Parents of children with Reactive Attachment Disorder frequently get taken to
task for calling their children "RAD kids" or "RADishes". While these terms personally make me cringe and I'm not sure I've ever called my child either, I tire of the criticism being leveled at parents already under a great deal of stress.

I wonder if parents of children with other disorders are held to the same standards. I've recently come across quite a bit of literature referring to "apsies" -- i.e. children and adults with Asperger's Syndrome (a high functioning form of autism). While the name is "cute" (sounds like a bunch of ski bums headed to Colorado to me), it is still a "labeling" of the child per their disability. Do people get taken to task for this one? There's even an organization called Aspies for Freedom -- a support group that contends that Aspergers is not a "disorder" but an alternate way of thinking. Hmmm...there are groups that contend just about anything. (After visiting a Chinese orphanage full of babies I'm still trying to wrap my head around the anti-adoption arguments, but that's topic for many other people's blogs, not here.)

Then there's always BPKids, the highly informative, often-referenced website for the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation. Do people take them to task because they refer to themselves as "BPKids"? -- and no the BP isn't for blood pressure! I've even worked with parents who refer to their "Downs" baby -- a child with Downs Syndrome -- and to my knowledge nobody's jumped down their throats either.

Why do parents do this, and do we mean anything by it? Critics of the parents who call their kids RADkids claim it reduces the child to a "thing" and defines the kid by the disorder. Most of the parents I know of emotionally disturbed children don't think of their children as "things" or labels, but use the labels for convenience sake -- in conversations to distinguish their children with disorders from their other children. In some forums, parents call their other children "NT" children or "neurotypical" children (leading us back to that whole "what is normal?" conversation). Critics charge that it defines the child by his/her disability. But my contention is that these disabilities are so profound that they often define the family by the magnitude of the impact -regardless of the label!

As speakers of the English language, we all use adjectives to shorten what we're trying to say. This is my older daughter, my ex-husband, my rich great aunt. The adjectives distinguish them from others and describe who they are. Just the point, critics says, our children are not their disorders.

One group of pediatricians has suggested that we call kids "quirky" as opposed to heavy diagnostic labels. They said so in Newsweek. Wonder if that would work? Just exactly which therapies and medications are prescribed for "quirky"????

So what do you think? Do parents use labels in a harmful way? Are parents of children with attachment disorder doing harm to their children by calling them RAD? Is there a double standard depending on the disability? Is labeling a bad thing, or a necessary way to describe and classify the disorder?