As a teacher I've run into this suspect categorization more than once - most recently yesterday, when I got paperwork informing me that a perfectly capable and apparently normal (temperament, affect, performance) student has ADHD. She's a young teenager who has shown above-average talent in my intro. art class and manifests no unusual behaviors or attributes. My guess is she has a hard time forcing herself to do homework she doesn't like. Maybe by today's enlightened standards that counts as a nascent personality disorder. Of course our counselors and PSW's are all unassailably authoritative, so who am I to question the process? The good thing is I think this girl has a decent chance of outliving the label.
The idea that getting bored with things we're not interested in or not wanting to do things we dislike (which in children manifests as disobedience too) is a mental disorder is one of the most insane notions of this era.
Part of the problem in schools is the narrowing of course offerings, which has coincided rather conveniently with the college-for-everyone push of the last 20-ish years. Vocational ed. that includes what used to be known as ‘shop’ classes - hands-on experience in woodworking, electronics, auto mechanics, metal work, etc. - has disappeared in many places. I work for the LA Unified School District and voc. ed. has been almost completely abolished. Meanwhile the geniuses who run things have decided that every LAUSD 11th grader should take the SAT, despite the fact that neither of California’s public university systems require it for admission. So a questionable decision is likely compounded by institutional graft. Ugh. Too bad for kids who might benefit from what’s now gone.
Not being able to question the mental health authorities within schools has to be maddening for teachers whose jobs get tougher when students' get easier. Not to mention that it's worse for students, too. Abigail Shrier, in Bad Therapy, really goes after the power we've given the mental health industry across many sections of our society. I'm hoping that's the beginning of a more reasonable compromise. Anyway, thank you for reading and commenting.
My personal experience with (probably diagnosable, never diagnosed) "ADHD streak" as well as talking to similar people who either never tried or didn't like the medication is that in addition to all the techniques you suggest, the ABSOLUTELY KEY one is to find things to do that you are interested in and that you'd (hyper)focus on without problems. This is hard for many children at school though. I was lucky enough to find most learning interesting and to be bright enough to be able to "work" in bursts of intense activity (this was before the prviledging of regular coursework effort over tests and exams) so the horror of doing boring shit did not hit me well after university, until adulthood, when life circumstances forced me to work for income rather than fun. But the principle of "finding interesting stuff is crucial if you are distractible" stands. I'm a student for fun again at 50+ now and focus isn't anywhere near as much of an issue.
Yeah this reminds me of two things. First, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, where he argues that schooling basically takes a child's natural curiosity and kills it. Second, a friend told me recently that he stopped reading for about 10 years after college, and was only picking it back up again. Even though he loved to read as a kid, the way high school and college made him read removed the desire. So I agree with you that by finding something we are interested in, for its own sake, we can overcome not only ADHD but a lot of mental distress in general. My life would be a lot worse if I didn't have the guarantee of 20 hours a week reading and writing, which I love to do.
Schools can and should be redesigned to be more aligned with our environment of evolutionary adaptation. There is neither need nor justification for schools to be as deeply mismatched as they are at present.
For instance, Montessori classrooms provide mixed aged classrooms in which students have much greater autonomy and agency and more opportunities for spontaneous movement. It is not quite playing hunter and gatherer games in the forest, but it is much farther in that direction than a traditional classroom. Importantly, mixed age classrooms allows for older students to serve as role models for younger ones rather than relying solely on adult control.
Separately, my focus is creating schools based on Socratic dialogue for secondary students (which have sometimes been adopted as a Montessori secondary model). It turns out that kids love to talk. By means of getting them to talk about philosophy, literature, science, etc. we can get kids engaged in intellectuality while allowing them the deeply social experience that adolescents crave - again reducing the evolutionary mismatch.
While there are extreme cases of students who still have attention issues in these environments, after having seen hundreds of students who had attention issues move to these kinds of environments, most find it much easier to focus when engaged in interesting work that they have chosen while moving freely about in a Montessori classroom, modeling their behavior on that of older peers, or engaged in lively conversation with their peers in secondary school instead of tuning out to a teacher giving a boring lecture.
To take another example, secondary students also love engaging in real world projects - making things that are valuable to other people, including novels, videos, software, music festivals, photography, etc. Montessori described this as "valorization," the need to be valued in the community by contributing something to the community. Again, in Paleolithic cultures at puberty young people would definitely be contributing to the community, often taking on adult or quasi-adult roles. The enforced passivity and infantilization of standard schooling is an extreme violation of human nature.
Add some outdoor time in nature and we are getting to high quality programs much more aligned with our nature - and I predict future "mental illnesses" the more we align K12 with the environment of evolutionary adaptation (while still robustly providing the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century).
I could go on, but suffice it to say that the standard K12 school experience is an extreme and unnecessary evolutionary mismatch. It is not at all surprising that many students "have ADHD."
"The enforced passivity and infantilization of standard schooling is an extreme violation of human nature." - Totally agree. I can remember being 18 and wanting so desperately to be an adult -- live on my own, pay my own way, do something valuable -- but the path was to continue being a student. Often, that continues now until people are into their thirties! Meanwhile, when my wife and I went to Uganda for our honeymoon, we saw 8-year-olds herding goats. Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting, Michael, and good luck with your work.
I am an old f**k who studied evolutionary biology in the late 70's heyday and beyond and was involved with teaching high school biology. In 1982, my first of 3 sons was born, and he was crazy hyperactive and easily distractible beginning at 3 years old and through his teens. So was his mom so my biological science brain said, ah-ha!, heredity! We were pioneers of the early "ADD" (which is what is what called then) days and agreed to medication because he was very disruptive in the classroom and affecting other kid's education (also, of course the teachers were not happy). So we tried Ritalin (exactly like those little white speed pills I took in college). We watched as our son magically began to write properly for his grade level for the first time in front of our faces, and were astounded. Yes, magic bullet, it worked in the classroom, and for a few years to come until he didn't "need" it anymore. Frantic parents concerned about their kids learning are going to pay attention to something like this even though they are giving their child "meth" (which makes any parent uncomfortable). One drug therapist I talked to back then mentioned using a few doses of Ritalin as a diagnostic tool which I thought was interesting. If they "speed up" on Ritalin, their "brain chemistry" (big term back then) was normal and if they calmed down, they are ADD. Yes, evolutionary mismatch is to blame for the "sitting child" difficulty, but then again 200 years ago, an ADD child would probably just get beaten and kicked out of school. In any case, my point is that the difficulties of ADHD are much more problematic with elementary children than when they get older and can handle behavior modification more easily. Thanks, Mike
Thanks for your comment. Good point about behavioral modification being easier the older the child is. Until then, the burden falls on parents to implement a solution, whether that's medication (as with your son) or behavioral modification (as with me).
I'm not suggesting that we beat kids for being hyperactive, but I am suggesting that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Kids can get away with anything right now, and they know it. A more disciplined environment, with higher costs for disobedience, would undoubtedly lead to more obedience. And then, outside of that, let kids be kids! I'm sure you noticed as a father that your boys were calmer if they had a chance to rough and tumble. My parents made sure I was dog tired by the end of the day, and much of the time, that involved me wrestling my brothers into submission. So I think in our hypersensitive age we forget that a simple way to cut down on distraction is to physically exhaust ourselves (probably especially for boys) -- and yet we're getting rid of recess?
Thanks for the response. I can use the elephant info in my writing about similarities in non-human and human behavior. And yes, we used behavioral modification on our son but can’t do that when he’s at school, of course. Also, I had 3 boys so wrestling (and after school play) were huge factors in tiring them out. I had to employ close supervision in the wrestling though, because for some reason, the oldest always over-powered the others! 😆
Just found the Substack, love the article. A few thoughts.
Robert Plomin makes the same point in his book Blueprint that diagnoses might better be thought of as outliers across several dimensions of human traits, rather than seperate categories, and that better genetic tech is bearing this out.
Intrigued by your parents "less sleep"idea. Can you say more about where this idea comes from and how it was beneficial to you?
Welcome Leon. As for diagnoses being outliers across dimensions, totally agree. I'll check Plomin out.
As for less sleep, the idea was to basically tire me out. I had too much energy all the time, especially for a classroom. So between more exercise and less sleep, I was able to mellow out a little.
I could see MORE sleep leading to the same solution by the way. Like when young kids are tired, they usually act out more, not less. So sleep is one of those things you just have to experiment with, I think, to find the intended effect on energy level.
GM Josh, how often is ADHD paired with dyslexia? Iirc, often: i lost the thread, but Stone Age Herbalist wrote one where he shows that dyslexia is a "paleolithic" learning skill, i.e. "paleolithic" tribemen are in great part dyslexics. I had two ADHD and dyslexic friends, one medicated and never "cured" and the other compleately "cured" of both by Open Dyslexic.
GM Paolo. I have no idea how often those two are paired, but I haven't looked into it much, so if you have or come across some sources, send them along. I also don't know much about dyslexia or how the mechanisms underlying it might have operated in preliterate times. The only relevant piece of information that comes to mind is about the reading debate -- e.g., https://www.thefp.com/p/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders. Because reading and writing are relatively recent innovations, we should expect that they need more explicit instruction than, say, talking -- or walking, seeing, grabbing things, chewing, and sleeping, all of which humans have been doing without much explicit instruction for far longer. This might also mean there are more problems/errors with reading than with talking, though I'm not sure if that's the case. Thanks for reading and commenting.
As a teacher I've run into this suspect categorization more than once - most recently yesterday, when I got paperwork informing me that a perfectly capable and apparently normal (temperament, affect, performance) student has ADHD. She's a young teenager who has shown above-average talent in my intro. art class and manifests no unusual behaviors or attributes. My guess is she has a hard time forcing herself to do homework she doesn't like. Maybe by today's enlightened standards that counts as a nascent personality disorder. Of course our counselors and PSW's are all unassailably authoritative, so who am I to question the process? The good thing is I think this girl has a decent chance of outliving the label.
The idea that getting bored with things we're not interested in or not wanting to do things we dislike (which in children manifests as disobedience too) is a mental disorder is one of the most insane notions of this era.
Part of the problem in schools is the narrowing of course offerings, which has coincided rather conveniently with the college-for-everyone push of the last 20-ish years. Vocational ed. that includes what used to be known as ‘shop’ classes - hands-on experience in woodworking, electronics, auto mechanics, metal work, etc. - has disappeared in many places. I work for the LA Unified School District and voc. ed. has been almost completely abolished. Meanwhile the geniuses who run things have decided that every LAUSD 11th grader should take the SAT, despite the fact that neither of California’s public university systems require it for admission. So a questionable decision is likely compounded by institutional graft. Ugh. Too bad for kids who might benefit from what’s now gone.
Not being able to question the mental health authorities within schools has to be maddening for teachers whose jobs get tougher when students' get easier. Not to mention that it's worse for students, too. Abigail Shrier, in Bad Therapy, really goes after the power we've given the mental health industry across many sections of our society. I'm hoping that's the beginning of a more reasonable compromise. Anyway, thank you for reading and commenting.
My personal experience with (probably diagnosable, never diagnosed) "ADHD streak" as well as talking to similar people who either never tried or didn't like the medication is that in addition to all the techniques you suggest, the ABSOLUTELY KEY one is to find things to do that you are interested in and that you'd (hyper)focus on without problems. This is hard for many children at school though. I was lucky enough to find most learning interesting and to be bright enough to be able to "work" in bursts of intense activity (this was before the prviledging of regular coursework effort over tests and exams) so the horror of doing boring shit did not hit me well after university, until adulthood, when life circumstances forced me to work for income rather than fun. But the principle of "finding interesting stuff is crucial if you are distractible" stands. I'm a student for fun again at 50+ now and focus isn't anywhere near as much of an issue.
Yeah this reminds me of two things. First, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, where he argues that schooling basically takes a child's natural curiosity and kills it. Second, a friend told me recently that he stopped reading for about 10 years after college, and was only picking it back up again. Even though he loved to read as a kid, the way high school and college made him read removed the desire. So I agree with you that by finding something we are interested in, for its own sake, we can overcome not only ADHD but a lot of mental distress in general. My life would be a lot worse if I didn't have the guarantee of 20 hours a week reading and writing, which I love to do.
Schools can and should be redesigned to be more aligned with our environment of evolutionary adaptation. There is neither need nor justification for schools to be as deeply mismatched as they are at present.
For instance, Montessori classrooms provide mixed aged classrooms in which students have much greater autonomy and agency and more opportunities for spontaneous movement. It is not quite playing hunter and gatherer games in the forest, but it is much farther in that direction than a traditional classroom. Importantly, mixed age classrooms allows for older students to serve as role models for younger ones rather than relying solely on adult control.
Separately, my focus is creating schools based on Socratic dialogue for secondary students (which have sometimes been adopted as a Montessori secondary model). It turns out that kids love to talk. By means of getting them to talk about philosophy, literature, science, etc. we can get kids engaged in intellectuality while allowing them the deeply social experience that adolescents crave - again reducing the evolutionary mismatch.
While there are extreme cases of students who still have attention issues in these environments, after having seen hundreds of students who had attention issues move to these kinds of environments, most find it much easier to focus when engaged in interesting work that they have chosen while moving freely about in a Montessori classroom, modeling their behavior on that of older peers, or engaged in lively conversation with their peers in secondary school instead of tuning out to a teacher giving a boring lecture.
To take another example, secondary students also love engaging in real world projects - making things that are valuable to other people, including novels, videos, software, music festivals, photography, etc. Montessori described this as "valorization," the need to be valued in the community by contributing something to the community. Again, in Paleolithic cultures at puberty young people would definitely be contributing to the community, often taking on adult or quasi-adult roles. The enforced passivity and infantilization of standard schooling is an extreme violation of human nature.
Add some outdoor time in nature and we are getting to high quality programs much more aligned with our nature - and I predict future "mental illnesses" the more we align K12 with the environment of evolutionary adaptation (while still robustly providing the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century).
I could go on, but suffice it to say that the standard K12 school experience is an extreme and unnecessary evolutionary mismatch. It is not at all surprising that many students "have ADHD."
"The enforced passivity and infantilization of standard schooling is an extreme violation of human nature." - Totally agree. I can remember being 18 and wanting so desperately to be an adult -- live on my own, pay my own way, do something valuable -- but the path was to continue being a student. Often, that continues now until people are into their thirties! Meanwhile, when my wife and I went to Uganda for our honeymoon, we saw 8-year-olds herding goats. Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting, Michael, and good luck with your work.
I am an old f**k who studied evolutionary biology in the late 70's heyday and beyond and was involved with teaching high school biology. In 1982, my first of 3 sons was born, and he was crazy hyperactive and easily distractible beginning at 3 years old and through his teens. So was his mom so my biological science brain said, ah-ha!, heredity! We were pioneers of the early "ADD" (which is what is what called then) days and agreed to medication because he was very disruptive in the classroom and affecting other kid's education (also, of course the teachers were not happy). So we tried Ritalin (exactly like those little white speed pills I took in college). We watched as our son magically began to write properly for his grade level for the first time in front of our faces, and were astounded. Yes, magic bullet, it worked in the classroom, and for a few years to come until he didn't "need" it anymore. Frantic parents concerned about their kids learning are going to pay attention to something like this even though they are giving their child "meth" (which makes any parent uncomfortable). One drug therapist I talked to back then mentioned using a few doses of Ritalin as a diagnostic tool which I thought was interesting. If they "speed up" on Ritalin, their "brain chemistry" (big term back then) was normal and if they calmed down, they are ADD. Yes, evolutionary mismatch is to blame for the "sitting child" difficulty, but then again 200 years ago, an ADD child would probably just get beaten and kicked out of school. In any case, my point is that the difficulties of ADHD are much more problematic with elementary children than when they get older and can handle behavior modification more easily. Thanks, Mike
Thanks for your comment. Good point about behavioral modification being easier the older the child is. Until then, the burden falls on parents to implement a solution, whether that's medication (as with your son) or behavioral modification (as with me).
On your point about ADD kids getting beaten and kicked out of school 200 years ago, Michael Strong (who commented above) has a fascinating story of adolescent male elephants getting drubbed into place by adults (https://flowidealism.medium.com/evolutionary-mismatch-as-a-causal-factor-in-adolescent-dysfunction-and-mental-illness-d235cc85584). Likewise, many of my teacher friends will joke that they wish they could slap their students around a little.
I'm not suggesting that we beat kids for being hyperactive, but I am suggesting that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Kids can get away with anything right now, and they know it. A more disciplined environment, with higher costs for disobedience, would undoubtedly lead to more obedience. And then, outside of that, let kids be kids! I'm sure you noticed as a father that your boys were calmer if they had a chance to rough and tumble. My parents made sure I was dog tired by the end of the day, and much of the time, that involved me wrestling my brothers into submission. So I think in our hypersensitive age we forget that a simple way to cut down on distraction is to physically exhaust ourselves (probably especially for boys) -- and yet we're getting rid of recess?
Anyway, thanks for reading and commenting.
Thanks for the response. I can use the elephant info in my writing about similarities in non-human and human behavior. And yes, we used behavioral modification on our son but can’t do that when he’s at school, of course. Also, I had 3 boys so wrestling (and after school play) were huge factors in tiring them out. I had to employ close supervision in the wrestling though, because for some reason, the oldest always over-powered the others! 😆
Some things you just can't explain :)
Just found the Substack, love the article. A few thoughts.
Robert Plomin makes the same point in his book Blueprint that diagnoses might better be thought of as outliers across several dimensions of human traits, rather than seperate categories, and that better genetic tech is bearing this out.
Intrigued by your parents "less sleep"idea. Can you say more about where this idea comes from and how it was beneficial to you?
Many thanks.
Welcome Leon. As for diagnoses being outliers across dimensions, totally agree. I'll check Plomin out.
As for less sleep, the idea was to basically tire me out. I had too much energy all the time, especially for a classroom. So between more exercise and less sleep, I was able to mellow out a little.
I could see MORE sleep leading to the same solution by the way. Like when young kids are tired, they usually act out more, not less. So sleep is one of those things you just have to experiment with, I think, to find the intended effect on energy level.
GM Josh, how often is ADHD paired with dyslexia? Iirc, often: i lost the thread, but Stone Age Herbalist wrote one where he shows that dyslexia is a "paleolithic" learning skill, i.e. "paleolithic" tribemen are in great part dyslexics. I had two ADHD and dyslexic friends, one medicated and never "cured" and the other compleately "cured" of both by Open Dyslexic.
GM Paolo. I have no idea how often those two are paired, but I haven't looked into it much, so if you have or come across some sources, send them along. I also don't know much about dyslexia or how the mechanisms underlying it might have operated in preliterate times. The only relevant piece of information that comes to mind is about the reading debate -- e.g., https://www.thefp.com/p/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders. Because reading and writing are relatively recent innovations, we should expect that they need more explicit instruction than, say, talking -- or walking, seeing, grabbing things, chewing, and sleeping, all of which humans have been doing without much explicit instruction for far longer. This might also mean there are more problems/errors with reading than with talking, though I'm not sure if that's the case. Thanks for reading and commenting.
Call it STD - Susceptibility To Distraction.
Yep, I love that. Outside of the obvious confusion with the other STD, it would be a much more accurate description of what is going on.