I tried therapy for a couple years and it seemed like any time I brought up anything, I was being pushed to blame my dad. I felt like it was going to drive a wedge between us and my opinion of who he is today would be colored by who he was 30-40 years ago due to all this blame. He has changed a lot in those decades and I think his heart is in the right place, even if his actions sometimes call that into question.

Keyed off by a YouTube video, I thought there is a good chance I have autism and ADHD. I brought this up to the therapist and it was mostly dismissed, while my dad shouldered the blame. I went and got tested anyway, and it turns out I was right, and stopped seeing the therapist.

When I told my dad about my diagnosis he almost instantly started to question if he has the same things, and started opening up about how he feels, that he works hard to hide/mask. The more he’s looked into it, the more he believes this to be true. Looking back at where we had friction when I was a kid, they can pretty much all be explained by his own neurodivergence. Even issues today make significantly more sense.

While it is easy to say the parents should have done this or that and we need to have empathy for these kids with “bad” parents. I think we also need to have empathy for these undiagnosed parents who were doing the best they could without any tools, support, or even knowledge of what was going on… as the diagnosis criteria was either non-existent or only recognized extreme cases.

The point is: there isn't a "right" way. That's exactly what the author is trying to say. By failing to recognize the ways in which they were different, they forced a mode upon them and here we are. A whole medicalized generation addicted to stimulants trying to fit in where in past generations you had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo.

> in past generations you had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo

I get what you’re saying, but parents of ADHD children are looking to help them become adults that can function in society and be independent without the struggles that are often accompanied with ADHD: addiction and self-destructive choices.

A lot of the types of people that you mention — rebels, seekers, misfits — I feel are generally less happy individuals, and might chose a different path for themselves if they had the right opportunities and tools.

Sure they might make life interesting for others, and maybe “interesting” is a word they might describe for their own life. And what often makes them “interesting”, looking from the outside, is that they are addicted and/or self-destructive.

But are they ultimately happy, and is it the life they really wanted for themselves?

That’s what parents struggle with. If they know their child will be happy with addiction, self-destruction, and being “interesting”, maybe it would be easier to not worry about or try to help them with their struggles with ADHD.

But most parents think their children will want a different life, and so they also want that for them.

Maybe it is just my subjective experiences in life and who I happened to meet, but people most would classify as "seekers and misfits" tend to have smiles on their faces more often than people who look just like everyone else.

But which way does the causality run?

> The point is: there isn't a "right" way.

I can tell you at least one “wrong way” though, which is to completely ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

That’s what my parents did and it’s extremely frustrating to deal with as an adult. Logically I understand there’s no value in living in the past, but the “what if” thoughts will nag me forever.

What if instead of failing out of high school and getting a GED, I could have been an honor roll student and go to the college of my dreams? Things like that.

The other problem is that I somehow lucked into a great, well-paying career, so now they just say “what’s the problem, everything worked out!”.

Right? Like what if the parents of a child who's legs didn't work just pretended they did? How would that play out? Probably would end with a phone call to CPS.

Ignoring mental differences is not a solution to the problem. I've met too many parents who are afraid to get a diagnosis because "what if they have it".

There isn't a right way yo parent kids with ADHD. It's going to be something you have to work on together. But pretending it doesn't exist can only bring misery for all involved.

Well why don't you go to the college of your dreams now? Or does it only work when other people work and pay for it?

I have no academic basis to apply to a top school, and to be honest the more annoying part is that I missed out on 4 years of the college experience that I got to watch my friends have from the sidelines.

I don’t understand your point about who pays for it, sorry.

> have no academic basis to apply to a top school

Then what exactly are you complaining about? You clearly didn't deserve that college experience.

Why do you say that?

Because you just said you didn't.

I guess maybe I wasn’t clear, my point was that if I had been given the chance to succeed academically from an early age, given my condition, my life could have been significantly different.

Or do you not believe ADHD is a real thing?

I agree that we have over medicalized many conditions and over prescribed psychoactive drugs but let's not romanticize past generations. Very few of those misfits became artists or rebels or seekers who did anything interesting or challenged the status quo. Lots of them ended up homeless or addicted or incarcerated or dead in motorcycle crashes. I have some of those in my own extended family and it's tragic to see them continuously fail, sometimes in ways that have disastrous consequences for the innocent people around them. You're looking for the successes and not seeing the failures (selection bias).

> had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo.

It's definitely interesting to read stories about such people, especially those that lived long ago or are fictional characters in the first place. The notion of being a misfit is romantic and gratifies our imagination. However, what those "misfits" and "rebels" actually were is people who suffered, or caused everyone around them to suffer, or both. Few of them, or those in their proximity, enjoyed their fate.

Are such people important to society? In some cases, yes. Do I want to be such an important person? No thank you, I'll happily read about them on the news.

I disagree. The author is clearly stating that he was not compatible with his parents’ way of raising him. So he is saying their way was “wrong”, and this implies that there is a “right” way, or at least “not wrong” way. I just feel really bad for the parents.

I don't think you meant it but I don't like how you phrased it. That in the past if you were to have ADHD, you'd be an artist or a rebel and so on, implying that it is something cool. And that nowadays it's just addiction to stimulants.

I know of quite few colleagues and friends with ADHD who need stimulants to get anything done at all, even to get out from their bed. Who were treated unsuccessfully for anxiety, depression, when all their symptoms vanished after getting on meds.

ADHD not to everyone is something quirky, to some people it can be utterly debilitating and devastating condition.

I wonder how much room there is for misfits these days. Young people have to nail it or fail with a high student debt burden.

I think in the past we missed a language to label the "weird" and unproductive people. But I know of communities were it was common for an employer to "hire" such people for a period, then pass the buck to another employer. Now the thing is, in the past, it was for the public normal to see a commercial enterprise as a social enterprise too.

Nothing of that is left anymore in today's Management Schools. In the technocratic thought of Nazism it started by just killing "unsocial elements" (read: people with disabilities).

  The Euthanasia Program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which individuals with disabilities should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Infants and small children with disabilities were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.

  (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-disabilities)

Okay, that escalated quickly. But talking about fitting in has to answer what it means to be human. And if we as society are actually at ease with people that are not as productive in current business processes. We obviously don't want to kill them, but on the other hand we require them to be "normal". Helping kids learning/trying to adapt a bit is not bad per se. But can we handle it when it doesn't work?

That hasn’t entirely gone away, it’s just taken up the guise of empathy now. Canada’s MAID program seeks to euthanize people for mental health issues, and it is my believe that it has already been successful in suckering many that would not otherwise go through with anything into ending their lives.

Although it is ostensibly not yet approved for mental illness, it appears that the standards in practice are lax, and that some amount of patients that start out seeking treatment for depression are convinced by their doctors to exaggerate other conditions to get approved for MAID.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/vancouve...

Blaming the parents doesn’t matter anyways. The author, and the rest of us, are adults and responsible for ourselves. If those problems we bear are a byproduct of our upbringing we still are the ones responsible for dealing with those problems. Sure it’s unfair but you can complain about it or learn to accept those experiences made you who you are.

The text doesn't read as if he's blaming his parents for anything. It seems to be a pretty neutral acknowledgement of past harms so he can move past them. Any "blame" you're reading into it is purely coming from your own perspective. He's pretty explicit about that:

> Yet I forgave: I have other things to attend to if I truly want to get over what happened.

I'd say his recovery/therapy is going pretty well. His perspective on the situation seems healthier than yours.

I would not recommend anyone to massively oversimplify and pass judgement on someone else’s life situation

They f you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra just for you.

But they were f'd up in their turn, By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern, And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

- Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

i would recommend two things for adhd . labels diagnosis lables are waste of time . if you are lucky enough to live somewhere where the schools will provide evidence based help amazing. if not and you have the double dose of adhd and dyslexia, do your own research find other people / families with similar issues . it's amazing to watch two kids with adhd realizing they actually like the other kid and they think like me.

> diagnosis [...] are waste of time

> schools will provide evidence based help

In many places you need the former to get the latter.

It's a very difficult job to do right, but some of the ways you can get it wrong are pretty damn easy to avoid. Like, it should be obvious that you don't double down on strategies that produce no results other than distressing your kid.

Making excuses for abuse is just as unhealthy as seeing it everywhere.

I have been diagnosed both autistic and adhd and I experienced food insecurity despite living in a house with several balconies and a detached garage bigger than my friends' families' houses because my parents thought I would get over it and start going out to eat with them if they didn't bring me any food. I don't think they intended deliberately to harm me - or realize that me not going out to eat with them didn't mean there was enough food - but their authoritarian way of thinking did the harm nonetheless and it's a completely predictable outcome of such a way of thinking; so it's not "I didn't mean it" so much as "I don't want to think differently because I value my attachment to this mode of thinking more than the wellbeing of others; and when I harm them I'll say 'nothing could be done' because changing how I approach the problem isn't on the table".

The healthiest thing most autistic/adhd people ever do is moving from 'I am sick' to 'the society I inhabit has an autoimmune disorder'.

All three of my kids are neurodivergent. If they have suffered from my parenting, they are more than welcome to blame me.

Sure, parenting kids with ADHD or Autism or whatever else is hard, but that doesn't make one a Saint and therefore unassailable. If comeuppance is due, it's due.

I agree, I mean that it is almost impossible not to fail at from the child’s perspective.

I blame the structure of society for this. When kid wants to spend time with animals, friends and just be in nature - we can only offer more classes and screens.

there are other options, though. most choose not to take the hard path of choosing them

Imagine you're a 10 year old in a typical suburb in the US. There might be a pet dog or cat around if you're lucky, but nothing even at the level of a goat or chicken, let alone something wilder.

Your nearest friend is two-three miles away. Not walkable at your age for sure. Maybe bikeable, but your parents watch Fox News and know that sex slavers from the city are on constant patrol for juicy morsels like you, so you stay in the house. (Even if your parents have a basic grasp of statistics, your neighbors don't and will call CPS before you make it a block from your door, if a "block" even existed for you.)

Genuinely, what would you do in this situation? This is _normal_ for a depressingly huge number of children in the US. There's school and there's the video games in the basement.

Adults can drive. There are no other options for kids.

what you are saying has nothing to do at all with my comment.

the parents have a choice, but they choose not to take it (or pretend not to see it).

From the article:

> Instead, they relied on discipline as the only solution: withholding rights, denying privileges, banning books outside the curriculum because they "caused inattention," cutting off the internet, locking TV channels with passwords, and limiting socialization during study time.

I'm perfectly inclined here to agree with the author in blaming the parents for putting the child in a borderline abusive environment because they were unable to look outside their own views for the sake of their child.

Punishment should never be so big that it cripples the child. Social deprivation as a punishment (no socialization, no internet, even no books), how could that possibly not harm someone's development?

It really depends on how long study time is. That sounds like proper parenting so long as we're talking like an hour or two.

Limiting socialisation for short time to focus is one thing, but a complete ban on reading outside the curriculum is hugely damaging to a child's education and happiness.

Are you sure banning books outside the curriculum is proper parenting because what I'm reading is thought control.

I bet this wasn't denying access to books outside the curriculum because they're bad influence or something - it was merely about making sure they did also read the books assigned to them by the school. It actually looks like following standard productivity advice - eliminating distraction. The kid could go back to reading whatever after the required job was done.

Wait where did you go little boy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42899018

if the author really has ADHD, he's blind to half (or more) the things the parents did and especially to why they did them. not his choice, that's how ADHD works, doesn't make it any easier for anyone.

you'd want to read parents' rebuttal, or at least commentary before judging them based on this post.

I didn’t read the author as blaming, and I can relate to what they’re saying. It’s hard to speak about a childhood full of abuses that thought they had your best interests at heart. I was locked in my room for days on end (sometimes back-to-back stints for weeks), deprived of privileges/books/music, berated, demeaned, and ultimately gaslit, throughout my childhood, because my parents didn’t really understand ADHD (or that I had it). It created a pretty big mismatch between expectations and reality. As a kid, I resented them a lot for this. As an adult (and parent), I realize what it must have looked like to them and I can empathize without condoning their behavior.

My performance is heavily bimodal: my adult ADHD assessment included scores in the 98th percentile and the 8th depending on the task. I also have an extremely wandering mind. Taken together, it seemed to my parents that I was a brilliant child who simply “refused to work hard”. This was not only toxic for my relationship with them, it poisoned my self-image and ability to relate to others for the first two decades of my life.

Any resentment I might have over that is ultimately misplaced. They were loving and caring parents who missed the mark in a way that just so happened to fundamentally shape my childhood experience. ADHD wasn’t even understood the way it is now, so the most I could have hoped for in childhood was a prescription.

Instead, I now make a point to be a parent who understands my own ADHD and my kid’s (which thankfully is pretty identical to mine). I help them use alarm clocks and timers like I do. I give them tools to understand and empathize with other people. I don’t treat dragging their feet on a task as disrespect or disinterest. I don’t get hurt when they lash out at me during a hard time. I’m not baffled or disgusted when their words reveal their underdeveloped empathy, and I try to accelerate that development.

I just cannot agree more that it’s a difficult job to get right. All kids need structure and discipline, but the types and amounts can vary widely, even for the same kid across their stages of development. I’m so thankful for the research that has been done and resources that have been created since I was young; without that I would have been a lot more like my parents, and my kid would have barely had a chance. I also appreciate OP for sharing their experience with us. It’s not fun to do but it’s necessary for understanding to grow.

I think it's pretty common to blame your parents for something or other, no matter how you end up no?

Of course there will be gaps where they failed you, they're human, expecting YOUR parents to be perfect is just unrealistic expectations. Seeing that failure as something more than just a part of life though is unrealistic.

Yes, your parents failed you, in many ways, because they're human, and it would be impossible to not screw something up unless they're omniscient.