monstro - that is exactly right (from someone who is a parent). The teacher says little Ronan would be doing much better in math if he’d only pay attention. If he doesn’t start to pay attention, he’s going to be really confused here when we move onto more complicated problems. Suddenly, the next ten years flash in front of your life - Harvard was never a goal, but if this doesn’t get under control, he won’t even make it into State College.
And what can you as a parent do? Darn little. You can’t sit in class with him every day. Reminding a six year old to pay attention is class is like taking to a puppy. The teacher has 38 kids in the classroom, she isn’t going to spend her time making sure your kid is paying attention - nor is she going to send 39 “how did your kid do today” emails home. About the only option open to you is medication - or ignoring it and saying “hey, car mechanics make decent money” - then hoping he gets through high school. You don’t have time to wait for the system to change.
I don’t doubt that ADHD is overdiagnosed, and that there are a lot of kids out there for whom ADHD meds don’t help anything and probably hurt. I also don’t doubt that ADHD really does exist, and that there are a lot of kids out there for whom ADHD meds are a huge help.
And the disease is not new, only the diagnosis of it. Talk to any long-time teacher, and they’ll tell you that in retrospect, they recognize the symptoms in a lot of their problem children from way back in the day, and wish that they could have done something about it at the time. What happened to those kids? Some succeeded in life, as a result of superhuman effort by themselves, their teachers, and their parents. Some didn’t have that superhuman effort, and ended up with much worse lives than they could have had. Some just outright failed. If we can increase the number who can succeed, then we should, and if drugs are the best way to do that, then we should use drugs.
Compare it to any non-mental medical condition. Measles used to be a major killer, before vaccines. Bacterial infections used to be much more serious, before antibiotics. Sure, we once did without those medicines, and most of us survived. But that doesn’t mean we should skip the medicines. Antibiotics are overused, for some conditions for which they won’t help, and that does cause problems. And ritalin is also overused, for some conditions for which it won’t help. But that doesn’t mean we should stop using either; it just means that we should get better at figuring out when to use them.
Just something I noticed when I worked in a school system and when I taught religious school-- premature kids who were entered in school on their birthdays tended to do very poorly and get referred for a lot of things, particularly ADHD, when their birthdays were close to the beginning of the school year, meaning that if that kid had been born full-term, he would have entered school a year later. Very rarely, when parents wait to enter a kid born premature according to his due date rather than his actual birthday, that kid fits right in.
There was a kid like that in one of the classes I interpreted in. He was repeating first grade. He had just turned 7 weeks before school started, something like 2 days before the cut-off date; I’m not sure exactly how premature he’d been, but when the kids did a project with picture when they were born, and how big they were, he weighed 3lbs-something. The year I saw him, his second year in first grade, he fit right in. He was right in the middle as far as his skills in gym went, and he was just learning how to read with the class, which meant he had learned pretty much nothing the year before-- but this year he was learning. He made friends easier, and size-wise, was in about the 75%. He must have had a horrible year the year before.
I read an article that said there was a high correlation between prematurity and ADD/ADHD. I wonder if the correlation would go away if premature kids were entered in school according to their due date, and not their actual birthday?
Oh, and teachers most assuredly do not want half the class to be on ADHD drugs. ADHD drugs do not make ordinary students any easier to control: Quite the opposite, in fact. ADHD drugs given to a student who does not genuinely have ADHD will actually make the kid’s behavior worse.
Interesting. I sometimes wonder if my 9-year-old has ADD or ADHD. She has trouble focusing and sitting still. But she does have a late July birthday, so that may be a large part of it.
This is very interesting, RivkahChayah. I was born 3 months premature in August (should have been born at the end of October), was always one of the smallest ones in the class, and in addition was skipped forward in the middle of grade 1 (I think because I could already read).
Funny about statistics-- they don’t always apply to an individual. My mother had a July birthday, and started school a year early, but never had any trouble keeping up. My son was born in October, and he’s not the smartest kid in the whole class-- he is very calm and focused, though. His teacher says she never has to tell him to do something twice. Thank goodness, because he couldn’t stand to be held back-- at nine & 1/2, he is 4’11 and 108lbs. Too bad he can’t shoot a basketball.
A lot of things make a difference for an individual. I have a friend whose son was very premature, but he’s an only child who has gotten tons of individual attention, and whose father is 6’5, so he’s actually gotten to be tall for his age by age 8, and by three had caught up with other kids, even though he qualified for some therapy when he was a toddler. I know a couple of twins who were a lot less premature, but who are the youngest of five, and their overworked parents never read to them, and pack them cookies and canned fruit for lunch. They were born in August, but should have been born in early October, and got held back in their preschool. They fit right in with the “younger” kids.
Four years ago, when the Firebug was a few months away from the start of kindergarten, some people we knew suggested that he be held back for another year in day care - ‘red-shirted’ as the phrase goes - since his birthday is at the end of July.
We didn’t give any serious consideration to the idea, because if he’d stayed in all-day day care for another year, he’d have been bored shitless, and would have turned into a major behavior problem. But the flip side is that we’ve got the problems of his being one of the most immature kids in his grade. And an ADHD diagnosis on top of that.
One thought I had about the whole redshirting thing is, couldn’t they just break the school year into semesters, and start a new kindergarten/first/second/etc. grade class every semester? That way, the age variation within a class wouldn’t be so dramatic, there’d be less need to red-shirt, and the kid would only be delayed by half a year, rather than a whole year, by redshirting.
And this pattern of ADHD diagnoses brings that question back again. Seems that this would greatly reduce the propensity of ADHD diagnoses caused by being born at the wrong time of year.
Yep. A couple of months ago, my six-year-old’s teacher started ‘active breaks’ in class - between lessons, they jump up and down and stretch out and do jumping jacks and stuff.
My kid doesn’t have ADHD, isn’t particularly hyper and has never had trouble concentrating. And I still noticed a real difference in her behaviour when this started. She comes home calmer and less stressed, now that she’s not trying to concentrate for six hours straight. It wasn’t confirmation bias, either: we weren’t told about the active breaks till a week after they started, the kid hadn’t mentioned them, and my husband and I had been talking about how much calmer she was after the school day that past week.
I think if kids were all given a five-minute run around the playground after every lesson, ADHD diagnoses (and lots of other behavioural problems) would plummet. And it would be a lot cheaper and more efficient than all those special plans and medication.
When I was a kid, parents and teachers didn’t know to say hyperactive, ADD, or ADHD. Kids like that were diagnosed as brats or demons. Those kids were classified as stupid, lazy, crazy, accident-prone, or just bad.
Now that we have more sophisticated names for them and drugs to give them, I suppose they turn out better than in the past. I hope that’s true.
Our culture is so super competitive. I just don’t think that’s ever going to stop anytime soon. People talk about how overmedicated everyone is, and yet we demand a high standard in everything. Like customer service. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people who work in customer service are more likely to take anti-anxiety meds. Perhaps if unsatisfied customers didn’t act like jerks so frequently, prescriptions for Xanax would drop. But is that ever going to happen? I don’t think so. A person can’t be blamed for turning to meds when it’s a fact the world doesn’t give a fuck about anyone’s personal difficulty. The world just cares about results.
I think interspersing breaks through out the school day is a good idea, especially for little kids. I also think making the school day start later would provide benefits, particularly for older kids. But these will only work provided that academic pressures stay at their current level. I can’t help but think that standards are only going to get harder as the stakes get higher. When fifth graders are all expected to write their own computer programs and be fluent in Mandarin, making kids do jumping jacks for five minutes every so often isn’t going to be enough to keep people from racing to the doctor’s office for some Concerta.
Mom recently sent me report cards and homework from elementary school. My memory of myself is I was a quiet, studious kid.
But it appears my self-concept was a bit off. All of my report card comments include some version of “Jennshark has much difficulty maintaining attention in class and tends to be disruptive.” This was 1972-1977; I’m wondering how disruptive I was if teachers were writing this about a little girl!* :rolleyes:
I still have attention deficits if I’m not interested in something (which is a lot of stuff). I tried Adderall several years ago, but it made me incredibly hyper-focused on stupid crap (like spending three hours experimenting with fonts for a memo) and I decided I prefer my weird selfness as is.
I agree that kids seem to have it rougher today. I don’t have offspring, but many of my college students are under incredible pressures like working three jobs and coming to class at 8am after working overnight at the UPS sorting factory. A few have confided that they “borrow” Adderall/Ritalin just to stay awake and minimally function. Breaks my heart.
*I do wonder, however, if at least some of this commentary was because I was a very butch little girl and preferred football and fistfights with the boys instead of hopscotch with the boring, demure girls. Maybe I made teachers uncomfortable with my masculine bent and this was a way for them to express it in shaded terms. Or maybe I was just a rowdy little rat!
Lots of adults are being evaluated and diagnosed in the wake of a young relative’s diagnosis; this is also true for autism.
I’ve found that an excellent way to tell if the diagnosis is genuine is whether the parents (OK, mothers) brag about it. If they don’t, the child is probably for real.
As a pharmacist, I’m not the only person who noticed that until the early 00s, it only seemed to exist in white children from low-income families.
“Hyperactivity” existed when I was a kid, and some children had that label, but there wasn’t much people could do, so there was really nothing to refer them for.
I personally think a lot of autism was diagnosed as mental retardation because until the 1970s, autism pretty much meant institutionalization. There were no schools for autistics, and public schools didn’t have to take them until 1974 (PL 94-142 was passed). There were a few scattered experimental programs for treating autism beginning in the 1960s, and in the 1950s, if parents could afford private institutions, kids were treated by psychoanalysis, where they were harassed to relive non-existent trauma, but it was way better than being warehoused in state institutions, where their life expectancy was about 38.
There were state schools for the mentally retarded, and sheltered workshops. If an autistic kid carried a “mentally retarded” diagnosis, instead of autistic, they could go to school, and then live in a group home, and have some place to go during the day.
Anyway, now that there is treatment for ADD/ADHD, more people are being presented for diagnosis, and so more people are getting diagnosed and treated.
They seem to be developing some objective tests for ADHD. They can see definite differences in the brain by PET, SPECT, or functional MRI, although those are not in routine clinic use yet.
So if they start using objective criteria rather than relying on annoyed teacher’s reports, we will see if the incidence drops.
