ADHD: Why They Can Do It When They're Interested

Duration: 20 min. + 10 min for questions
Audience: Parents, teachers, psychologists, and physicians.
Media: Slides, 5 pp handout

Objectives: The participants will understand:
1) The child as an enterprising, self organizing creature who makes both opportunities and choices from whatever she finds.
2) Behavioral skills as evolved adaptations that efficiently solve problems related to eating, dating, rearing children, trading assets, and self defense. We enjoy most of our adaptations and follow them to economic and familial success.
3) A modular concept of attention and why ADHD often may not be a generalized deficiency.
4) Suggestions for finding intact or superior skills

Content

1) Current research finds children to be highly resilient to environmental demands. That is, children pick elements from their niche, sometimes modify those elements, and sometimes find a new niche entirely. Parents narrow ("adulterate"!) options to those that are workable and least socially disruptive. The good news is that children resist harm; the bad news is that they resist just as vigorously our efforts to change them when they don't act as we wish.

2) We all have adaptations for seeing, hearing, breathing, and surviving. We also appear to have far more complex adaptations. A very broad array of cross cultural studies show human behavior around the globe to be highly similar for acquiring food, having and rearing children, conducting trade, making moral judgments, and self defense.
Despite the cross cultural similarity of human behavior, individuals within a culture can vary sharply. Not all of us are good hunters.

3) Evidence suggests that "ADHD" may not always be a generalized deficit.

First, ADHD children and adults can pay excellent attention but in arenas that appear to vary with each child. Their zeal with Nintendo might be due to its rapid pace; however, some children have no tolerance for Nintendo. Similarly, the Nature and History Channels enchant some children; still others are most easily preoccupied by Legos.

Second, ADHD individuals do some things very well but a different set of things characterize each individual. For example, it has been suggested that ADHD children make poor baby sitters yet I know of some children with ADHD who are superior baby sitters and have saved lives at the community pool because of superior attentiveness.

Third, islands of special talents are common in most of us as well as in disorders such as Aspergers or Williams syndrome.

4) Lists of probable human "adaptations" may offer a way to find and to classify novel skills. Furthermore, because we do things that are both fun and for which we have ability, careful observation and histories for a child or an adult may reveal intact abilities and perhaps even substantial talent. Given the resemblance between children and parents and grandparents, it is time that we consider familial traits not just to diagnose pathology but also to look for unsuspected talents. It has been said that ADHD children have a limited "sense of the future." Clinicians have a similar disability when they fail to consider specific familial talents and restrict assessments to the transient experience of a single generation.

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