Anyone who is a parent knows we don’t get to order up the type of child we get.
I’ve got five, counting my husband’s son. Each one, in his or her own way, regularly shocks me. "Who is this person?" I frequently ask myself in amazement.
However, when you are gifted a child with disabilities, the questions tend to go deeper: Is nature or nurture at play?
Some may ask themselves, "Was it something I did in parenting, or was it fate, genetics or heredity?" Two examples: Hannah and Tim are two young adults that are as opposite from each other as can be, each bringing to the world some skills which will serve them well and others that could pose a challenge for them.
Hannah Rogers is one powerhouse of a personality. Now 23, she entered the world in such precarious shape that the doctors and nurses thought she wasn’t alive. Her Apgar score, the test of viability of newborns at one and five minutes, was zero, her mother Valerie reports. Hannah was blue with no pulse or respiration. She was immediately attended to in the delivery room and through valiant efforts, survived.
However, deprived of oxygen for a crucial period in the process of being born, no one could say how Hannah would develop. On top of this rough birth, geneticists at UCLA had found, in utero, a translocation, a chromosome which broke off and reattached itself somewhere else. It’s a rare mutation, occurring in only 1 of 300,000 babies. Those two factors, the genetic and the traumatic birth, are a lot to be stacked against one little girl, yet, Hannah at 23, is a sunny young woman whose natural expression is a smile.
I swim with Hannah three times a week at the YMCA. She has some physical challenges, but the list of activities she participates in is impressive. Through Special Olympics, she bowls, plays basketball and golf. With excellent musicality, she’s sung in several choruses; and completed Santa Ynez Valley High School in eight years. And thanks to the California Special Education statutes guaranteeing education until age 22, Hannah reads and writes and received life skills training.
Something went very right for Hannah in the nurture department. Her parents gave her many experiences and opportunities to thrive.
Gregarious Valerie, her mom, has raised a charming and social daughter. Hannah’s involved father gave her many athletic interests and skills. I didn’t ask Valerie about her fears for Hannah in the future, knowing that expectations of independence that parents contemplate for kids in their 20s, are likely not there for Hannah.
Then there is 25-year-old Tim with an off-the-charts I.Q. All through school, some of it spent in special education and some in mainstream classes, teachers were in disbelief at his numbers.
Math is his strong suit, and he is a talented writer and majors in computer graphics in college. Yet, he spends most of his life in his room playing video games with people he calls friends, but who live across the globe. Time zones don’t matter to Tim as he is largely nocturnal, up all night, usually falling asleep only after daybreak. He hates exercise and being outdoors. In fact, fulfilling his physical education requirement was the hardest aspect of his education in both high school and college. He prefers not to be touched and when he makes social overtures, they are often awkward or somehow off-the-mark.
Probably the most dramatic contrast between Hannah and Tim is not intellectual, but social. For Tim, engaging with others in the flesh is torment, but a real joy for Hannah. And vice versa when it comes to computers and math.
The nature vs. nurture answer just might be summed up in a metaphor a friend once shared with me: having a child, whether special needs or not, is like boarding a plane to Amsterdam when you intended a trip to Hawaii. Although you might have thought you wanted a vacation in balmy weather by the ocean, once you get to Amsterdam, you admire its lovely winding canals and beautiful tulips, and realize it's exactly where you were meant to be.