> John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down perfectly captured this when he noticed that schools, another place where authority figures hang out, ruthlessly disciplined any child who tried to assert individuality.
There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.
I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
Having ADHD is then of course a major disadvantage in environments where there is only one global optimum. Examples include highly regulated and deterministic academic environments (school, undergraduate studies) or corporate environments.
But in human history, environments with a single global optimum have been the exception, not the rule.
People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. We need these individuals in the future.
> People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool.
Being a researcher with ADHD I find academia very very weird. I feel like my ADHD (and others I know) should be a superpower. Loving to dig down into rabbit holes and a bunch of different topics, which can allow connecting different things. Not needing reasons to go down the rabbit holes, but just because. Meaning you explore things others don't.
But actually academia is incredibly stressful and feels hostile. There's the publish or perish, so you can't go down the rabbit holes and deep dive. You don't have time to dig deep. Dealing with review is crazy as you have to argue to people who don't care that your stuff matters even though no one can tell if it does or not and you should just pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. (We used to not review this way. We used to check for errors and plagiarism and if not, publish). Everything is just hyper metric focused even though everyone knows the metrics mean so little to the actual end goal they are everything to your survival goals. The goals are at odds and I don't think anyone wants to do anything about it even though many will admit it.
I know some people will say I'm naive to think academia should work that way but I think that's naive, so we'll have to agree to disagree. I think academia should be about pursuing knowledge and giving people the environment they need to do that, with the trade being teaching the future generations.
To be honest it feels the world is becoming more hostile to me. There is becoming less flexibility. Fewer opportunities to explore and hire punishments for doing so. Its harder to take things apart (physical or code) as the gardens close more and more. Harder to fix things, harder to make things to things I want (for utility and for fun). It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough adderal that can fix that.
I think you are right that the chaos helps escape local minima. If I've learned anything in my studies it's that noise is essential in optimization theory. It is also a measurement of error or uncertainty. So unless you can measure something to infinite precision then you should be incorporating noise into your models
> It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough Adderall that can fix that.
My psychiatrist told me that when using any amphetamine-based medication for ADHD, it's important to see it as a way to reinforce routines and habits, whatever they may be, and not necessarily a fix to ADHD itself but rather as a tool to help my brain.
With that in mind, I was advised to take my medication and immediately start doing the things I usually struggle with. For me, that just meant getting to work on specific tasks or studying specific things. Sticking to this approach made a huge difference in how well the medication worked for me.
Over time, I was able to lower my dose, and now I find it much easier to settle into a routine. While the medication can dull my creativity, I've learned to work around that by adjusting when I take it and planning out my work accordingly.
In the case my workload or life changes I tend to get back to my old dosage for a short period until new routines settle, I'm very fortunate to have a family doctor that understands this and is willing to change dosages when needed.
I'm not sure how this would play out with extended-release versions or if this applies to your situation, but I figured it was worth sharing.
Also curious to know if this approach has worked particularly well for me but not for others, or if you take the same approach already.
I'm also an academic researcher with ADHD, and feel exactly the same as you. Sometimes my hyperfocus and sense of adventure leads to big discoveries and resulting publications that keep me successful... but that is interspersed with months or years of guilt and terror over not meeting expectations at regular intervals. I love science, but I do feel like my health is suffering from this, and that I'm putting much more energy into trying to hide/mask ADHD than actually doing my job.
Anyways, you are not alone, there are others like you also going through this. I am thinking about how nice it would be to have a community for ADHD academics to share advice and strategies.
This is actually why I decided not to pursue a career in Academia. I originally wanted to work in acadeemia, but as I finished my undergraduate I realized that while I would love to do research, the other aspects, like applying for grants, constantly having to publish, etc. would be extremely taxing and stressful for me.
You might get a kick out of this: it's an attempt to remodel funding to reward and reinvigorate research with the intelligence of the folks who straddle fields -- to reward those who make correct predictions about where future "breakthrough innovations" (ie. Intersectional and significant research convergences) will appear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24
Puja Ohlhaver has some great ideas and interventions in this space <3
ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later
I enjoy this take. As someone who feels like they align with a lot of symptoms associated with ADHD, I thrive in startup environments and would rather be unemployed than work in a corporate environment. That checks out! And there's no harm to it, there are plenty of opportunities for people of all kinds. I think the danger is expecting that any environment fits everyone. We're too many and too diverse for that to be true.
> There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.
The “scored higher” part of this study is editorialization. The game was developed in a way that exploration produced a higher numeric result so they could measure something as part of the test. The game was an artificial experiment environment and it was designed to “reward” behavior associated with ADHD, so it would have been more surprising if the game did not result in higher scores for people with ADHD.
The layers of editorialization and hypothesizing built on studies like this remind me of the debate over “depressive realism”. Some researchers put out a study showing that people with depression more accurately interpreted something in some specific scenarios which were designed for the study. It was widely misinterpreted by the public and pop culture science writers as showing that depressed people see the world more accurately, and therefore they are an untapped reservoir for seeing the world as it really is. There’s a huge problem with this interpretation because depression produces a lot of cognitive distortions that make people think things are much worse than they really are, so they’re really only more “accurate” when you have them evaluate situations that are worse than they appear. Yet this nuance is lost in the pop culture debate and many people think “depressive realism” means depressed people have a secret advantage.
I think these ideas have become popular as the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and other conditions have widened to include large percentages of the population. In the past the diagnostic criteria for ADHD was such that it was estimated to have low single digit percentage prevalence in the population. Now we’re at a point where Adderall is the 14th most prescribed drug in America ( https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx ).
A similar thing has happened with Autism Spectrum diagnoses, where the criteria were once so strict that it was very rare for someone to get a diagnosis. Now I’m hearing fellow parents casually mention that their young children got an Autism Spectrum diagnosis after simply visiting a medical professional (found on internet listings) and suggesting it. Meanwhile my family friends with a severe autistic child are increasingly frustrated that pop culture idea of autism has shifted so far into the population that people are seemingly forgetting that severe autism is actually very debilitating, much like severe ADHD.
> I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
I have had life-long crippling ADHD that I am only now, in my 30s, starting to learn to cope with. My biggest thing was educating myself on what ADHD actually was so that I was better able to spot it in my own life, and then apply strategies to address it.
I'm not sure the above is relevant, but what I wanted to say is in response to this:
> I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate - playing an instrument, learning a language, gettign a PhD, etc. But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things.
On one hand, that sucks. I wish my brain needed less short-term reward. I wish I was able to hold long term goals in my head as a motivation to get stuff done. But ADHD brains are famously very bad at this, mine included.
On the other hand, ADHD, to your point, has forced a LOT of growth and movement in my life. I cannot sit in one job, town, relationship, friendship, forever. I get antsy. I have to try new things. I crave novelty, and I seek it out in every aspect of my life. I do weird, crazy things, and I meet people who also do those things, and we get along just great. I live a very nontraditional lifestyle. And I've tried a million different things, hobbies, people, cities. I know a little bit about absolutely everything and can talk to almost anyone about something they're interested in because I know just enough to ask interesting questions that they enjoy answering.
It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
> My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate (...). But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things.
This is 100% accurate description of me, too. Except, I somehow managed to finish my masters' studies, start a career in software and eventually get a decent job, then get married and had a kid before I got diagnosed and realized where all my anguish comes from, why I barely hold on.
On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, this still sucks. I really wish I'd been diagnosed a bit earlier, because even if the kind of lifestyle and perspective you described would've worked for me too, it's too late for me now. I can't afford to try any nontrivial novelty, try different hobbies, or do anything else I've been denying myself, with the intensity I actually need.
No, an hour a week of a new hobby will not do; nothing short of frequent binges lasting uninterrupted for days would do. It's how I learned everything, including the knowledge and experience to give me a solid start in software. I thought I don't need it, I denied myself it to fit better with normal society and regular people, and now it's too late - too many loved ones depend on me not just bailing out and reinventing myself in another industry.
> It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
Yes, like this, and I wish I could do it like you. Wonder if there is another way.
The "Double Empathy Problem" is a great way to conceptualize this, both to educate neurotypical people, but also to get over shame associated with neurodiversity. It's usually brought up in relation to people on the spectrum:
This theory proposes that many of the difficulties autistic individuals face
when socializing with non-autistic individuals are due, in part, to a lack
of mutual understanding between the two groups, meaning that most autistic
people struggle to understand and empathize with non-autistic people,
whereas most non-autistic people also struggle to understand and empathize
with autistic people. This lack of mutual understanding may stem from
bidirectional differences in dispositions (e.g., communication style,
social-cognitive characteristics), and experiences between autistic and non-
autistic individuals, as opposed to always being an inherent deficit.
I totally sympathize with the author as someone who is (probably) neurodivergent but had accommodating parents. Being given space to better understand myself and my value was integral to my success and in being ok being different.
But as a dad to a neurodivergent kid, I impose structure - sometimes to discomfort, never intentionally to pain - because structure is imposed upon us all. I mean, if I could stop time, that would fix most of the issues with my kid’s ADHD. Same if I could make less the impositions of having to do chores, or to eat, sleep, bathe. But there is no easy escape from those things. So, I impose, despite not wanting to, because the imposition is coming anyway.
But it is. As others have said in comments, ADHD actually may be an optimization in certain environments, but do those environments actually exist in 2024? Even if they exist Are they preferable, overall, to the typical alternative?
There may be jobs that are better suited to someone with ADHD, but do they pay a living wage? Are they precarious? Are they dangerous?
Maybe those jobs "should" pay more. But, as a parent, your job is to prepare your kids for reality, not sell them a fantasy.
There's no shortage of careers with fast-paced work environments requiring creative problem solving that would be well-suited to a person with ADHD.
Anything creative or artistic, healthcare, tech, sales, skilled trades, restaurants, etc.
If the "reality" you are trying to prepare your child for is becoming an accountant/banker/lawyer/bureaucrat, then you will probably all be disappointed.
I sometimes look back on my childhood and think about what might have helped me beyond just having structure - which, for the record, I do agree is very important. I think the biggest thing would have been understanding earlier that I was naturally going to struggle with certain things and that it was okay to ask for help.
To be clear, I don't mean just telling a child they can blame ADHD for their difficulties. Rather, helping them recognize that ADHD is often the reason behind their struggles with certain things and encouraging them to ask people around them for reminders, support, or ways in general to create accountability.
For example, my first job, a paper route when I was ~14, was a nightmare until I asked a friend to do his at the same time as mine and pick me up. Even though we had separate routes, just knowing I had to be ready when he arrived created enough accountability that I didn’t struggle with it as much, and it didn't require me to rely on my parents to impose that structure on me.
Imposing structure is helpful, but it only lasts as long as they have someone imposing it. Ideally, they learn how to build that structure for themselves before they have to navigate everything on their own.
you're describing to me what sounds like "it would be nice to sometimes be taking seriously, be treated gently, and helped in certain ways".
Often emotional aid is simply a compassionate and present person who sometimes helps a bit. maybe doing their own thing at the same time you're doing your thing, and they know what you're doing or trying to do, and they are not evaluating you for failure but being peaceful within themselves. it's sometimes a really nice thing.
We all deserve to at least sometimes have time with people like this!
I’m with you. The author makes bold claims about not following the assumptions imposed upon you about success and productivity, but what, exactly, is the alternative? Maybe I could go live in the wilderness, hunting and foraging at my own pace, instead of the pace imposed upon me. Of course, that isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people.
> Instead of feeling bad, examine the gap between your current life and the one you yearn for.
Say, for example, my definition of fulfillment is having a large array of close friends. If I find myself distracted from or am unwilling to shower, that will drive many people off. If I miss social cues and communicate “in a different language,” so to speak, that will make it difficult to relate to people and become close with them. If I don’t let myself sleep, I’ll be robbed of the motivation and energy I need to pursue this goal or any other.
That’s just an example. But the vast majority of people, regardless of how they define fulfillment, will have to “play society’s game” to some extent.
I propose that it could be possible to reduce your imposed structure around eating, sleeping, and bathing.
Let a kid go a few days without a bath. Don't shame them if/when odors eventually emerge. At least be willing to. But I've never had issues. Same with sleeping. And the only real reason sleep is urgent is because waking up at a certain time might be urgent, but if one gets to the evening time tired, they'll take themselves to bed early.
So, I donno.
I basically think you're defending something that's not true. You _are_ imposing all of those things. There would be an easy escape from all of it, for your kid, but for you. Could you see you and the kid as working together to avoid the pressure _from the world_?
"OK, no bathing, no problem. When I don't bath I make sure to put on fresh clothes before going out the next time... usually, but absolutely not always..."
I think you are over-relying on the concept of 'authority'. "I, adult, do this to you, child, because some external authority is making me."
I don't buy it. could you get more creative? or ask them for ideas?
"sometimes I don't wanna shower either. So I don't. because I usually have the power within me to do things that I want to do only when I want to do them."
And now you might be talking (openly, without pushy energy) why you _want_ to shower. Ever. Do you always do it out of obligation exclusively? Is it sometimes relaxing or could be made more relaxing? Turning the light off and lighting a candle can make it super peaceful, and everyone deserves a few minutes of peace.
Also, sometimes we do shower out of obligation, bc we're stinky, but it's totally fine to push the distance between those showers. I've done some long times without bathing, and would feel it important to point out that it's often FINE to not bath for a day or even two, especially if fresh/clean clothing is being worn.
I could prob think of books for creative problem solving. I, personally, would start with "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" by David Friedman. It's available for free on his website, or amazon/library/whatever. Tons of ideas of collaborative problem solving, if you go through it with the lense of sifting for ideas you might be able to implement around you, to reduce conflict/coercive energy.
The person blaming his parents because they tried to do their job of, well, parenting a child with ADHD.
I’ve read that psychotherapy is much more difficult when there is no-one to blame. So it might help for him, until he will have his own kids with ADHD and fail in a completely opposite way.
I would not recommend anyone to blame parents of neurodivergent kids, as it is a very difficult job to do right.
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.
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!”.
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.
> 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 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).
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 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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
My experience with my ADHD diagnosis and the 25 years of Adderall that followed have left me jaded at the state of psychiatry.
The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.
But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?
Disability is in general relative to the expextations of a particular society. There are people who can't tell a minor and a major third apart - they won't make a career in music probably, but it's not considered a disability or disorder.
Being unable to focus attention is not a beneficial trait in current society. Imagine having to have to take regular medication to control your blood pressure but cannot keep track of your regimen. It requires extra effort to keep the person healthy. Another is tackling difficult and long-term cognitive tasks, which is often necessary to function in society nowadays (I dread filing taxes). This may change in the future (especially with AI) but right now it is the way it is.
There are many traits that are advantageous in one environment and not in another: for example, sickle-cell phenotype became prevalent in regions where malaria was common, because you are likely to survive the infection. But otherwise the individual is likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. People who have low calorie requirement may survive a famine, but may suffer from obesity in calorie-rich environment.
Many things are hard enough for “normal” person who would not be perceived as having ADHD, but it’s more so for people with it. The expectations are set by the modern society, but the actual challenges for ADHD are naturally present - thus they are classified as disorder. It’s commonly debilitating enough to be recognized as one.
> But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder
I think it’s because it’s outside of your control. Ideally you would be able to choose which impulses you want to respond to, and with ADHD that’s extremely hard.
ADHD for academic performance is not a problem, but it can be disruptive in a classroom. Until fairly recently, it wasn't medicated. Can't follow along? You'll just have to do lower levels. If you're medicated out of expectation, that's on your parents.
> How many early humans ...
That's a highly speculative argument for returning to the stone age?
> But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
"In other words"... no, those are separate things.
"Normal" means being like most of the rest of the group. My being 6'3" isn't normal here, but iirc would be normal in parts of the Netherlands.
A deficiency or disorder is something that causes problems. And getting people to just declare that something isn't a disorder won't actually change anything, because the language is downstream of the reality of what skills or abilities are needed for what roles in society.
A lot of that is true. Evolutionary advantage is always relative to the environment.
ADHD can have material impact on other aspects of your life though not just stuff related to studies or cognitive jobs.
A recent bit of research linked ADHD to shorter life expectancy (7-9 years). Reasons probably vary but I'd wager a big part of it is that those with ADHD can have a much harder time keeping up with regular life maintenance, including matters of personal health.
Making that doctor's appointment for a checkup or cancer screening is always 5 minutes away. Encountering even the least bit of unexpected friction can derail you even when you manage to get moving. Next thing you know, 6 months have gone by.
I’m curious to know if medication helped you conform to the societal expectation regarding attention, and whether you experienced other effects from it (positive, negative).
I’d value anecdata to know more and decide whether to push back if school starts pressuring for an adhd evaluation which is usually for an ulterior goal of medicating the kid.
This is blaming the parents for society, and the complaints appears to not be specific to ADHD.
Parents do their best within the knowledge they have. Blaming your parents for the outcomes of society is childish.
Fortunately the author is maturing out of childhood - and discovering as we all do that they are the only person that has the motivation and ability to find their own solutions to their own problems.
Society definitely fucks us up, and most people are trying hard to help improve their little corners, but it's a devil's problem.
Education systems do unfortunately feel so retardedly broken from the inside as users.
On rereading, I can't see anything actionable for parents. Article says:
The whole experience was abusive.
[my parents] 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.
We can wish our parents were appropriately liberal, and personally I am fortunate to have been brought up by permissive but not lax parents.
but strict ("authoritarian") parents do not change their habits easily. In my experience parents don't know how to teach independence (the key to adulthood).
My smartest friends left home at 15, to avoid their loving but overbearing/overcontrolling parents.
Yes, this article has the value of having a child’s perspective in form of an adult prose. It’s difficult to sympathize with him as an adult but gives insight on how some children see their parents during their adolescence.
The author focuses on their experience as a teen with ADHD, but having been a parent of three teenagers, and having been a teenager myself, I think that the educational system is generally asking something of teenagers that they (the teenagers) can't yet provide.
But that is minor compared to how badly some classes are taught. Every time I've helped one of my children with a class in which they were genuinely struggling I realized that the instructor was not capable of teaching the material (usually because they assumed the students already knew what they were talking about).
As a neuroatypical I feel this. But also society has to happen, even if I am at the outskirts of it. As a neuroatypical parent of a neuroatypical children, I still have to guide them understanding the structures and expectations of society, and I see often time that she resents me for it, as the autor resent their upbringing.
Society just don't care, and blaming parent for trying to impart that lesson is harsh, and while I don't know and I cannot judge author own experiences, I can see the one sidedness narrative that's at play, and wonder how much of this is the narrator own issues in processing a faceted issue, writing for himself a easy way out, and I wonder what parents would write about their experiences.
Overall the post address nothing about the thing that still needs to happen to function in the society, only a long unjustified self pity trip where each paragraph ends with an "I was right all along" that doesn't actually feel like it due the onesidedness of the narrative.
> As a neuroatypical parent of a neuroatypical children, I still have to guide them understanding the structures and expectations of society, and I see often time that she resents me for it, as the autor resent their upbringing.
I think where a lot of parents go wrong is representing things as "because I said so" when in fact, there is a very good reason for what the parent is doing and explaining that reason to the child would both reduce resentment and be more valuable than the discipline being given. And the corollary to that is, if you can't explain to your child why you're doing something they don't like, maybe what you're doing isn't actually good parenting.
"Society expects this, society is probably wrong and it isn't fair, but it's not within our immediate capability to change it so we have to find ways to function around society's expectations at the current time" is a hugely valuable lesson to teach kids.
Without this explanation, your kid just has to come up with their own explanation for why you're doing what you're doing, and a lot of the time they're just going to conclude that you're wrong or you're just being mean, which unfortunately is sometimes true with some parents (I'm not saying it's true of you).
And sometimes, with the explanation, you're still going to be wrong, and you may never figure that out what you did wrong. But at least if you've explained why you did what you did, your child understands that so when they begin the process of realizing their parents aren't perfect they have some reason to empathize for the mistakes you made.
That's not how neuroatypical children operate. Explaining whys will just disconnect them.
You need extra work to embed the explanation as experiences in the field they currently relate to.
That doesn't always works, or you get caught in situation where there's just no time to go the extra mile: today conflict was because she decided running into pool of a busy parking lot was what she wanted and she would ignore / shut out me, mommy, the cars, everything else was irrelevant at that moment.
I will find out other ways to explain later on, but the fact remain that I had to act to prevent harm, and it generated resentement. We got to puddles later, but things don't cancel out that way.
"Because I said so" means "My authority as a parent should be sufficient reason for compliance. You asking for additional justification threatens my shifgrethor." Shifgrethor -- Ursula K. LeGuin's word meaning, roughly, authority simultaneously as the bedrock of the organization of society and as a measure of personal self-worth, is widely perceived as bullshit by neurodivergents, and it mostly probably is. But it is of prime importance to normies and if you challenge it, normies will inflict severe consequences. This is such a powerful lesson parents feel the need to instill it early on.
“I think where a lot of parents go wrong is representing things as "because I said so" when in fact, there is a very good reason for what the parent is doing and explaining that reason to the child would both reduce resentment and be more valuable than the discipline being given. ”
Oh boy…if kids were that reasonable I would overlook almost any other deficiency. I don’t think this isn’t what you are implying, I think the author’s parents DID explain things to him. He just didn’t like what he heard.
Admittedly due to the recent hype about adult ADHD, I got myself tested to understand that I am likely to have it to some degree. However, it proved difficult to diagnose as I found my niche to function as part of society (if you assume that a university is no ivory tower) I had a mother that actually in hindsight devoted her life pretty much to make life work for me. Before she died she actually told my to be wife to take care of me. As much as I am thankful about having people who cover my ass, I would expect it from anyone. Also the right balance between structure and 'affirmative action' is close to impossible to find. One of the most important things though my mother told me over and over as a child was that I should not compare myself to others and that I am in the end responsible for myself (also to find my place in society)
Readit News
There has been an interesting result recently, which was discussed here [0]. In an online game where participants had to forage for resources, people with attention deficits scored higher, because they preferred exploration to exploitation.
I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
Having ADHD is then of course a major disadvantage in environments where there is only one global optimum. Examples include highly regulated and deterministic academic environments (school, undergraduate studies) or corporate environments.
But in human history, environments with a single global optimum have been the exception, not the rule.
People with ADHD - and their parents and teachers - should therefore embrace their individuality as a kind of reservoir talent in the human gene pool. We need these individuals in the future.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39508573
[0]: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/evolution
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/21/adhd-may-hav...
I submitted your [1] here back then, conversation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39451173
In ancient times the Raja Yogis (basically wizards) preferred to recruit from those with ADHD. They called them "habitually one-pointed".
But actually academia is incredibly stressful and feels hostile. There's the publish or perish, so you can't go down the rabbit holes and deep dive. You don't have time to dig deep. Dealing with review is crazy as you have to argue to people who don't care that your stuff matters even though no one can tell if it does or not and you should just pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. (We used to not review this way. We used to check for errors and plagiarism and if not, publish). Everything is just hyper metric focused even though everyone knows the metrics mean so little to the actual end goal they are everything to your survival goals. The goals are at odds and I don't think anyone wants to do anything about it even though many will admit it.
I know some people will say I'm naive to think academia should work that way but I think that's naive, so we'll have to agree to disagree. I think academia should be about pursuing knowledge and giving people the environment they need to do that, with the trade being teaching the future generations.
To be honest it feels the world is becoming more hostile to me. There is becoming less flexibility. Fewer opportunities to explore and hire punishments for doing so. Its harder to take things apart (physical or code) as the gardens close more and more. Harder to fix things, harder to make things to things I want (for utility and for fun). It literally feels like the walls are closing in and there's not enough adderal that can fix that.
I think you are right that the chaos helps escape local minima. If I've learned anything in my studies it's that noise is essential in optimization theory. It is also a measurement of error or uncertainty. So unless you can measure something to infinite precision then you should be incorporating noise into your models
My psychiatrist told me that when using any amphetamine-based medication for ADHD, it's important to see it as a way to reinforce routines and habits, whatever they may be, and not necessarily a fix to ADHD itself but rather as a tool to help my brain.
With that in mind, I was advised to take my medication and immediately start doing the things I usually struggle with. For me, that just meant getting to work on specific tasks or studying specific things. Sticking to this approach made a huge difference in how well the medication worked for me.
Over time, I was able to lower my dose, and now I find it much easier to settle into a routine. While the medication can dull my creativity, I've learned to work around that by adjusting when I take it and planning out my work accordingly.
In the case my workload or life changes I tend to get back to my old dosage for a short period until new routines settle, I'm very fortunate to have a family doctor that understands this and is willing to change dosages when needed.
I'm not sure how this would play out with extended-release versions or if this applies to your situation, but I figured it was worth sharing.
Also curious to know if this approach has worked particularly well for me but not for others, or if you take the same approach already.
Anyways, you are not alone, there are others like you also going through this. I am thinking about how nice it would be to have a community for ADHD academics to share advice and strategies.
Puja Ohlhaver has some great ideas and interventions in this space <3
The “scored higher” part of this study is editorialization. The game was developed in a way that exploration produced a higher numeric result so they could measure something as part of the test. The game was an artificial experiment environment and it was designed to “reward” behavior associated with ADHD, so it would have been more surprising if the game did not result in higher scores for people with ADHD.
The layers of editorialization and hypothesizing built on studies like this remind me of the debate over “depressive realism”. Some researchers put out a study showing that people with depression more accurately interpreted something in some specific scenarios which were designed for the study. It was widely misinterpreted by the public and pop culture science writers as showing that depressed people see the world more accurately, and therefore they are an untapped reservoir for seeing the world as it really is. There’s a huge problem with this interpretation because depression produces a lot of cognitive distortions that make people think things are much worse than they really are, so they’re really only more “accurate” when you have them evaluate situations that are worse than they appear. Yet this nuance is lost in the pop culture debate and many people think “depressive realism” means depressed people have a secret advantage.
I think these ideas have become popular as the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and other conditions have widened to include large percentages of the population. In the past the diagnostic criteria for ADHD was such that it was estimated to have low single digit percentage prevalence in the population. Now we’re at a point where Adderall is the 14th most prescribed drug in America ( https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx ).
A similar thing has happened with Autism Spectrum diagnoses, where the criteria were once so strict that it was very rare for someone to get a diagnosis. Now I’m hearing fellow parents casually mention that their young children got an Autism Spectrum diagnosis after simply visiting a medical professional (found on internet listings) and suggesting it. Meanwhile my family friends with a severe autistic child are increasingly frustrated that pop culture idea of autism has shifted so far into the population that people are seemingly forgetting that severe autism is actually very debilitating, much like severe ADHD.
I have had life-long crippling ADHD that I am only now, in my 30s, starting to learn to cope with. My biggest thing was educating myself on what ADHD actually was so that I was better able to spot it in my own life, and then apply strategies to address it.
I'm not sure the above is relevant, but what I wanted to say is in response to this:
> I commented back then that ADHD may be understood as introducing chaos into life to avoid being trapped in local optima.
My life has been really difficult because I simply cannot, ever, force myself to do something I don't want to do. I think there are cool goals in life I'd really appreciate - playing an instrument, learning a language, gettign a PhD, etc. But each of these goals involves an activity that I inherently don't want to do and therefore cannot make myself do them. Studying for exams to get into a grad program, practicing consistently for an instrument, studying a language that has no real applicable use in my life. I simply cannot do these things.
On one hand, that sucks. I wish my brain needed less short-term reward. I wish I was able to hold long term goals in my head as a motivation to get stuff done. But ADHD brains are famously very bad at this, mine included.
On the other hand, ADHD, to your point, has forced a LOT of growth and movement in my life. I cannot sit in one job, town, relationship, friendship, forever. I get antsy. I have to try new things. I crave novelty, and I seek it out in every aspect of my life. I do weird, crazy things, and I meet people who also do those things, and we get along just great. I live a very nontraditional lifestyle. And I've tried a million different things, hobbies, people, cities. I know a little bit about absolutely everything and can talk to almost anyone about something they're interested in because I know just enough to ask interesting questions that they enjoy answering.
It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
This is 100% accurate description of me, too. Except, I somehow managed to finish my masters' studies, start a career in software and eventually get a decent job, then get married and had a kid before I got diagnosed and realized where all my anguish comes from, why I barely hold on.
On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, this still sucks. I really wish I'd been diagnosed a bit earlier, because even if the kind of lifestyle and perspective you described would've worked for me too, it's too late for me now. I can't afford to try any nontrivial novelty, try different hobbies, or do anything else I've been denying myself, with the intensity I actually need.
No, an hour a week of a new hobby will not do; nothing short of frequent binges lasting uninterrupted for days would do. It's how I learned everything, including the knowledge and experience to give me a solid start in software. I thought I don't need it, I denied myself it to fit better with normal society and regular people, and now it's too late - too many loved ones depend on me not just bailing out and reinventing myself in another industry.
> It's a shame that my ADHD is pretty incompatible with capitalism. I work for a couple years then take a year or more off work, rinse and repeat. I've done this my entire life. Thankfully I work in software that pays well enough, and I'm frugal enough, to make this work. But job hopping plus not caring that much about my work means I don't get FAANG bucks or anything, in fact my salary has always been pretty below average for the work I do. But I make it work.
Yes, like this, and I wish I could do it like you. Wonder if there is another way.
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-p...
I totally sympathize with the author as someone who is (probably) neurodivergent but had accommodating parents. Being given space to better understand myself and my value was integral to my success and in being ok being different.
But as a dad to a neurodivergent kid, I impose structure - sometimes to discomfort, never intentionally to pain - because structure is imposed upon us all. I mean, if I could stop time, that would fix most of the issues with my kid’s ADHD. Same if I could make less the impositions of having to do chores, or to eat, sleep, bathe. But there is no easy escape from those things. So, I impose, despite not wanting to, because the imposition is coming anyway.
"It shouldn't be this way!"
But it is. As others have said in comments, ADHD actually may be an optimization in certain environments, but do those environments actually exist in 2024? Even if they exist Are they preferable, overall, to the typical alternative?
There may be jobs that are better suited to someone with ADHD, but do they pay a living wage? Are they precarious? Are they dangerous?
Maybe those jobs "should" pay more. But, as a parent, your job is to prepare your kids for reality, not sell them a fantasy.
Anything creative or artistic, healthcare, tech, sales, skilled trades, restaurants, etc.
If the "reality" you are trying to prepare your child for is becoming an accountant/banker/lawyer/bureaucrat, then you will probably all be disappointed.
To be clear, I don't mean just telling a child they can blame ADHD for their difficulties. Rather, helping them recognize that ADHD is often the reason behind their struggles with certain things and encouraging them to ask people around them for reminders, support, or ways in general to create accountability.
For example, my first job, a paper route when I was ~14, was a nightmare until I asked a friend to do his at the same time as mine and pick me up. Even though we had separate routes, just knowing I had to be ready when he arrived created enough accountability that I didn’t struggle with it as much, and it didn't require me to rely on my parents to impose that structure on me.
Imposing structure is helpful, but it only lasts as long as they have someone imposing it. Ideally, they learn how to build that structure for themselves before they have to navigate everything on their own.
Often emotional aid is simply a compassionate and present person who sometimes helps a bit. maybe doing their own thing at the same time you're doing your thing, and they know what you're doing or trying to do, and they are not evaluating you for failure but being peaceful within themselves. it's sometimes a really nice thing.
We all deserve to at least sometimes have time with people like this!
> Instead of feeling bad, examine the gap between your current life and the one you yearn for.
Say, for example, my definition of fulfillment is having a large array of close friends. If I find myself distracted from or am unwilling to shower, that will drive many people off. If I miss social cues and communicate “in a different language,” so to speak, that will make it difficult to relate to people and become close with them. If I don’t let myself sleep, I’ll be robbed of the motivation and energy I need to pursue this goal or any other.
That’s just an example. But the vast majority of people, regardless of how they define fulfillment, will have to “play society’s game” to some extent.
Let a kid go a few days without a bath. Don't shame them if/when odors eventually emerge. At least be willing to. But I've never had issues. Same with sleeping. And the only real reason sleep is urgent is because waking up at a certain time might be urgent, but if one gets to the evening time tired, they'll take themselves to bed early.
So, I donno.
I basically think you're defending something that's not true. You _are_ imposing all of those things. There would be an easy escape from all of it, for your kid, but for you. Could you see you and the kid as working together to avoid the pressure _from the world_?
"OK, no bathing, no problem. When I don't bath I make sure to put on fresh clothes before going out the next time... usually, but absolutely not always..."
I think you are over-relying on the concept of 'authority'. "I, adult, do this to you, child, because some external authority is making me."
I don't buy it. could you get more creative? or ask them for ideas?
"sometimes I don't wanna shower either. So I don't. because I usually have the power within me to do things that I want to do only when I want to do them."
And now you might be talking (openly, without pushy energy) why you _want_ to shower. Ever. Do you always do it out of obligation exclusively? Is it sometimes relaxing or could be made more relaxing? Turning the light off and lighting a candle can make it super peaceful, and everyone deserves a few minutes of peace.
Also, sometimes we do shower out of obligation, bc we're stinky, but it's totally fine to push the distance between those showers. I've done some long times without bathing, and would feel it important to point out that it's often FINE to not bath for a day or even two, especially if fresh/clean clothing is being worn.
I could prob think of books for creative problem solving. I, personally, would start with "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" by David Friedman. It's available for free on his website, or amazon/library/whatever. Tons of ideas of collaborative problem solving, if you go through it with the lense of sifting for ideas you might be able to implement around you, to reduce conflict/coercive energy.
good luck to us all.
I’ve read that psychotherapy is much more difficult when there is no-one to blame. So it might help for him, until he will have his own kids with ADHD and fail in a completely opposite way.
I would not recommend anyone to blame parents of neurodivergent kids, as it is a very difficult job to do right.
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.
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!”.
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.
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.
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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).
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?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.
> 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.
you'd want to read parents' rebuttal, or at least commentary before judging them based on this post.
> 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.
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
> schools will provide evidence based help
In many places you need the former to get the latter.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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'.
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The focus of my attention does indeed change at a rate which is faster than average. If something can distract me from a task, then it usually does, at least for a few moments. But why is this classified as a deficiency and a disorder? In other words, why is directed attention considered the normal human experience?
To me, it seems obvious. My attention is considered deficient because we have constructed a society in which we expect children as young as 8 (that was the age I was diagnosed) to focus in a classroom on highly abstract topics (history, language, math, etc.) for hours at a time without issue. If a child can’t meet that expectation, then they will be medicated until they do.
But if we lived in a different society, especially one set in pre-modern times, then my kind of attention might not be considered a disorder. It could even be advantageous. How many early humans suffered a premature death because their hyper-focus on gathering berries left them oblivious to the rustling of leaves?
There are many traits that are advantageous in one environment and not in another: for example, sickle-cell phenotype became prevalent in regions where malaria was common, because you are likely to survive the infection. But otherwise the individual is likely to suffer from sickle cell anemia. People who have low calorie requirement may survive a famine, but may suffer from obesity in calorie-rich environment.
Many things are hard enough for “normal” person who would not be perceived as having ADHD, but it’s more so for people with it. The expectations are set by the modern society, but the actual challenges for ADHD are naturally present - thus they are classified as disorder. It’s commonly debilitating enough to be recognized as one.
I think it’s because it’s outside of your control. Ideally you would be able to choose which impulses you want to respond to, and with ADHD that’s extremely hard.
> How many early humans ...
That's a highly speculative argument for returning to the stone age?
"In other words"... no, those are separate things.
"Normal" means being like most of the rest of the group. My being 6'3" isn't normal here, but iirc would be normal in parts of the Netherlands.
A deficiency or disorder is something that causes problems. And getting people to just declare that something isn't a disorder won't actually change anything, because the language is downstream of the reality of what skills or abilities are needed for what roles in society.
ADHD can have material impact on other aspects of your life though not just stuff related to studies or cognitive jobs.
A recent bit of research linked ADHD to shorter life expectancy (7-9 years). Reasons probably vary but I'd wager a big part of it is that those with ADHD can have a much harder time keeping up with regular life maintenance, including matters of personal health.
Making that doctor's appointment for a checkup or cancer screening is always 5 minutes away. Encountering even the least bit of unexpected friction can derail you even when you manage to get moving. Next thing you know, 6 months have gone by.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/23/adults-diagn...
I’d value anecdata to know more and decide whether to push back if school starts pressuring for an adhd evaluation which is usually for an ulterior goal of medicating the kid.
Parents do their best within the knowledge they have. Blaming your parents for the outcomes of society is childish.
Fortunately the author is maturing out of childhood - and discovering as we all do that they are the only person that has the motivation and ability to find their own solutions to their own problems.
Society definitely fucks us up, and most people are trying hard to help improve their little corners, but it's a devil's problem.
Education systems do unfortunately feel so retardedly broken from the inside as users.
Pragmatically speaking: I offer that society isn't going to read the article but some parents will.
And parents won't change the direction of society but they can parent differently.
That's where I see potential value in the article.
but strict ("authoritarian") parents do not change their habits easily. In my experience parents don't know how to teach independence (the key to adulthood).
My smartest friends left home at 15, to avoid their loving but overbearing/overcontrolling parents.
But that is minor compared to how badly some classes are taught. Every time I've helped one of my children with a class in which they were genuinely struggling I realized that the instructor was not capable of teaching the material (usually because they assumed the students already knew what they were talking about).
Society just don't care, and blaming parent for trying to impart that lesson is harsh, and while I don't know and I cannot judge author own experiences, I can see the one sidedness narrative that's at play, and wonder how much of this is the narrator own issues in processing a faceted issue, writing for himself a easy way out, and I wonder what parents would write about their experiences.
Overall the post address nothing about the thing that still needs to happen to function in the society, only a long unjustified self pity trip where each paragraph ends with an "I was right all along" that doesn't actually feel like it due the onesidedness of the narrative.
I think where a lot of parents go wrong is representing things as "because I said so" when in fact, there is a very good reason for what the parent is doing and explaining that reason to the child would both reduce resentment and be more valuable than the discipline being given. And the corollary to that is, if you can't explain to your child why you're doing something they don't like, maybe what you're doing isn't actually good parenting.
"Society expects this, society is probably wrong and it isn't fair, but it's not within our immediate capability to change it so we have to find ways to function around society's expectations at the current time" is a hugely valuable lesson to teach kids.
Without this explanation, your kid just has to come up with their own explanation for why you're doing what you're doing, and a lot of the time they're just going to conclude that you're wrong or you're just being mean, which unfortunately is sometimes true with some parents (I'm not saying it's true of you).
And sometimes, with the explanation, you're still going to be wrong, and you may never figure that out what you did wrong. But at least if you've explained why you did what you did, your child understands that so when they begin the process of realizing their parents aren't perfect they have some reason to empathize for the mistakes you made.
You need extra work to embed the explanation as experiences in the field they currently relate to.
That doesn't always works, or you get caught in situation where there's just no time to go the extra mile: today conflict was because she decided running into pool of a busy parking lot was what she wanted and she would ignore / shut out me, mommy, the cars, everything else was irrelevant at that moment.
I will find out other ways to explain later on, but the fact remain that I had to act to prevent harm, and it generated resentement. We got to puddles later, but things don't cancel out that way.