ADD/ADHD: 3 Dangerous Myths About Distractible and Hyperactive Children
There’s a lot of information on Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder available today, most of which points essentially in the same direction – medication and professional behavior therapy for your child to cure her abnormality of the brain. Everything sounds persuasive, and is also designed to turn up in the first page of Google whenever a worried parent searches for ‘ADD’ or ‘ADHD’.
But if you have a child with this disorder, you need to know that the ADD/ADHD diagnosis, as well as the prescribed treatment, is controversial. Here are three things we here all the time about ADD/ADHD which go against what we instinctively know to be true, but which a lot of us believe because the people who are saying it are respectable and authoritative:
- Parenting styles don’t matter
That children influence parents just as much as parents influence children, that the advise to ‘love them more’ is nonsense and an insensitive insult to parents of difficult children, that if she doesn’t listen to you it’s because of a disorder in her brain.
This feels so good, but the truth is tough and we must face it. We have almost total power over our children, especially when they are young. We all feel love for our children and try to teach them right from wrong, but children are needy, and some children are needier than others, and they take very, very hard work.
These are choices we make that affect our children’s ability to focus and behave: to let them live with only one natural parent, spend less time with them, and make the TV or computer their primary baby-sitters. Or we might be depressed and not realize the importance of at least pretending to be cheerful around our children if we want them to feel loved. We may not be tactful and courteous with our children, and expect them to listen when we go on without giving them a chance to get a word in (and we accuse them of attention-deficit!). We might talk about their character flaws – or the abnormality of their brains – and not realize that expectations of bad behavior will lead to bad behavior.
On the discipline front, for young children we might not be able to consistently and constantly watch out and control what is unacceptable while encouraging what is good. Also, if we should trouble to give positive attention when they are not misbehaving, and involve them in interesting activities, we will reduce behavior problems.
- Teaching styles don’t matter
That the power to concentrate is inborn and cannot be learnt, that if a child does not learn the usual way she has a disability.
All children, not just children with ADD/ADHD, learn better when the teaching is interesting; all children, and not just ADD/ADHD children, do better in smaller classes; all children do better when there is a lot of hands-on work, and not just writing and reading. When some children act out and are not able to learn in our overcrowded classrooms where you get information mainly from books and show your understanding mainly by writing, it is really fair – or accurate - to say they have a disorder?
Another painful truth is that we parents and teachers often interrupt our children when they do concentrate. Even a two-year old can concentrate on practical things like wearing her own socks and shoes, mopping up a mess on the floor, opening the tube and squeezing out her own toothpaste, for even a quarter of an hour. These activities encourage the coordination of mind and body (one sign of concentration) and let a child focus in a real job, but we offer to help, or tell her she is making a mess or taking too much time, and end up doing the job for her. She will then be told to concentrate on other things which are from her point of view pointless. Why does it surprise us when she develops attention-deficit and low self-esteem?
- The medicines are harmless
That taking them is like taking aspirin for headaches, that they increase positive behavior.
Medicines for ADD/ADHD do make children more manageable and help them get better marks. But that is because they make children more submissive, more compliant, less exploratory and less playful.
Your doctor will probably warn you of physical side-effects like sleeplessness and loss of appetite, and help you manage them. But there are scarier possibilities of psychological side effects. Maybe you’ve been told that abnormal behavior, tics, and suicidal thoughts, are mentioned as side-effects in the drug labels because it’s legally required, but that these rarely happen. You should know that these become more likely when Ritalin (methylphenidate) or Adderall (dextroamphetamine) is prescribed to cure attention and behavior problems that are caused by depression, abuse or trauma.
We say that our parenting and teaching choices have not effect, and that some children cannot even learn to look out for traffic when they cross the road or sit in their chairs at class without being medicated. While some children are harder to teach than others, even autistic children learn to do these things when taught properly. It would be ridiculous if it were not so dangerous! What the ADD/ADHD gurus say is very soothing for parents and teachers, and offers quick results (within half an hour for Ritalin!), but it is based on such lies that we cannot afford to build our lives and our children’s lives on them.
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