My shirt has a label that tells me how to wash it. My lunch had a label that tells me how many calories it contains. But when it comes to children, what do their labels tell us? When my daughter was born, she didn’t have a label. She was an 8 lb. bundle of pure joy with crazy curly hair and toes so long her newborn shoes barely fit. But there were no instructions included and no label to tell us what to do as new parents.
Years passed and we knew something was different. Her thinking was unique and she needed something different in school. So, we did everything we could to find out what was going on. We thought we were fighting for her, but truthfully, we were fighting for a label. Labels make us feel like we know what’s coming, what to expect, and what to do. Labels helped us find a reason for differences, and could even free us from our biggest fear, that something in some way was our fault.
In a recent conversation, my daughter said something that struck me. She called a group of kids, “Typical.” She said it purely out of a reason for her to assign a label, and wholeheartedly without judgement. Typical, as in “normal.” I said, “What?” She said, “You know, they are not autistic.”
That’s when I realized, we are in a world that loves labels and she has learned that. We crave knowing what to call things and issues. We want to create some sense of order within something that makes us uncomfortable to not understand.
Gifted. Learning disabled. Dyslexic. Artistic. Musical genius. Prodigy. Processing Disorder. Autistic. Oppositional Defiant. Attention Deficit. It’s not so much the label that carries the weight. It’s the weight we put on it all. It’s the preconceived notions, the judgments, the skewed expectations. All things that take the focus off what matters most of all: the child. Because the magic our children, every single child, brings to the world in who they are is something we all need.
And if we’re not careful, we’ll get so wrapped up in labels, that we’ll miss out on understanding that magic.