent, inattentive, sad and scared children, who more often than not have  very low self-esteem.

Leja Mahnič