Are ADD and ADHD Real?

Please leave your comments, i believe that ADHD is a medical scam, What do you think? Let me know.-Robert Heard

The diagnosis of children with ADD and ADHD is becoming a widespread problem today.  Most people do now know that ADD and ADHD are psychiatric diagnoses rather than medical diagnoses.  A child cannot be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD unless they have 6 or more of 18 symptoms listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition (DSM-IV for short).  As a trained counselor, I was surprised that so many children are being diagnosed with this disorder until I realized that all you have to do is meet 6 of these in the opinion of the person doing the diagnosis. When looking at the list, it dawned on me how easy it would be for someone who did not understand children and their basic natures to render a diagnosis of ADD/ADHD.  I have personally seen cases where ADD/ADHD was diagnosed in which my personal opinion differed from the person doing the diagnosis.  If you are diagnosed by one person, you have it, and if you are diagnosed by someone else, you don’t.  It’s all a matter of whether the parent or clinician perceives that child being a lot of trouble, because the criteria state that there MUST be CLEAR evidence of impairment at home, school, and work.  Now, if an adult is good at helping a child deal with his temperament by altering his/her environment so that he/she is more successful, then that impairment won’t show up.  But if an adult expects a child to be able to function in any environment they are placed in without performing behaviors which constitute “acting up” (in their opinion), then the impairment WILL show up.  A simple example is that, if you are an adult who believes that “children should be seen and not heard” then a child who is enthusiastic and unable to control his talking and movement at times because of his excitement might be considered by you to be a candidate for this diagnosis.  On the other hand, if you are an adult who knows that children by their very nature are SUPPOSED to be easily excited, and that this is a healthy part of their development, then you will not perceive this as a problem.  As a teacher of attachment parenting classes for new parents, I find that parents are often amazed by the huge amount of work it is to take care of a child.  You have to be there all the time.  Children are curious and need to explore their environments….that’s how their brains are wired.  As a result, they often get into things.  But many parents, instead of allowing this very important exploratory behavior and following along to make sure the child is safe while he/she explores, want to limit it because it’s a lot of work to follow the child around all the time.  But that’s what parents are supposed to do – facilitate their child’s success in whatever environment they are in, so they can grow up feeling good about themselves and their abilities.  Instead, parents would rather give the child a drug like Ritalin so that they (the parents) don’t have so much work, so their child is more placid, and their senses dulled so they can’t perceive their environment in the wonderful, stimulating way they did before.

My oldest son was always extremely active as a child.  From the time he was born, until he was 5 or 6, I was always his sunday school teacher because I knew that the other teachers would not understand him and would limit him.  As he went from 2-3 to 4-5 years of age, I just moved up from one sunday school class to the other so that I could teach him and give him success rather than failure.  While many of the other children did sit still in their chairs more often than my son, I knew how to regain his attention when it was wandering, and would take the time to do that.  I had developed a teaching style that accommodated that and therefore didn’t make him feel he was a failure all the time.

Once we went to a traveling carnival that came near our town, and my son and I were standing in line so that he could ride the ponies.  He was about 3 years old.  He was so excited he could not contain himself.  He had never ridden a pony, never even been close to a horse, and the thought that he was going to be able to was an exciting thought.  As we stood in line, we talked about what it was going to be like, and he danced around, jumped up and down, and was so happy and excited.  Then I looked at all the parents and children standing in line in front of us.  All the children were standing there like little sticks, holding their parents hands and being very still.  Instead of thinking, “Wow, there is something wrong with my child because he can’t stand still like that” I thought “How sad that the natural enthusiasm of these children has been squelched so that they are not allowed to express their natural excitement.”  When did it become wrong for children to be children?  Yes, they are immature, they become easily excited, they can’t stand still, they don’t have good self-control……that’s what being a child is all about.  We shouldn’t expect them to be little adults.  Two hundred years ago, a parent would have laughed at you if you had implied that children should be expected to sit still inside and play quietly and not interrupt adult activity.  That’s simply not reality.  But in our cultured, educated, polite, sit-down society that we live in, that is what is valued.  Children live in apartments in cities where they can’t roam around and play outside, or they are confined to daycares and classrooms all day long where they cannot let their natural impulses be indulged.  In that environment, of course adults are going to want children quiet and always in control of themselves.  I believe such a state of affairs really does a disservice to the child.  We can’t blame the child for not being able to operate within the unnatural environment we have set up for them to live in.  They (the children) are simply trying to express what is necessary for them to have good physical, intellectual, and emotional health, and we as adults are not listening.

When my child was 5 or 6, I finally allowed him to go into a regular sunday school classroom without being his teacher myself.  After a couple of weeks, the teacher came to me and said, ” I think your child needs to be tested or something.  What is wrong with him?  He can’t sit in his seat and be still like the other children.  He doesn’t pay attention when I am trying to teach.”  I told her politely that no, he did not need to be tested, that he was simply behaving normally for his age level.  I told her that even though he was not always in his seat, that he WAS listening and paying attention (I had learned that I could ask him questions about what had been taught, and he knew what the teacher had been saying, and HAD been listening….it’s just that he needs a lot of movement while learning).  I told her that if she would alter her teaching style just a little bit to accommodate this, there would be no problems.  Needless to say, she wasn’t happy with having to do this, so I just removed him from her class.

As a parent, I chose to homeschool my child to protect him from the failure I knew was imminent in the social and educational environment he would have had to endure.  As a teenager, he was enrolled in a private school.  It was his choice to go into this environment, knowing the challenges he would face.   But after trying to live and work in that environment, had having real struggles in some subject areas, mainly math, because of the extremely structured environment, the high expectations of success, and the unwillingness for teachers to alter their teaching styles to accomodate different learning needs, he agreed that it would be better for him to finish his schooling at home.

Of course, there are a FEW children who, even though they are given opportunities for this natural growth, do still have a problem focusing on the tasks before them, even though those tasks are appropriate to their age and development.  For those children, please do not run to the drug store for some Ritalin.  Please try to find the underlying CAUSE of the ADD or ADHD.  Yes, these conditions do have a cause.  Your child does NOT have to be condemned to a life of failure.  Please read the next article “Causes of True ADD and ADHD.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 8:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.