It's Nobody's Fault Read Online Free

by my not being available to her when she was an infant. If I hadn’t gotten sick, she probably would have been completely normal. One part of me didn’t believe what the doctor said. It isn’t as if I abandoned her or anything. But I felt tremendous guilt anyway. I cried for a week.”
    Serena’s psychiatrist wasn’t the first person to make up a story to explain away a child’s problem, and he won’t be the last. People do it all the time; they see a set of symptoms and create a story around them. What’s the rationale of this disorder? they ask. What has happened in this child’s life to explain this abnormal behavior? Traumatic birth, adoption, illness, parents’ divorce, strong mother, weak mother, an overachieving older sister—all of these and many more have been used to rationalize children’s psychiatric disorders. One mother told me that her 10-year-old son wet his bed every night because he had skipped second grade. The impossible behavior of a nine-year-old with obsessive compulsive disorder was attributed to the fact that the little boy, who was always bossing people around, was simply imitating his father, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
    Even when these ingeniously fabricated stories make a small amount of sense, science is all but ignored. The psychiatrist who told Serena’s mother that it was her sickness that brought on Serena’s separation anxiety disorder was forgetting the fact that many children with sick mothers—or no mothers, for that matter—do
not
end up with SAD. What’s more, there are many children with SAD whose mothers have never spent a single day in a sickbed. People who become convinced that A causes B often lose sight of the facts. For example, it is widely believed that bulimia is the result of sexual abuse, but there is little evidence to support this theory. Sexual abuse is a common phenomenon, and bulimia is a common disorder; it stands to reason, therefore, that there willbe a substantial number of women with bulimia who have been sexually abused. That still doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship. Many women who have been sexually abused don’t have bulimia or any other disorder, and many women with bulimia have not been abused.
    There are millions of people who endure traumatic experiences—abuse, divorce, the death of a loved one, skipping second grade, and so on—without having to be treated for a psychiatric disorder. Naturally, all children are affected by the events of their lives. If a child is abandoned or beaten, it will most certainly change the way he looks at the world and reacts to it. If his parents get a divorce, it will unquestionably have an effect on him, probably a significant effect. But unless he has the brain chemistry that makes him vulnerable to a psychiatric disorder, the child will not end up with a disorder. By the same token, a brain disorder doesn’t miraculously disappear if the unpleasant environmental factors are altered.
NORMAL DEVELOPMENT
    Not all children develop at precisely the same rate, of course. Still, the developmental milestones that follow will give parents a rough idea of what to expect.
    At
one month
a child will react to voices and be attentive to faces. By
four months
he’ll smile at people and respond socially to both familiar and unfamiliar people. At
six months
a child will sleep through the night. At about
age one
he’ll walk and say his first word, usually “Mama” or “Dada,” and he’ll have developed a clear attachment to a caretaker, usually but not necessarily the mother. Also at one year kids start “pretend play,” having tea parties with imaginary food and pretending, for example, that a toy cup is real.
    At
two years old
a child can draw a circle, and he starts to use symbolism: a pencil represents a person, or a block becomes a chair. At the same time kids have “idealized representations”; they don’t like broken dolls or toys or anything that has something wrong with it. Kids