09:40 min
CLEAR ALL
A child doesn’t want to leave the toy store, so he stops and flops. Another bolts across a busy parking lot, turns and smiles at his mom. An eighteen-year-old student bursts into tears when asked to change activities at school.
As a parent of a child diagnosed with Down syndrome, you may be feeling unsure of what to do next or where your child’s journey will take you.
These behaviors are more common than you might think with an estimated range of 6.4% to 30.8% of teens admitting to trying to harm themselves.
If you’re cutting or hurting yourself you’re not alone. Thousands of teens across the country think that hurting themselves is the only way they can feel better, even though they continue to feel alone and out of control. There are a lot of reasons why teens hurt themselves.
Cutting and other forms of self-injury are often cries for help, pleas for someone to notice that the pain is too much to bear. As Plante discusses here, the threat of suicide must always be carefully evaluated, although the majority of cutters are not in fact suicidal.