If Williams Syndrome wasn’t so rare, I wouldn’t mind this kind of reductive overview shown in 60 Minutes, since people would know all the other elements that go into having WS. But they don’t. They knew nothing of it, and now they know one thing, and that one thing is about as shallow and misleading as can be. That’s what 60 Minutes has contributed with this piece.
My son (7yo with WS) has dealt with more doctors than I ever have, he deals with anxiety and worry about planning and the future, and struggles with the conflicts between his desire for agency and his limitations. He has epilepsy, autism, and aspirates when drinking thin liquids, so we have to thicken everything his drinks. He’s had significant difficulties in making friends and being a regular kid. In the most general terms, WS has restricted the natural expansion of his world.
And none of that is unique. He’s pretty typical for a kid his age with WS. He’s also adorable, and charming, and a light to every room he enters. Also typical.
To reduce his difference to neurotypical kids as similar to the difference between a dog and a wolf does almost nothing to help people understand what WS is, and how it impacts people. The general public didn’t need to be told that people with WS are friendly – that’s literally the first thing you’ll learn about them, and they make that very clear all by themselves. What people would benefit from understanding is their more subtle gifts, and their more significant challenges.
Honestly, what it really does is reverse-anthropomorphizes people with WS. We have uniquely romantic notions about the inner lives of dogs – we love their zoomies, their noms, their loving affection, and their single-minded loyalty. Similarly with wolves, we have very strong ideas about their cunning, intelligence, unscrupulousness, and vicious brutality – despite never having any actual understanding of their inner experience. And of course we see those characteristics in humans – *we got them from humans to start with*. We superimpose human characteristics on animals of all kinds to help us understand them – so to turn them back around is just to look at our own reflections. To claim that as a unique and remarkable insight into the condition of people with WS is embarrassingly shallow at best, and offensive at worst.
Whether dogs have the same genetic deletion as people with WS is possible, I suppose? But it doesn’t seem to impact their elastin, or their spatial reasoning, or their heart & vascular function. It seems much less similar to WS when you look at the bigger picture. It seems like 60 Minutes didn’t consider that. It seems more likely that someone encountered this spurious “factoid” and saw the good-natured demeanor shared by dogs and people with WS, and made way more of it than it deserves.