The ADD/ADHD Diagnosis And What It Means To Your Child’s Education
Let me start by saying I am not a medical professional nor am I being paid to endorse any product or service. What I am going to give you is my unbiased viewpoint from observing and tutoring hundreds of students one-on-one.
Growing up in a public high school in the 1990s, while at times was stressful and competitive, was at the same time simple. You went to class, you went home and you studied. Some stuff you didn’t understand so you just memorized it, but that was the pattern. You then took the test, remembered what you could and immediately after the test you would forget everything. Yes, there were students who had speech or learning disabilities, but a vast majority of my classmates were really just… kids.
In the 2000s, it seemed that the ADHD “boom” came from doctors and psychiatrists looking at why students struggled with their schoolwork and why they experienced one, or several, of a checklist of study manifestations. (On my ‘how to study‘ page, I mention what causes those manifestations.)
The conclusion was a student’s lack of comprehension had something to do with the brain and that there was a chemical imbalance. Here’s the kicker though: the National Institute of Health says there is no such thing.
If students had trouble remembering what they read or got headaches or felt tired then that led to the ADD/ADHD label. All of a sudden there was a laundry list of behaviors that could place someone under that umbrella. But from my perspective there’s nothing ‘disorder’ about having trouble understanding something that is difficult. If I’m passing out in science class, it’s not because of ADHD, it’s because something happened in that lesson that caused my behavior.
And what has been the solution? Medication, more specifically Ritalin, Adderall and endless other psychotropic drugs that are really amphetamines with dangerous side effects. You did not have an Adderall deficiency so why would you take that drug. Sleep, nutrition and exercise are just a few of things that can counter ADHD symptoms.
In my over 3000 hours of tutoring, in almost every instance of seeing a student not understanding, I never thought, “Oh, this is an ADHD student.” What I observed was this child simply didn’t know how to study!
Because the ADHD diagnosis is now so widely accepted (and misunderstood), students and parents have grown suggestible enough to believe medication is the answer. In fact, thanks to all those television commercials you see and magazine ads you read over 8 million children are being prescribed psychiatric drugs in the USA alone, and that includes 1 million children under age 5!
Of the hundreds of students I have tutored, the ones on the medication have been the slowest. Not because there were naturally slow, but because the medication toned them down. It turned them from an alert child into a monotonous zombie.
Years ago I was tutoring a bright girl who then went to a neurologist who said she was ADHD. She then had to ‘get used to’ her medication. I continued to tutor her, but what happened was her mental math declined, her cognitive processing slowed down and her mood became more wooden.
I had another bright student studying for the ACTs. She had her issues with the test, but she was always engaged with what she was learning. As test day was approaching, she disclosed that she was labeled ADHD even though she never displayed any of your ‘typical’ ADHD signs when I was tutoring her. She was deciding whether or not to ‘take a pill’ the day of the test to give her a boost. My viewpoint is why would you introduce an unknown into your routine when you are already successful?
More recently, I tutored someone who was essentially an honors student, but just like baseball players looked for an edge in ‘the steroid era,’ this student did six hours of ADHD testing only in hopes of getting more time for tests. (He was already finishing his tests in time.)
I am not saying that the symptoms you experience when trying to learn something are bogus, but the brain-based theory behind the cause is the first misdirection, which makes the medication a ‘mis-solution.’ I will continue to tutor ADD/ADHD students, but I will be tutoring the student and not the diagnosis.
You have the potential to learn anything and if you can’t it doesn’t mean you have ADD or ADHD. It means you need to learn the technology of study. We take classes in different areas of knowledge, but we never have classes on how to learn. That is something I always introduce to the struggling student. I will even do a full lesson only on study skills. And then you won’t have to spend hours memorizing something for a test, because you will simply know it.
Check out my how to study page and get some real data about ADHD and child mental disorders.
I can usually pick up within the first few minutes of a lesson what a student’s difficulty is. If they are rubbing eyes, yawning, sluggish I know there is something there. A lot of these manifestations can be misconstrued as ADD/ADHD. While I’ve helped plenty of students who have been given those labels, in each instance, it was simply a lack of knowing HOW to study that came into play. They didn’t see the pothole in the road so they just picked up another dent in their comprehension. One of a tutor’s responsibilities is to smooth out the dents.