Within Normal Limits: Good or Bad?
It's all about context
The final score is 150. Is this a winning or losing score?
150 is an incredible final score for a professional basketball team. And 150 is a completely horrid score coming off an 18-hole, par-72 golf course. To be able to correctly answer that question, we need to know the context.
Within Normal Limits ("WNL") is a common medical phrase used to describe laboratory test results, indicating that a particular patient's results fall within the expected range considered to be normal in a healthy individual. This concept isn't restricted to the area of lab tests. Pediatrician growth charts for children reflect the same idea. Statistics has its own version in one Standard Deviation, referring to the 34% on either side of the mean, often represented visually by the bell curve.
In these contexts, to be Within Normal Limits seems the desirable place to be.
Sometimes, it's good to be Within Normal Limits.
But is being outside of Normal Limits a bad place to be? Look at the musical accomplishments of the classical pianist and conductor Murray Perahia, with his 18 Grammy Award Nominations, resulting in 3 wins, and his 9 Gramophone Classical Music Awards (the Oscars for classical music). Or think about the head-spinning sports achievements of Michael Jordan in basketball and Wayne Gretzky in ice hockey.
No one would say these men are Within Normal Limits, and no one would say that's a bad thing.
Sometimes, it's good to be outside of Normal Limits.
Those are excellent, positive examples of not being Within Normal Limits. On the flip side, are there negative examples of not being Within Normal Limits? The short answer is yes. It all comes back to context.
Every loving parent knows the thrill of watching a baby learn how to walk: from pulling up on furniture, to cruising around holding on, to standing near the comfort of furniture, and bravely starting to let go. Then come the actual first few steps. Then the fall. More steps. More falls. And along the way, we cheer our baby on.
But would we still be cheering if our child were wobbly stepping and falling, stepping and falling, at the age of 5? Probably not. At this point, most parents would likely be worried about their child's development.
Sometimes, it's bad to be outside of Normal Limits.
Applying the concept of Within Normal Limits to behavior, Maria Montessori had a definite opinion. Commonly believed to be the first woman medical doctor in Italy, Montessori observed the behavior of children from a disinterested, scientific viewpoint. Over time, she noticed that certain behaviors were disruptive and caused unhappiness both in the misbehaving child and for all those around him. She called these behaviors “deviations from normality”. 1
Montessori classified these undesirable behaviors into two groups:
Those shown by strong children (who resist and overcome the obstacles they meet) and
those shown by weak children (who succumb to unfavorable conditions)
In the strong children, some characteristics she noted included:
impulsivity and moodiness
tendencies to violence
fits of rage
insubordination
aggression
disobedience
a destructive instinct
possessiveness, leading to selfishness and envy
instability of purpose
inability to focus or concentrate
unkindness to weaker children and animals
In the weak children, Montessori observed:
passivity
laziness
idleness
an inclination to whine and to be catered to by others
a seeking for constant entertainment
boredom
fear and clinginess to adults
timidity
tendency to lie and steal
pickiness or gluttony in eating
fear of the dark
nervousness 2
Interestingly, she saw that society considered only the strong children as problems. Conversely, the weak children were thought of as blessings because their behaviors were not dramatic — and could even be interpreted as endearing:
"The mother thinks her child is good and obedient because he does nothing wrong. His clinging to her she takes to be affection. He loves her so much, she says, that he won't go to bed without her." 3
The commonality of these children on both ends of the behavioral range
was a lack of discipline.
What, then, did Montessori see as the behavior of a normal child?
The normal child displayed discipline in freedom, which seemed to spring up spontaneously through the work done by the children in the Montessori schools which she had established. 4
Maria Montessori called this process by which the children in her educational care moved from disruptive behaviors to self-discipline Normalization. Once normalized, these children distinguished themselves through:
concentration
hard work
self-discipline
organization
proper sociability
The process of Normalization will be discussed in an upcoming article.
For now, I’ll leave you with this thought. If you recognize your child — or even yourself — as being strong or weak, it’s not a reason to get upset.
Acknowledging that certain behaviors are outside of Normal Limits
is not to cause shame or place blame.
Those are destructive mindsets. Rather, this calm, neutral acceptance of reality is the diagnosis, the starting point, and the hope for improvement.
All references are from Maria Montessori's work, The Absorbent Mind, trans. Claremont, 1967.
1 p. 205.
2 p. 197, 204.
3 p. 198.
4 p. 202.