You mean back when problematic family members were routinely institutionalized for life? Just b/c you didn’t see something doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, it just means you were ignorant of it.
One excellent program is something called Transitional First Grade (at least around here and at one time). Everyone starts K according to their birthdate just like everywhere. Some kids are young, some are older. Some do well, some not. My oldest didn’t do well. We were offered Transitional First Grade as an option. Turns out 3 boys in the same block were in the same situation. My son was placed in T1. The other 2 weren’t. All three entered 3rd grade together… My son did the best of the three and didn’t carry any burdens that come from repeating (or as the children called it failing) 1st or 2nd grade. My daughter did just fine when her turn came up. Girls tend to do that.
I think I might have mentioned it a few years ago when this thread was new, but my son has an October birthday. My mother wanted us to try to get him into kindergarten at age 4, so he wouldn’t turn 6 shortly after the school year started. I tried explaining to her that 1. the school year starts about three weeks earlier than it did when I was in school, and 2. kindergarten is WAY more demanding than it used to be. She was a little disappointed that we didn’t listen to her anyway.
My son did fine in kindergarten where he was, and was by no means the oldest kid in the class. The cut-off date, which had been something like Oct. 1st for a school year that started on Sept. 1st in my day, was now June 1st for a school year that started on Aug. 5th. There was a screening process for kids whose birthdays were between June 1st and Aug. 1st if they had been to preschool, and a few of them were allowed to start early, but some got the stigma of “failing” the screening. We knew what was coming for my son, so even though he had started a preschool at 10.5 months, when we moved, he did the “3’s” room again at his new preschool. He was with new kids in any event, and never knew he was technically “repeating.” It got him on track to start kindergarten at the right age.
He fit right in. He was not at the head of the class, nor the bottom. He wasn’t bored, nor overly-challenged. It was just right. My birthday is in January, and I was the same way in school, at least in elementary school. October is the new January.
I realize the stay-at-home mom argument is seen as a get-off-my-lawn meme but I see it as a skill-set that’s passed down from generation to generation. IMO this process has been interrupted with the transition toward dual income families. A primary care giver can’t be in 2 places at once.
And how do you explain the children with ADHD that do have stay at home parents that were raised by stay at home parents?
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I can go through my grade school photos and show you nobody disappeared into an “institution”. In a time when everybody knew their neighbor it would be pretty tough making a child disappear without the whole neighborhood knowing about it.
I guess we never got enough “hot bottoms”. (God that sounds disgusting)
We didn’t have ADHD when I was young. We weren’t allowed. The behavior was shut down from the first day of kindergarten.
and for some strange reason we didn’t have kids running around killing each other. It’s almost like there’s a correlation between early behavior control and violent behavior years later.
The first school shooting was in 1840 in the US.
Honestly. There were weird kids in my school who undoubtedly would have been diagnosed with ADHD today. I can go through my yearbook, and point to all the kids we had nicknames for who in hindsight I now think probably had ADHD or high-functioning autism-- and one kid who probably had Tourette’s syndrome. The kid could not shut up, or stay in his seat, and was constantly getting sent to the principal’s office. He called people names, but he never made eye contact when he did, and sometimes looked startled when it happened. And there were times he’d just stand up and sit down again. It seems like mild Tourette’s now. It’s almost a shame he didn’t have a more serious case, because if he had, it probably would have gotten diagnosed, and even in the 70s, there were some medications that sometimes helped.
But I can count in the class I went to school with in public school that was about 60 kids big (two classes actually) one kid with pretty serious autism, but good language skills, two kids with milder autism, one kid who just screamed for a Ritalin prescription (he was in the principal’s office nearly every day), and three kids who probably were ADD without the H. One maybe had the H. The last kid was freaking brilliant, so he got away with a lot.
I am about nine years younger than you. Something you need to understand is that until 1974, the public schools did not have to educate children with disabilities, so it was to no one’s advantage to have a diagnosis. There were no IEPs. No resource teachers. And while there were state schools for the Deaf and Blind, they would not take you unless you were just Deaf or just Blind. Deaf and cerebral palsy? tough. I know a guy like that. He could’t go to public school because he was Deaf, and the Deaf school wouldn’t take him because he had CP (nowadays, his parents would have their pick). The private school run by the Baptist Church took him, and his parents were so grateful, they ended up becoming members of that church, and remained there for life.
Autistic kids who couldn’t “pass” in a regular classroom were better off being misdiagnosed as mentally retarded, because most states had schools for the mentally retarded. There were only institutions for autistic kids. They had a life-expectancy there of less than 40.
There may not have been diagnoses like ADHD, but there were other diagnoses, and stick one on a kid, and he was barred from public school forever.
Public law 94-142, The Education of All Handicapped Children, was passed to take effect in 1974. If I was in second grade, you were a freshman in high school. So most of the kids who could have been in your class had been gone for too long to benefit from the law.
So? What’s you’re point?
And what does autism and Tourette’s Syndrome have to do with this thread? It’s about ADHD.
I wasn’t aware that we “allowed” people to have neurological disorders. :dubious:
And tell me, how did you “shut down” that behavior? Oh right, with “hot bottoms”.
Then why did you say:
If you have proof of this, please, by all means, show us.
Again what does this have to do with the discussion. Your train is off the tracks here.
and you thought this was an absolute statement and I meant nobody in the history of the universe killed a schoolmate?
I smell belt onions.
You display shocking ignorance about a recognized medical phenomenon (or more accurately a spectrum of phenomena).
There is a lot of research on biological markers for ADHD. For example, this paper, Millichap, J.G. & Millichap, J.J., (2014). Biological Markers in Diagnosis of ADHD: Biologically Based Nosology for ADHD. Pediatric Neurology Briefs. 28(8s), pp.5–5.
And this one, which looked at brain activity using MRIs.
(There are many papers and articles. I just picked two.)
There are also accepted procedures for a formal diagnosis for ADD and ADHD. Simply having high energy isn’t enough to get the diagnosis. Behavior is considered in different settings, reported and monitored by different people, physical tests may be ordered, and criteria have to be met over a period of time.
The idea that corporal punishment is the best treatment is horrific.
If society has changed to better support people with ADD/ADHD, then that’s a good thing.
These three conditions often co-exist. And I sure hope you don’t have children.
Another thing about ADHD is that until the early 00s, at least in the upper Midwest it seemed to be “diagnosed” only in white children from low-income families. That’s not the case any more. I can’t find a link, but I’ve also heard more than once about schools that automatically referred all children who were not living with both biological parents, regardless of why, for ADHD evaluation, and of course they had to be diagnosed with it, because that’s just the way it is. :dubious:
And ADHD is NOT about violent, antisocial behavior! A child who is beating up other kids, setting fires, acting out sexually, etc. might have ADHD, but that’s not why they act the way they do.
One other thing. An astonishing number of adults have been evaluated and diagnosed with these conditions in the wake of a child, or even a grandchild, receiving such a diagnosis.
I went back to page 1 and realized that this is a zombie thread. Anyway, double-promotion aka grade-skipping is avoided because it causes far, far bigger problems in the kids for whom it’s done than it solves. Ask me how I know that.
There’s a family in my city whose daughter is in high school, and every year they get in the newspaper because they’re convinced that she belongs in the G&T program, and they have her tested but she always falls short, and they threaten to file suit because they believe that the tests are biased in such as way as to keep her out. The newspaper stories never say that the school officials have repeatedly sat these parents down and told them, “Your daughter is not as smart as you think she is” but I’m sure that’s happened.
When I was growing up, holding children back a grade (aka flunking) also seemed to happen only to kids from high-risk or low-income families. I remember a HS classmate from a wealthy family who really belonged in special ed. I know you aren’t supposed to call people “retarded” any more, but she was, and she DID NOT belong in the college track classes, for which she got D’s because the teachers had to give them to her, and not because she was an athlete. It was probably because they would have lost their jobs had they not done this.
When my daughter went through the dx process the very first step was hearing and vision. That was 21 years ago. She went through the entire process of hearing, vision, and speech for ADHD and they told me she didn’t have it but she did test high for dyscalculia. I would have though any testing process would start with those basic tests. The same happened with my 13 year old 10 years ago when she went through Early Childhood to get tested for autism. Hearing and vision checks, then speech, then early childhood psych eval, then neuro, then speech pathologist, occupational therapist, and back to psych. It took almost a year for her diagnosis.
I’m shocked I tell you. It’s a shame all the kids I grew up with weren’t diagnosed with ADHD and drugged into the successful lives they experienced. We didn’t know any better.
Do you think it’s too late to warn them? A prescription for speed is probably just what our hearts need at our age. After all, there’s been a 42% increase in the diagnosis of ADHD in the last 8 years so clearly it’s some kind of epidemic going on. I’m just going to blame the antivaxers or BPA’s.
I can think of a lot of kids I grew up with who were considered the class troublemaker and basically written off at an early age because they were just incorrigible and clearly uninterested in learning or whatever. I wonder how many of these kids would have been able to succeed today with the appropriate support.
Or they were shipped to reform school and then graduated to prison. Or they were drafted in the Vietnam War and either got killed or screwed up further in the head.
Or they wound up like a cousin of mine, killing himself doing wheelies on his motorcycle because ADHD = poor impulse control. Or they ended up like my aunt, self-medicating herself with every kind of booze and cigarette ever made–killing herself in the process. I don’t know if she had ADHD, but she had every other psychiatric disorder in the world, so who knows?
In other words, confirmation bias. Besides, there are plenty of Boomers who seem to be pictures of success, but behind closed doors they are all kinds of fucked-up. Perhaps if they’d gotten fewer whuppins and more therapeutic interventions as a kid, they’d be better human beings today.