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I've seen a few of these in my life (both personally and as a treating physician) and have a few coworkers who meet this description. The classic example is boys who are a little too male for our current teaching paradigms. Think poor behavioral regulation or ADHD. If they have a supportive home environment and intellectual reserve it is very possible they'll stay out of just enough trouble/troubling behavioral patterns for their frontal lobe to develop and adequate coping skills/treatment to come into play.
Then they end up being productive members of society.
The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen, then they fall out of society. School alone is pretty ineffective at covering that but you do need both.
I had all the classic traits of childhood ADHD : Loud mouth yapper, easily distracted and stress-driven ultra focus. Home support alone could not have saved me. My parents had no idea what they were dealing with. The problem wasn't caused by them either. I got the same standard strict-south-Asian upbringing that turned my peers & cousins turned into compliant adults.
School should provide initial resources to help students understand their quirks. The 0->1 step can be huge, and that's where schools have the most impact. Additionally, schools see 100s of kids a year. They're best equipped to pattern match the student to their unique quirks.
Some kids can't be a fixed by parents alone.
I suspect the same. My dad was a know-it-all Tarzan incarnate. He was always outdoors and would spend his summer in forests (literally) collecting dead butterflies & hunting rabbits. ADHD is passed down dad-to-son, and I suspect he had it too. But back in his day, he could could get all his physical energy out. I grew up in a school without a yard. Sports were banned. The contrast couldn't be starker.
I've recently found drums to be the best way to exhaust ADHD energy. Strongly recommend. That's a couple of positive anecdotes towards - "ADHD people need something to exhaust their physical energy on".
Agreed. As much as school can help equip parents and do the 101, the rest of the struggle is on the parents & the child. The school can't be handholding the child through 12 years of special education. It's not sustainable. (I can feel a suburban-sprawl / car-culture / death of community rant welling up in me. Imma shut up)
With all that being said, ADHD meds are a game changer and should be viewed as complementary to behavioral interventions.
The first time I took Vyvanse, I was bewildered by new abilities that my siblings & friends insisted all normal people are able to do without extra meds. Most importantly, the meds got my life in order so that I could spare time for learning good habits. The meds helped me follow routines, and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not. Nowadays, I skip my meds on the regular and can still salvage 70% day in a way that I never could before. I wish I'd gotten started 20 years ago. Even if I'd weaned off them, school and college would've been manageable. I would've had fewer struggles with bullying, basic orderliness and studying subjects that my ADHD brain had deemed uninteresting.
Yes!
People with a good enough "life" (genetics, money, family support, intellectual reserve, whatever) can often do well or age out with enough time to establish "normal" life patterns and for some general brain development.
Even anti-socials often age out of a lot of the bad behavior.
Institutions that help with this can work! ...but are not always worth the costs.
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I was one of those who made it. My snappy way of putting it is that I don't have to thank a teacher for being able to read but I do have to thank a Head Start speech therapist for being able to talk.
I wound up back in special ed as a Kindergartener for bad behavior/ADHD. There were IEPs, some of them were farcical. At some point they had me IQ tested and decided that I was "talented and gifted" (I have a severe loathing for that term, because my sister wasn't, and our mother wrecked her for failing to match that.). Supportive home environment? Not really, though my grandparents were great. It was a lot like Hillbilly Elegy with the characters and dysfunctions shuffled, maybe a bit worse. I did have the intellectual reserve to get away with being a terribly lazy/inefficient student. Even in the worst of times, there was this weird dichotomy where I was this awful pain in the ass kid, but also the kid who could and was glad to fix their computers (mostly dumb issues like "this isn't plugged in", but I wound up working as an assistant for the computer lab in place of study hall and was pretty good at basic PC troubleshooting and repair). I'm not proud of this in retrospect, but the elementary teachers got variable results out of me. The ones who were able to elicit my affection/desire to please instead of resentment through failed attempts to intimidate generally got along fine with me. Odd as it may seem given how much I hated school, I remember all of them fondly.
If I have to credit anyone for my successful reform, it was my middle school and in particular grades 6-8 teachers. They were a bunch of veterans who more or less ran their own show independent of the office, and were thus able/willing to strike their own bargain without involving the office or my mother. They were tough and strict, but fair, and never took anything personally. The bargain was simple: "We catch you breaking the rules, you suffer the punishment.". I liked leaning back in my chair (against the rules), so I incurred a bunch of glossary pages (to the point that I still remember the page number, 746) and paddlings, but it wasn't personal. I was released from special ed by 7th grade and upon graduating 8th grade the vice principal, my old nemesis, called me his "greatest success story". I was privileged as a high school student (in a "math and science" boarding school) to have the opportunity to go back and help the elementary literacy teacher set up her computers before each school year. I was a pain in the ass student; it was the least I could've done.
Am I a success? Eh...I'm not dead or in jail as I was expected to be. Did I live up to my college education? Also no. I rode an easy gravy train (locally owned food delivery company) after being a crippled alcoholic in my early 20s. The gravy train ended and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm not optimistic, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
As for ADHD, I mostly don't notice it as an adult unless I'm badly emotionally regulated (lol where does PTSD end and ADHD begin?) or in an unfamiliar situation where I haven't been able to set up a construct to work around it. At my best (owner's crony/best producer at a food delivery company) I am actually very structured and relentlessly organized/detail oriented.
In my current gig (draft beer repair/service technician) I am lauded for my excellent communication skills because I take the time to document/explain what I'm doing to on-site managers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything special, just explaining to the customer what I'm doing/need to do, and why that is, essentially telling them what they're paying for and why they need this or that thing done.
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I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.
IIRC from my deep dive into ADHD skepticism-
some cases of ADHD diagnosis are actually hearing or vision related issues that will resolve themselves, and these are very common in elementary school aged boys. Experienced elementary teachers tend to have lower rates of ADHD diagnoses in their classes because they deal with these by adjusting the seating chart first, and that’s usually enough to route around the problem.
ADHD diagnoses are much higher in boys born just after the age cutoff than in boys born just before it- that is, cases are concentrated among the youngest boys in a given class.
ADHD as a thing that the system worries about is globally correlated with treating elementary school in a seriously academic way, with grades, homework, etc. The US is a global outlier in both respects.
The medications in use improve focus and make behavior easier at the cost of side effects regardless of ADHD; teachers are strongly incentivized to get kids on them to make their jobs easier, and they deliver higher grades anyways, so parents usually don’t complain. Doctors who always make the diagnosis and write the scrip are known to the school systems and sometimes recommended by them.
Countries which don’t think ADHD is real are doing fine academically.
The TDLR is that there’s a lot of things going into the ADHD overdiagnosis issue beyond ‘why don’t I have a classroom full of girls’ moaning by teachers.
Do you have more info on countries that don't diagnose ADHD? This seems like the kind of thing that is very culture bound in a fascinating way.
I can remember that France was one, I think, but this is all memories from a deep dive several years ago. I concluded that while ADHD probably is real, most cases are some other issue being misdiagnosed and it shouldn’t be considered a possibility before high school. Oh, and I remembered that the diagnosis patterns by ethnicity don’t match any of the usual patterns- blacks get the least but Asians don’t have an elevated rate, it’s a whites and Indians(both kinds) thing.
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I mean I'm just here to say it works SOMETIMES.
I suspect that part of the problem is the refusal to give up on anybody leaving everyone behind, as is common elsewhere.
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