ADHD Diagnosis and Behavior Expectations, Revisited
Original Article published on Today Book, Quotes by Peg Tyre, from her book The Trouble With Boys
“According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2003, 14 percent of boys across the nation were identified as having ADHD by they time they reached their sixteenth birthday. And the percentage is continuing to grow. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of boys from birth to age nineteen who were being prescribed ADHD medication grew 48 percent. That such large numbers of boys are being diagnosed with a central nervous system disorder suggests two things: Either we are witnessing the largest pandemic in our country since influenza struck in the United States in 1918, or school-age boys are being overidentified and overdiagnosed.”
While ADHD and ADD have been in our vocabulary for years, and associated with off task children, mostly boys, it seems once again developmental issues are overlooked in the classroom;
“Kindergarten and the first half of first grade were a breeze. Back then, Kai’s teacher had nothing but wonderful things to say about him. Shortly after Christmas break, though, Kelley and Tim Farquhar, who live in a suburb outside Kansas City, noticed that Kai was struggling to get his math and writing homework done. “Writing has always been a problem since he can’t really control his pencil yet,” says Kelley, who works in a bank. She gives a little laugh. “He’s got the handwriting of a serial killer.” He’s also bored to death with the drill-it-till-you-kill-it approach to math homework. “The same problems, with the same numbers over and over again,” says Kelley. “We’ve had lots of tears — both his and mine.””
Pediatric Occupational Therapists will confirm that this is not an attention problem, rather a problem of neurological development. It can not be cured, trained or a child’s development accelerated by medication! Children develop at different rates both academically and physically. A child who is reading way beyond his grade level can still struggle with maturity and body control. Asynchronous Development is not a disease, rather another example of school demands being greater than ability of children.
“I can’t complete a journal entry,” Kai confesses, his blue eyes and thick eyelashes growing moist. Why not? He thinks for a minute, then looks down at his hand, which often starts to ache when he writes for a long time. “Oh, man!” he says, flexing his fingers. “I just get sick of doing it!”
Schools are ignoring the demand for more physical development allowances while still pushing an agenda of more earlier and earlier. There are great things about finger painting, we are missing development milestones when we cut to the pencil. Just because our school system has been evolving, our bodies are adjusting at this speed. This created a negative feedback system; children can’t preform and get caught in a diagnosis crisis.
“What parents, psychologists, and physicians forget is that when a teacher checks off “Often” next to “Climbs excessively” she is saying something about your son but she is saying more about her expectations for your son’s behavior in her class. As schools ratchet up their expectations, says Lawrence Diller, a psychiatrist in the Bay Area who has been an outspoken critic of the ADHD industry, “more kids — and particularly more boys — look as if they might have a problem. Teachers now demand a standardized level of performance from all students. Many can’t tolerate too much motion, too much noise, too many questions — even within the range of normal — if it interferes with the pace of their class. They forget what’s normal.”
While the author of the full article has the subject of ADHD in mind, it is also often over looked about disorders in Sensory Integration. Again, one can argue that the demands being too high too soon will bring on less desirable behaviors. What is it, a disorder in development, or behaviors because demands are incompatible with normal neurological development? In both ADHD and SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) behaviors are symptoms of a bigger problem, not behaviors that are A disease or disorder. Looking at the environment that the behavior manifest is a key to the answers.
To read the full article click here.
To read more about Peg Tyre click here.
