Kids TV Characters with Developmental and Emotional Disorders

First, I need to say that the comments on Monday's post just made me happy. There were a few different opinions, but everybody was really respectful and thoughtful, and I'm really honored that you guys took the time to share your views.

I've emailed many of you who commented, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts about this issue. I presented an example of a character in a children's television show who was portrayed in a rather stereotyped fashion and asked, essentially, if it was better than nothing.

Some of you said yes--at least the writers tried to include a character with a developmental disorder like Asperger's, and it's better than pretending individuals with such disorders don't exist. The assumption here is that it's important to include diverse characters (and obviously, I'm talking about stuff way beyond racial/ethnic diversity) in children's television. I agree with this assumption. Our world is diverse. Religiously, sexually, ethnically, neurologically ... people are enormously complex--and in each of our dimensions, we vary tremendously, and that's really cool. It ain't just heterosexual-neurotypical-white folk watching the telly, right? Right. So we should have television characters that reflect that diversity.

Some of you said no--this type of stereotypical portrayal is not good at all. It's insulting and potentially harmful. Aaaaand ... I agree. Let me tell you a story (and by that, I mean a mash-up of an experience I've had way too many times): I'm sitting with the parents of a five-year-old, and I'm telling them that I'm diagnosing their child with autistic disorder. You know what they say? "But he acts NOTHING LIKE RAIN MAN!" I can almost see their thoughts--they are picturing their adorable child as an adult living in an institution and counting matchsticks.

That alone is heartbreaking. But you know what's worse? Sometimes, a parent has had concerns for a few years. Maybe they even worked up the courage to speak it aloud to a grandmother-aunt-neighbor-friend-stranger. And that person said, "Pshah. He acts nothing like Rain Man. You don't need to have him evaluated."

I've worked with people who put evaluations off for a year or two in part because of this very thing--media portrayals that are extreme or very stereotyped. Sometimes it means that the child has missed one or two years of treatment.

In that case, I would say that stereotyped portrayals have done some damage. The problem is, when we only see the extreme or the stereotyped, it's easy to be blinded to the complete continuum.



This is the late Kim Peek. Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man was based on him. He was what is known as a "savant" and memorized about 9000 books before his death in 2009. He also couldn't button his clothes. His presentation was NOT typical of individuals with autism spectrum disorders. He was an extreme. I'm not saying it was wrong to make that movie--by all accounts the portrayal was accurate. But if it's one of the few out there, it leaves viewers thinking "this is what people with autism spectrum disorders are like."


Usually, my first response to controversial stuff on TV is to say "if parents are going to let their kids watch it, they should watch it with their kids and talk about it." I feel that way about this issue, but it doesn't get rid of my concerns. Because what if the parent doesn't know much more about autism spectrum disorders than the kid? That parent is dependent upon the writers and creators of those shows to present an accurate picture of an individual with one of these diagnoses. I happen to think this is ESPECIALLY TRUE of children's television shows where the clear goal of the portrayal is to raise awareness and sensitivity, as was the case with that episode of Dino Squad. The things is, so often the symptoms of this disorder (and many others) are subtle and not easily recognized unless you know exactly what to look for.

I won't go on and on. This is a tricky issue--both in adult and children's television. We need diversity, but it needs to be nuanced and sensitive, well-researched and informed by real-world experience. I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that.

On the Sisterhood of the Traveling Blog front, check out Deb's post on "In my writing, I always/never ___"!

Psychological Problems in Kids and Teens New Study Looks at Parental Discord as a Major Cause

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the tendency of mental health researchers and practitioners to look at patients' symptoms without any investigation into the home environment, and decide that they, or their brains, are the entire problem.

Psychological problems in kids are roughly divided into externalizing behaviors and internalizing behavior. The former is basically acting out: doing poorly in school, being hyperactive, being oppositional, getting  into fights, throwing tantrums and the like. 

The latter refers to things like anxiety and depression. Either way, today kids who have any of these problems are in danger of being labeled with mental disorders such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, and even "oppositional defiant disorder," which I refer to as "spoiled brat disorder." And of course there is "conduct disorder," which I refer to as "juvenile delinquency."

These know-nothing researchers act as if living in a tense or chaotic home environment is good for children's emotional life and that they do not become distractible or agitated under these circumstances.

As I have often joked, when it comes to looking at the home environment, most mental health professions will - if they say anything at all - label it as "within normal limits (WNL)." What WNL usually really means is "We never looked." If they do "look," they may ask the parents one or two questions about discipline, and take their answers at face value as well as valid or complete.

Or if they really want to pretend they have obtained the whole picture, they can ask the child's teacher what the kid's behavior is like at school. Of course, teachers are likely to have less patience with kids who are distractible, and then have lower expectations of them. The kids will pick up on this, and the teacher's attitude causes these kids to become even more distressed, which makes the teacher have even less patience and lower expectations of them, and so on in a vicious circle. (This long-term process was described by Peter M. Senge in his amazing book, The Fifth Discipline).

Researchers in psychiatry, as I described in a post about borderline personality disorder researchers, are even worse than practitioners at ruling out environmental causes as the explanation for symptomatic children. They never even read summaries of the literature produced by developmental psychologists.

One developmental psychologist, E. Mark Cummings, summed up quite nicely the type of results that this literature routinely shows . He was quoted in a recent article in the Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/10/the-effects-of-a-simmering-parental-grudge/503015/#article-comments) that described a recent study ("The Multiple Faces of Interparental Conflict: Implications for Cascades of Children's Insecurity and Externalizing Problems,"  P.T. Davies, R.F. Hentges, J.L. Coe; E.M. Cummings, Journal of Abnormal Psychology [in press]):

“Children are like emotional geiger counters,” said E. Mark Cummings, a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame who has conducted extensive studies on the effects of marital discord on kids for more than 20 years. Children, he explained, are incredibly attuned to parents’ emotional communication with each other; they’re keenly aware that, for their parents, nonverbal expression is key to communicating feelings.

For many couples, holding onto a grudge—smoldering but not letting a disagreement erupt into a fighting match—may seem like the best way to deal with a conflict. But research shows this kind of discord can significantly interfere with a child’s behavior and sense of emotional security. When exposed to prolonged unresolved conflict, kids are more likely to get into fights with their peers at school and show signs of distress, anger, and hostility. They may also have trouble sleeping at night, which can undermine their academic performance. In fact, according to various studies that measured children’s emotional responses to interparental hostility, disengagement and uncooperative discord between couples has shown to increase a child’s risk of psychological problems, including depression, anxiety, social withdrawal, and aggression."

Here is the abstract of the study. Notice how the study was longitudinal - meaning it looked at parental behavior and children's reactions to it over an extended period of time - and used multiple measures and multiple observers. Researchers also actually observed the family members interacting with one another while engaged in various conflict resolution tasks. That's what a researcher has to do to in order vastly improve his or her chances to see what is really going on at home and to see what the most important causal factors are for psychological distress in young people.

This multistudy article examined the relative strength of mediational pathways involving hostile, disengaged, and uncooperative forms of interparental conflict, children's emotional insecurity, and their externalizing problems across 2 longitudinal studies. Participants in Study 1 consisted of 243 preschool children (M age = 4.60 years) and their parents, whereas Study 2 consisted of 263 adolescents (M age = 12.62 years) and their parents. Both studies utilized multimethod, multi-informant assessment batteries within a longitudinal design with 3 measurement occasions. Across both studies, lagged, autoregressive tests of the mediational paths revealed that interparental hostility was a significantly stronger predictor of the prospective cascade of children's insecurity and externalizing problems than interparental disengagement and low levels of interparental cooperation. Findings further indicated that interparental disengagement was a stronger predictor of the insecurity pathway than was low interparental cooperation for the sample of adolescents in Study 2. Results are discussed in relation to how they inform and advance developmental models of family risk.