The Phantom Menace
Do 1 in 20 kids really have "sensory processing disorder"?
by Vivian Manning-Schaffel
June 16, 2008
Four — count 'em — four of my four-year-old son's friends are in occupational therapy for sensory processing disorder, a.k.a. SPD.
Considering his inner circle tops out at about fifteen, this indicates an epidemic on our Brooklyn playground.
And it's not just New York. Based on studies at the Sensory Therapies and Research Center (STAR) in Denver, CO, at least one in every twenty children and adults has SPD — 3.5 million people in the U.S. alone, including one out of three gifted children, and eight in ten autistic children.
So, where did this mysterious disorder come from? Are the numbers soaring because, like autism, more information about SPD is coming to light, or is SPD just a hot new way to classify the challenges of certain kids, like the "indigo children" popularized by the 1998 New Age book? Or is SPD, as Time magazine mused last year, the new ADD?
The SPD diagnosis isn't so new. Sensory Processing Disorder — or Sensory Integration Disorder — was first outlined in the early '70s by occupational therapist A. Jean Ayres. In her book, Sensory Integration and the Child, Ayres claimed that children with SPD are either over- or under- responsive to various sensory stimuli — be they touch, movement, smell, taste, vision or hearing.
SPD indicates a breakdown in how input is processed. There are three major subgroups that fall under the umbrella of SPD: Sensory Modulation Disorder, Sensory-Based Motor Disorder and Sensory Discrimination Disorder, which manifest in the delayed development of a wide variety of social, emotional and motor skill sets.
What's SPD and what's just part of being four years old?
But many SPD symptoms, like throwing tantrums and not holding a pen correctly, are typical of so many young children. In the face of all this grey area and controversy, how's a parent supposed to tell what's SPD and what's just part of being four years old?
Dr. Lucy Jane Miller, author of Sensational Kids: Hope and Help for Children with Sensory Processing Disorder, and Director of the STAR Center, has been working for more than thirty years to provide scientific evidence that SPD is not just quirky kid behavior but an actual, physiological condition.
One study at her center examined the brainwaves of children experiencing two sensory stimuli simultaneously, like touch and smell.
"When you put those two together and administer them at the same time, you should see an enhanced response — as you do in every type of living creature," Dr. Miller explains. "These children respond the same as they would to a single stimuli. They are not integrating at the neuron level the same way that typically developing living creatures do. It's as if they are caught in a constant fight-or-flight reaction."
She says medical professionals often misdiagnose SPD as ADHD and/or autism because the lines between the disorders are slightly blurred. "It's not in the autism spectrum, but almost all children who have autism or Asperger's syndrome have sensory problems, sometimes very significantly. But the majority of kids who have sensory problems don't have autism," says Dr. Miller.
©2008 Vivian Manning-Schaffel and Nerve Media
About the Author
|
|
Related Articles
|
|
Vivian Manning-Schaffel has written for Parents, Parenting, The Advocate, The New York Post, Business Week and a variety of other publications. She lives and works in the heart of breeder Brooklyn with her husband and two kids. She's on the web at vivianmanningschaffel.com. |
|
|
-
by Jean Railla
Why today's women are choosing to have babies alone.
-
by Miriam Axel-Lute
Official advice about lead poisoning is either too scary or not scary enough.
-
by Kathi Alexander
Is "child-centered" parenting producing a generation of brats?
|
