I must be an old timer, if the tune in my head today is Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. But it’s the background music as I mull over the conversation I had with a friend at dinner last night. She’s a close friend, and she works as a special needs parapro at a local elementary school, doing an awesome job of handling some very challenging students.

She was telling me the story of a student who has returned to their classroom after moving for several months to another school district. The grapevine says that the other district kicked the child out for hitting a teacher. The official story was that it wasn’t true. Another rumor was that DFCS had been called on the mother.

Just as I was about to feel that same pity the rest of the women around our table felt about another poor special needs child who wasn’t being parented correctly, she gave me two more pieces of information. The boy is adopted, and he has fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

All of the sudden, things shifted. Then I realized I was the only one around the table who could see the shift. My friend then related that the child had already hit her and attempted to hit another teacher. I asked her what interface she’d had with the mother. None, yet. I explained to her that things might not be as they look on the surface, and that perhaps the child was not a neglected or abused child, at least not by this mother, but that the family was truly a family in crisis. And I wondered whether the school had the correct approaches and interventions in place for a child with FAS in her classroom.

I realize how alarmist I must have sounded, because my friend looked a little stunned. He comes to school dirty and bruised, she reported, still pretty convinced that the mom was a big part of the problem. But all I could think about were the countless parents in crisis, who find us at ATN. Many have had schools file false allegations of abuse on them, especially if they’ve pushed the schools for services they didn’t want to provide. Some actually believe the children, who themselves will make the false allegations. And what about just the daily challenges of parenting a child with FAS?

I asked my friend to reach out to the mother enough to give her my name and phone number as a possible resource. I explained that the mom may be in crisis on lots of different fronts and may benefit from the network we have at ATN. My friend agreed, although I sense that she’s pretty sure I’m not right.

But having looked at parenting challenging children from both sides now, I have to say that things in the “inside” aren’t always what they appear to those on the “outside”.

Photo Credit