When starting school, younger children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD

Re:When starting school, younger children are more likely to... by jonhendry18 on Thursday November 29, 2018 @10:51PM (#18566511)

Personally, I'm a September baby so was relatively young compared to my grade peers.

I got mostly A's in K-6. Once in 4th grade another student pitched a tiny fit about how I always got A's on spelling quizzes.

After that my grades started to decline. I was having trouble with the increasing demands of the work. Graduated high school with a 2.25 GPA or something like that.

In college I was diagnosed with ADD.

The industrial-age education system wasn't a problem for me, until it became a problem for me.

But it really isn't the problem, because ADD can prevent people from being able to focus on things they want to do of their own free will in their own time. Industrial-age education isn't an issue there.

So, being unable to maintain focus especially on the boring bits, they end up sucking at whatever it is, which gets depressing.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When starting school, younger children are more likely to... by wpietri on Thursday November 29, 2018 @11:36PM (#18566710)

Just to be clear, I believe some people have disorders that affect attention. I also believe there's a larger group of people who are just cognitively different. They are fine in some circumstances, not in others.

As an example, I'll note that common characteristics of people with ADHD include hyperfocus [1] and higher creativity [2]. They are also more easily bored. Is this different? Yes. Is it bad? Certainly in the context of the standard educational experience. Do stimulants help? Sure, but they also help everybody cope with boring things. Almost every office in the world has a coffeepot. We have built a system that most people need stimulant drugs to function well. That some people need more or different ones than others to fit the system's needs is unsurprising. I'm just suspicious that the disease model fits it particularly well.

As an analogy, consider who can reach which cabinets. We just accept that there's a pretty wide normal variation in human height; some people can reach higher shelves than others. We also recognize that kids grow taller. If we started declaring kids below the median height had "Height Deficiency Disorder" and started giving them growth hormones because they couldn't reach the top shelves, that would be pretty sinister. Especially when that happened to the ones who were just younger in their grade, and therefore naturally shorter. Especially when it's possible to build cabinets differently, to provide assistive devices, and to help short kids learn how to deal.

So yes, we definitely don't want kids to fail. But I would like us to treat medication as a last resort, and to start being more accepting of neurodiversity.

[1] https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/hyperfocus-flow

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/here-there-and-every...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When starting school, younger children are more likely to... by ts1543636885 on Friday November 30, 2018 @11:17PM (#18575120)

The spread in executive functioning and other attributes between ADHD sufferer and non- is WAY wider than the spread between tallest and shortest person.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:When starting school, younger children are more likely to... by wpietri on Saturday December 01, 2018 @11:39PM (#18580834)

I would be interested to see your data for that. But even so, so what? | There are plenty of human characteristics that have wider variation. Nobody's diagnosing people with European Skin Syndrome despite the way white people can't handle reasonable amounts of sun and are highly prone to cancer.

Also, it's an analogy, and not meant to be taken literally. It's just meant to give people a feel for what unnecessary medicalization might be like.

[ Parent | on HN ]