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Big Dreams
Profile of a Young Person With Skeletal Dysplaysia By Teri Brown
Fava is majoring in sport management and plans to double major in either finance or communications. Though many children with dwarfism have difficulty in school, Fava recalls his school career as being fairly positive. Fava attended a Catholic grammar school for the first nine years of school. "When I started there in kindergarten, we were all basically the same height, so no one really noticed the difference in height," says Fava. "As we progressed through school, my height was never a factor. All the kids that I went to school with saw nothing wrong with me."
It was outside of school that Fava had the most problems and was often subject to the taunts, name-calling, staring and finger pointing of other people. "I was able to develop thick skin, and today those things don't bother me like they used to, he says. "In high school, most people are mature, and my dwarfism made no difference to them."
Socially, Fava looks back on his teenage years as being very successful. He had many friends and enjoyed himself immensely. His biggest challenge was with girls. "I guess the problem that I faced most was with the girls," he says. "It was during my teenage years when girls strictly saw me as a friend and never really saw me as the boyfriend type. I think that it was just a maturity thing. Girls were just afraid of what their friends would think rather than realizing what they really felt. That was probably the most difficult part of my teenage years."
