By: Christina Wood newsletter@lm.kaboose.com
My son is not hyperactive. He's very calm. He's curious, bright, and a lot of fun to be around. So I was startled (okay, angry) when his kindergarten teacher called me in for a conference and made it clear that she thought there was something wrong with him. "He has trouble staying on task. He never pays attention," she said.
Then I heard the words "pediatrician" and "evaluated for attention issues," looked at the list of behavior problems she was handing me and saw red. The list included things like "humming" and "twitchy." I had liked his teacher up to that point. And I knew Cole was willful, but I didn't accept that he would fall behind in school, or the implication that he had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD.) "He needs more of a challenge," I told her. I refused to have him evaluated by a pediatrician, who I assumed would give him a pill so he could drone through a stifling setting.
I tried to ignore the whole thing. Cole turned on the charm with his teachers and got through kindergarten that way.
The same thing happened in first grade. He learned to read just fine. He quickly got very good at math. He kept up with—in fact was mostly ahead of—the rest of the class. But he didn't finish work and rarely appeared to be paying attention. If he's keeping up, I wanted to know, what's the big deal?
"It's a big deal because his self-image could be seriously damaged by the way the world reacts to him," explains Patricia Quinn, a developmental pediatrician in the Washington, D.C. area and the author of many books on ADHD including Putting on the Brakes: Young People's Guide to Understanding Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder. "I once evaluated a three-year old with ADHD who was also very bright," she continues. "The first thing he told me was that he was bad. 'Dr. Quinn,' he said. 'When people yell at you all day long, you must be bad.'"
By the middle of first grade, I knew this all too well. Cole's teacher and I had tried everything from reward systems to punishments to get him to finish his work. He would do it long enough to demonstrate that he could but it was not consistent. As a result, he was always in trouble.
One day, I went to school to visit him at "Fun Day" and found him in the classroom refusing to complete a test. I looked at it. It should have been easy for him. I decided right then that this couldn't go on. So I asked him if he wanted to finish the test and go to fun day or come home with me. "I have to get 100 percent to go to fun day," he told me, miserable. "Just finish it," I said. "If you don't get 100 percent, we'll go to the playground." He perked up, answered all the questions as quickly as he could, got 100 percent, and went to fun day. But I'd made up my mind; he was being treated like a bad kid. Whether it was because he was bright and bored or had ADHD wasn't the point. It had to stop. But how?
"School is the least ADHD friendly place in the world," agrees Quinn. "But it is what we have." She explained that there are myriad ways to cope depending on the child, the diagnosis, the parent's situation, and the school system. What's the same in every case where a child is being called out as a problem is that you must deal with it—the sooner the better.
"You have a window between when they are about five to 10 or 11 years old to treat this before it starts to affect their self esteem in some permanent ways," cautions Janet Z. Giler, Ph.D., a California family therapist, educator, and author of an Attention Deficit Disorder website (www.ld-add.com) established to help parents recognize and manage ADHD and learning disabilities in children.
I called the therapist who'd been recommended to me the year before. I was now thinking in terms of finding strategies for dealing with the education system rather than avoiding a diagnosis for ADHD. But I wish I'd gotten to that point a year earlier.
"Teachers have a pretty good frame of reference when it comes to identifying behaviors and symptoms since they see a lot of children from year to year," says Quinn. But these behaviors can have a lot of different explanations other than ADHD. "Child abuse can look like ADHD," offers Giler, "Depression can look like it. A child who hasn't been socialized before getting to school may be withdrawn or distractible. Children who are very bright and bored can look like they have attention problems."
And taking a pill is not the only solution. "Medication is too easy an answer," says Quinn. "This is about self-knowledge. If you know yourself well enough to know that you can't focus on boring tasks, you make sure you don't choose a career that requires you to focus on boring tasks. It is the same with a child." I was starting to see how these same factors had shaped my own life. Maybe I was the right person to help him deal with this.
I don't yet know the right answer but I know the wrong one—ignoring it. Maybe the solution is to give him a motive for completing those boring tasks—a reward system of some kind that is the same at home and at school. More likely a different type of classroom is the answer for him. I'm considering private schools, an inquiry-based charter school, a magnet school for math and science, and home schooling. We may end up trying all of these options and more between now and college.
"It sounds like you are on the right track," Quinn assures me. "At least you aren't in denial anymore."
Eventually this can be a good thing, she counsels. "If [your son] wants to be a CEO, a lot of these traits will be very useful. And then he can hire people to do all the boring things that need to get done."
But between now and then he has to get an education and continue to believe, as I do, that's he's not a bad kid. Quinn helped me to see that I have a lot of experience with this and that Cole probably comes to his "attention problems" through genetics. (There isn't one of us on either side of the family that would choose to be an accountant. We are a creative bunch and we lose our car keys frequently. But that also means we have a lot of knowledge of what worked for us--and what didn't--to draw from.)
Whatever the doctor we visit calls Cole's "problem" no longer matters to me—except that it might be a useful tool—because I no longer see it as a problem. I see it as a challenge and, like Cole, I like things to be challenging rather than boring. So even if he isn't a good fit for the school system, he's a great fit for this family. I just have to make sure he knows that. Share this post :
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