How often have you heard…
- When I was a child there was no such thing as ADHD.
- ADHD is not a real thing. These children simply need less sugar, less technology and more discipline.
- Parents need to stop blaming their child’s behavior problems on ADHD and start disciplining them.
The statements above represent how several people view ADHD. Some don’t believe it deserves an acronym because some don’t believe it is a disorder, they simply believe it is bad parenting. While I agree that many things can create ADHD like symptoms, ADHD is very real. We are not seeing more children with ADHD, we are seeing a new world that has caused the true symptoms of ADHD to boil over.
Think of it this way. When we plant a seed in the ground, it does not grow until it is watered. Our fast-forward, technology-rich society has watered the brains of our children and while some sprouts used to pop up here and there, we have now created nutrient-rich soil with the water needed to grow lots of plants. Our new world is growing our ADHD brains.
But, the ADHD brain is not bad! Far from it. The ADHD brain is simply different.
When I work with parents of ADHD children I use the zip-line analogy. Inside the brain of ADHD children are thousands of zip-lines. If something is not strong enough to hold their attention they will simply zip-line to something more exciting. In years past, we could hold our children’s attention much longer because quite frankly, our world was more boring. We did not have everything at our finger tips. If we wanted to learn about The Big Dipper we could either look in our textbooks, go to the library or leaf through our handy-dandy encyclopedias and read three to five paragraphs in summary. Today we simply type The Big Dipper into our computers and we might as well be standing in the constellation itself. We are instantly given pictures, videos, activities and interactive, everything imaginable in seconds. Whether we like it or not, this new world is far from boring. It is fast, it is innovative, it is creative and it is interesting.
This technology burst has created all sorts of change. Our transportation is safer, faster and more efficient. Our form of communication is instantaneous. Our creativity is endless. But our education system, for the most part, has not changed. Don’t get me wrong, there are amazing teachers, but they are up against an archaic education system. Children are expected to sit in their chairs for hours listening to teachers lecture about things we have been teaching for years. Not only that, we expect this to happen at a younger age. When our kindergartners should be outside running, playing and exploring, we are expecting them to sit while writing letters and numbers. We have taken away recess, physical education and the arts. We send children home with hours of mindless homework and wonder why we see behavior problems. For a child that does not have ADHD this might seem boring, but it is doable. They fit into the box and while it might be dark and mindless, they learn to live with it. That is not the case with an ADHD brain.