Rainbows and labels

“Yellow car!”, she yelled, as my daughter punched me in the arm. I had my objections. Not against the punching (this was part of the game), but against the yellowness of the car. Because wasn’t it more green than yellow? 

Within the rainbow, the spectrum of visible light changes continuously from one colour to the next and putting the borders where one colour begins and the other starts can be hard. Even the names we give to colours are quite culturally dependent (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term). It is useful to have names or labels for specific colour, but then again, where one colour begins and the other ends is hard to tell.

One of the most well-known graphs in astronomy is the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. It shows the amount of light that different stars give off, as seen from a certain distance, versus a measure of the star’s surface temperature. If you plot many stars like that, a lot of them will lie on a neat, wavy curve, which describes the “main sequence” stars. These are the most common stars in the universe. Throughout their lives, these stars move along this curve in the H-R diagram. As you can see, there are no clear boundaries between the stars in the main sequence, and yet astronomers divide up stars into several distinct classes. These classes originate from looking more detailed into the spectrum of light that the stars give off. But just by looking at the temperature and brightness of the star, like in the H-R diagram, the classes are not obvious.

 

Example of an H-R diagram. Source: NASA https://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/formal/variable_stars/bg_info.html )

Another famous example of a continuum is gender and sexuality. The rainbow flag is aptly chosen of course.

From my experience with my kids, their friends, and kids of colleagues and friends, there seems to be another rainbow-like phenomenon, which is neurodivergence. For autism, I already knew that it is part of a rainbow of symptoms and problems (they don’t call it autism spectrum disorder for nothing), but I only learned after having kids that giftedness, autism, and ADHD/ADD all have overlapping symptoms and problems (see e.g. https://tendingpaths.wordpress.com/2022/12/12/updated-autism-adhd-giftedness-venn-diagram/ ). Many could probably also be described by Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs). I did not know this despite being diagnosed as gifted at an early age. And it also does not seem to appear common knowledge: when you tell someone you have a gifted child I don’t think many people realise the difficulties that also come with this, whereas if you would say you have an autistic child, the focus is more (likely too much) on the problematic side of such a label. So, people in general seem to view autistic children as unlucky (see e.g. the scaremongery about vaccines), and gifted children as lucky (the name gives it away). In reality, both seem to have overlapping challenges, and it depends on the person and situation how well someone can deal with life in our society.

WIth these psychological traits, I find that giving children labels can be both problematic and helpful. On the one hand, you don’t want to be defined solely by your diagnosis. You are more than your autism, giftedness, or ADHD. These labels can also have negative connotations, which might result in people treating you badly. On the other hand, the labels can help yourself and others to understand you better. People are often relieved when they get a diagnosis at a later age, because the world makes more sense in that way. I found that labels also greatly help in communicating with others, such as teachers and schools. It often allows you to get more suitable professional help. However, because there are many overlapping symptoms, there is a risk of mislabelling. I know of a few instances where a child was diagnosed with autism, whereas it was (also) gifted. This mislabelling meant that the child got the wrong help, which was sometimes counterproductive and very frustrating for both parents and child.

In the end, I think we have to keep an open mind and acknowledge that it is not always easy to draw boundaries and put labels on people, like with colours and stars. Although labels can help, in the end, we all have a unique place on the continuous rainbow that is humanity.