Parenting Advice to Prevent A.D.D.
Do you have or know a child with an attention deficit disorder diagnosis? Then you are probably aware that the standard approach to diagnosing and treating A.D.D. is being seriously challenged by long term studies and neuroscientific discoveries. If you have been doing your best to cope with an A.D.D. child, this news may trigger a complicated range of emotions, everything from joy that there might be new hope for your child to anger, resentment, guilt or downright despair that by following the best medical advice of the last twenty years you may have harmed rather than helped your child. In spreading the news, it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad. That we have been misled is not our fault and fault-finding, while tempting in the short run to ease some personal pain, will not help your child. My hope for you and your child is that your undeniable willingness to do whatever it takes, including adjusting and adapting your own behavior, will enable you to listen with an open mind to the current discoveries and that you will find my parenting advice helpful. Here goes:
As a pre-school teacher in the late nineties, I had to deal with the standard approach to A.D.D. Over the years, a few of my students were in the process of being evaluated. Well-meaning parents, keen to give their children the best edge at early learning, eagerly embraced the diagnosis and drug treatment. But I wondered about the rush to diagnosis. Observing one parent at home with her young son, I couldn’t help but question the belief in genetic or born-with explanations. Believing that her child had trouble attending to the task at hand, I think it was playing with a set of blocks, she interrupted every few seconds with directions. It sounded like rapid gun fire to me.
See the big one? No not that one—the big one is blue. You know what blue is—you wanted to wear your blue shirt today. Look at your shirt. Look at your—don’t walk away. I want you to finish this. I know you can do it. Now sit down and see if you can find the big, blue one.
I felt my blood pressure rise as I listened to her relentless string of directives and I thought two things: no one could concentrate under those conditions, I don’t care how “normal” they were and her lack of confidence in her child broke my heart, and I am sure it wounded his. The big question that formed for me was this: Was this child truly born with an attention problem or was his parent’s behavior creating one in him? And if the latter, what good would a pill do?
The look-inside-the-child’s-brain-and-fix-it-with-a-pill approach to solving behavior problems is a symptom of a deeply held cultural conviction in the human being as a self-made, self-starting creature. The belief goes something like this: We are born with innate abilities and deficits, gifts and limits, that make us who we are. The job of concerned parents and educators is to correctly sort out what to encourage and what to fix and then to throw ourselves into the task with devotion as demonstrated by the barraging mother above. This conviction infects medicine, of course, as medicine is embedded in culture, not separate from it, and so medicine seeks to fix with its own brand of corrections. We have been operating under the self-made, self-starting picture of human beings for a good 500 years now, but this view is in the process of being overturned by theorists and experimental scientists and yielding exciting new ways to think about medicine, education and parenting.
In an article in the New York Times recently, L. Alan Sroufe, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, beautifully summarized the shift in thinking about A.D.D. that has occurred since the 1960s. From a theory of inborn dysfunction, the field has begun to recognize that “behavior and the brain are intertwined” and grow in a sort of feedback loop with one another. Behavior and environment influence and actually shape the physical brain. Prof. Sroufe says it this way: “One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience.” Or as René Girard, cultural theorist and founder of mimetic theory might say, we are not individuals at all but at every level and fiber of our being, we are inter-dividual, social creatures who when left alone as infants fail to thrive and even die. Just the opposite of independent self-starters, human beings develop under the influence of others, our community and culture. Are we born with particular bodies, unique genetics and predispositions? Of course we are, but that is not the limit of our becoming, in fact it is more like a cupboard of ingredients that can be shaped into different dishes by different environmental factors. It is also true that our particularities at birth will shape our response to the environments, but the critical discovery is the profound interaction of biology with environment that is the creative force in human development.
You may be surprised to know that this understanding of human development is not new, but rather has been part of the minority report operating below the surface. As a Montessori educator I learned that as early as 1903, Dr. Maria Montessori was teaching that the absolute worst thing one could do with children is to interrupt their play, or “work” as she called it. These interruptions interfere with a child’s normal attention pattern by imposing our will upon him. Today this is a common problem where busy lifestyles, the need to get to work, daycare, or other appointments forces the child into adapting to adult patterns of behavior.
Here is how Montessori described it in her medical textbook from the early 1900s:
Often what we call naughtiness on the part of the individual child is rebellion against our own mistakes in educating him. The coercive means which we adopt toward children are what destroy their natural tranquility. A healthy child, in his moments of freedom, succeeds in escaping from the toys inflicted upon him by his parents, and in securing some object which arouses the investigating instinct of his mind; a worm, an insect, some pebbles, etc.; he is silent, tranquil and attentive. If the child is not well, or if his mother obliges him to remain seated in a chair, playing with a doll, he becomes restless, cries, or gives way to convulsive outbursts (“bad temper”). The mother believes that educating her child means forcing him to do what is pleasing to her, however far she may be from knowing what the child’s real needs are, and unfortunately we must make the same statement regarding the school-teachers! Then, in order to make him yield to coercion, she punishes the child when he rebels and rewards him when he is obedient. By this method we drive a child by force along paths that are not natural to him. (emphasis in the original)
I do admire her boldness – she is really unconcerned if she is hurting the feelings of well-meaning parents because her first and foremost concern is with the child. It is a wonderful example to imitate. Prof. Sroufe, also putting the child’s developmental needs first, pointed out that behavior problems in children have “many possible sources. Among them are family stresses.” He lists a few obvious stressors like domestic violence or chaotic living situations, but the one that interested me was this:
…especially, patterns of parental intrusiveness that involve stimulation for which the baby is not prepared. For example, a 6-month-old baby is playing, and the parent picks it up quickly from behind and plunges it in the bath. Or a 3-year-old is becoming frustrated solving a problem, and a parent taunts or ridicules.
The mother I described at the opening may not have thought of her directives as taunting, but I wonder if her child would agree. Someone who hovers over you and persistently focuses your attention on what you are doing wrong may indeed be described as engaging in ridicule. Now, if you have read this far, you are surely following in Montessori’s footsteps by doggedly putting your desire to help your child ahead of your instinctive need to avoid feeling hurt, guilty or whatever. Allow me to conclude with some easy to implement parenting tips to support a child’s natural development.
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- When you see a child engaged in play or concentrating on seemingly trivial things like specks of dust or his own hand, think: “Einstein at work”. If you had to interrupt Einstein, you would do it in a spirit of humility and regret, wouldn’t you? That is the same attitude to take when you need to interrupt your child.
- Young children are notoriously bad at transitions, but easily coaxed into them with sufficient warning. Let’s use the example of transitioning from play time to dinner time. While the children are playing, slowly squat near them and in a quiet voice say, “Five minutes until it’s time to wash our hands for dinner.” Then walk away. Of course, the 5 minutes means nothing to them and be as short or long as you need it to be. But in a few minutes more, repeat your warning in a quiet voice, “3 minutes till dinner. It will be time to put your toys away and wash your hands.” Then give a one minute warning and finally, “It’s dinner time. Let’s put our toys away and wash up.”
- If your child balks at the moment of transition, don’t get into a power struggle. Just ask, “What did my words say?” Not “What did I say,” but precisely, “What did my words say?” Your child will think for a second and then repeat some version of “It’s time for dinner”. You will just shrug as if it is a shame for you, too, that we have to go to dinner, sharing in your child’s experience at that moment. Then off you go together, putting toys away and washing up as a team.
That’s it, three easy steps! It is hard to underestimate how vitally important this style of parenting can be to the formation of a healthy pattern of attention. As Dr. Montessori put it over one hundred years ago, “We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate life itself.” Too dramatic? Maybe, but maybe not. The beauty of it all is that to support life itself may be as easy as one, two, three.