It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since I participated in the 31 for 21 2012 blogging effort to raise awareness of Trisomy 21, more commonly known as Down syndrome.  There are 31 days in October, and Trisomy 21 occurs when the 21st chromosome is triplicated – hence the name – and for this month bloggers across the blogosphere are joining in.  During this month I won’t be posting only about Trisomy 21, though there will probably be more posts on the topic than usual.  But I will be mentioning my participation at the beginning of each post.

My general perspective on parenting is that every child has his growth curve (physically and emotionally) and we need to have patience and trust the individual’s process.  Sometimes there are things you see in your child that cause you to worry because he doesn’t doesn’t seem to be getting it as quickly as most other kids his age.  This could be academic, behavioral, psychological – and you have to let go of your fear and shift your thinking to believe in him so that you can reflect that back to him.

That’s why one of my favorite children’s picture books is Leo the Late Bloomer.  Leo is a lion cub that can’t do anything right.  All his friends pass him in all areas of development, and while his father tries not to show how worried he is, he keeps seeing Leo failing in all the areas that his friends are succeeding in.  Reading, writing, speaking, drawing, eating.  Time passes and no improvements, until suddenly, one day Leo ‘blooms’ – he seemingly overnight acquired proficiency in all these areas.

I’ve often thought how true this is of child development, and how important a parent’s trust in a child is to the process. And yet I sometimes feel I’m mentally groping to find the right balance in this area when it comes to Yirmiyahu (now fifteen months).

There have been two developmental milestones that I’ve been concerned about in recent months: eating and crawling.  Yirmiyahu hardly eats any solids and that’s not for lack of effort on my part.  And though Yirmiyahu started to army crawl a tiny bit when he was thirteen months, he prefers to sit and actively resists being put down on his stomach.   My question for myself – how much to trust his internal timetable, and how much to push him?  It’s not one or the other, but sometimes doing too much on one side of the equation leads to too little on the other.

All of this wondering about these two concerns came to a quick conclusion recently.  Two weeks ago Yirmiyahu got his first two teeth which were rapidly followed by another three.  Five teeth in two weeks!  Sometime in this same period, Yirmiyahu’s eating suddenly dramatically changed.  For months he rarely ate more than a teaspoon of food a day no matter what I tried – suddenly he’s eating several teaspoons of food at each meal!  My naturopath told me that until the teeth come in, a child is physiologically unable to digest starches.  Perhaps his body is finally able to tolerate solids foods and that’s why he’s suddenly eating?  I don’t know but it’s amazing how these two issues resolved themselves literally overnight without any intervention on my part.

As far as the crawling?  After almost two months of being physically able to crawl but resisting any efforts to be on his tummy, in the last week he’s suddenly decided he wants to crawl!  Not huge distances yet, but he’s doing it himself because he wants to.  We didn’t change anything we were doing, but it’s as if the internal sensor told him he’s ready to do this now.

Seeing these noticeable changes in such a short time has helped me find some inner balance and regain my trust in his individual process.  It’s helping me to let go of some of the worries about developmental steps being too delayed if I don’t push harder.  It’s challenging enough with a typical child to trust his inherent growth process when faced with issues that don’t match what is considered the norm, but it’s an extremely prevalent way of thinking about T21 so you have to really choose the paradigm you want your mind to spend time in!

Trusting in his inner time frame doesn’t mean we don’t provide him with a stimulating environment – it means while we do whatever we feel is in his best interest, we let go of the inner tension that tells us we have to make something happen or else.   Letting go makes it so much easier to enjoy the process of watching him grow up rather than worrying about things not happening fast enough.  While we’ll continue to read, talk, play with him – I don’t want to get hung up on the timetable; I don’t want to worry that I’m not enough because he’s not hitting those milestones by a given time.  Yirmiyahu is showing me that with our support and love, he’ll continue to do things when he’s ready.

Avivah