Pathologizing normal childhood struggles and seeking accommodations backfires and makes kids more miserable
Source: "ACT score anxiety is pushing kids to seek unneeded test accommodations | Fox News." October 17, 2026. www.foxnews.com
The Gist
The author, a child neuropsychologist, says we've become so fixated on scores and labels that we treat normal struggles and ordinary stress as medical problems. She argues this doesn't help kids and actually makes them more anxious and miserable, and it takes time away from normal childhood. Real disorders do exist, but most kids are fine and need space to struggle and grow.
Conclusion
Parents and society should stop treating every childhood struggle as a disorder, because medicalizing normal developmental difficulties, including seeking unneeded accommodations, is harmful and makes kids more miserable.
Premises
- Some children have real disorders and disabilities for which labels and supports are crucial, but many other struggles are healthy, normal parts of development.
- Society socializes people to obsess over measurements and percentiles (e.g., height, weight, test scores), leading parents and kids to give scores more importance than they deserve and to read them too negatively.
- Most scores are imperfect descriptors of ability: they are snapshots in time, contain measurement error, and fail to capture the best predictors of success such as perseverance, creativity and people skills.
- In most domains more is not better; the wide average range is often optimal, so a 37th percentile score is solidly average and even a near-perfect 34 on the ACT does not signal failure.
- When nothing is good enough, people reach for labels, accommodations and services to close perceived gaps; parents pathologize both struggling kids (seeing disorders) and excelling kids (seeing perfectionism or anxiety), erasing the normal 'messy middle'.
- Unnecessary interventions are not harmless because they carry opportunity costs, taking time and money away from normal childhood activities like sports, camp, playdates and homework, and they make kids more miserable.
Assumptions
- The author's clinical experience with cases like Zach generalizes to a broad societal trend of over-pathologizing children.
- Kids who receive unneeded labels or accommodations are worse off psychologically than they would be without them.
- Parents and clinicians can reliably distinguish real disorders from normal developmental struggles.
- The time and money spent on interventions would otherwise be used on more beneficial normal activities.
- Pathologizing causes misery, rather than misery prompting parents to seek help in the first place.