The Squeaky Wheel

For a few weeks I knew that my refrigerator wasn’t fully working. The food didn’t seem that cold and every once in a while the milk curdled. But at nine months pregnant, I had other things on my mind.The day after I came home from the hospital with the baby, the refrigerator was flat-out broken. A few calls and a couple of hours later, two repairmen arrived and worked until 1 a.m. As I sat there watching them, I couldn’t help but wonder what other problems, distracted by my pregnancy, I had failed to acknowledge. And not every breakdown takes just two hours and two repairmen to fix.I’d like to think that I’m better at addressing my children’s issues than I am my home’s, but in my family, like most, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the most oil.“One of my kids is plain-old difficult,” says a mother of three. “I’m always dealing with his problems. The other two just cope better. They can roll with the punches. But I know it’s not fair to them. They probably have a bunch of issues, and I don’t spend nearly enough time focusing on them,” she says.A friend of mine with five siblings warns that in families where one child is needier, the others often pay a price for appearing so competent.“My parents spent so much energy dealing with my one sister who had emotional problems that the rest of us felt like all our issues – normal teenage issues – weren’t even worth raising. It wasn’t just that we felt guilty for even imagining bringing up these issues to our parents. Even more damaging was the fact that our parents didn’t take the time to see each of us as individuals,” she says.Very few of us will have six children, but many of us will have a difficult child thrown in the mix. And most of us will have stressful jobs, newborns, renovations, or sick parents limiting our energy to the point where the child who makes the most noise gets the most face time.And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. But what happens to the other children?“One of my friends has a child with special needs, and it was this friend who pointed out to me that my daughter was quietly suffering,” says another friend of mine. “My son is at a regular school and is highly functioning, but he’s got issues that take up space and energy. He’s inflexible and can’t accept limits. He throws tantrums and gets away with stuff that she wouldn’t dream of doing. My friend helped me see that just because my daughter is doing well at school, has nice friends, and is amenable at home, doesn’t mean that she doesn’t resent the amount of time I spend dealing with my son’s issues or the fact that his mood often dominates our house. I set up this paradigm in my head in which he was falling apart and she had it all together, and neither is really true.”Parents of children with special needs are used to making a special effort to reach out to their typically developing children, who must learn to deal with their sibling’s particular set of issues and the impact this has at home.But in a home where all the children are typically developing, it is more difficult to rank children’s emotional needs, particularly when each child has a unique way of expressing frustration, anxiety, and angst. Some children have nightmares. Some receive bad report cards. Some yell and scream and slam doors. Some have trouble making friends. And there’s no reason to think that the child who seems to need you most this year, or even this month, will be the same child when you reassess a few months later.“When I finally told my daughter that I felt that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to her, and that I couldn’t even imagine how hard it was for her to have her brother acting out all the time, she just burst into tears,” says my friend. “She told me that I’ve been overlooking her problems and that they’re just as important as my son’s. She was angry – you could see. But as bad as I felt about not having seen the situation sooner, I felt so much better about having opened up the line of communication, about letting her know that I noticed the situation and was going to change things.”This is a good time of year to step back and take a serious look at your children. In August, our town might not slow down quite like Paris does, but there’s less going on for our children. It’s a good opportunity not only to examine their needs, but to take an even closer look at how we meet them.Which child needs to be taken out for a hamburger on her own? Who needs to have a special weekend away?And don’t just focus on the obvious. Sometimes it’s the child who complains the least that needs the most.

The Squeaky Wheel

The Squeaky Wheel

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