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Children with ADHDADHD is not a deficit, disorder or neurological defect, but a highly refined skill that backfires. It is a learned defense mechanism that can be unlearned. Find out how it is not a lifetime curse that has to be accepted but a very treatable obstacle. Read about the non-pathological neurology of ADHD.
Articles in Children with ADHD
Last Updated on Friday, 05 March 2010 03:47 Written by Administrator Monday, 01 March 2010 18:20
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------You’re a bug on the ceiling of Mrs. Reed’s 3rd grade class. You watch as she tells the children to open their books. Then your eye catches Jason. He is poking a pencil at Melissa to which she is frowning as she hisses under her breath, “get outta here!” She swings her hand and knocks the pencil out of his hand. He smirks. Mrs. Reed hears the commotion and walks briskly toward Jason’s desk. All eyes rivet on Jason. He sits up straight and has a glint in his eye. Mrs. Reed bends over his desk and starts talking to him about his choices with a mild threat that if he does this again he would have to go to the principal’s office. You observe some of the other children snickering or giggling. Jason glances at them, appearing to feign a serious demeanor as Mrs. Reed gets closer. You can tell by his attitude and her irritated voice, this scenario has happened before, probably many times. His diagnosis…
As a social species, humans spend much energy trying to change the behavior of other people in their lives: children, spouses, students, employees, etc. However, for all this effort, people seldom consider how their models of behavior may be inaccurate and thus lead to very ineffective strategies to effect this change.
As the family has degenerated, schools, media, peers, the legal system and government have taken over parental roles. And, specifically, criticizing the educational system — teachers, curriculum, funding, etc. — has been a current national pastime.
The monster we criticize, though, was created by the surreal and incompatible demands we place on schools. As the culture has progressively redefined the task of schools, it has increasingly become their responsibility not just to teach the 3R’s but to direct this socialization process.(Read #24-4 as introduction first) Once an ADHD child is aroused by feelings of anxiety and anger, his ability to learn attentional avoidance increases while his ability to learn math, spelling and the like declines. This happens in a two-stage process.
First, the child experiences both the discomfort of the emotion as well as its negative effects on his performance. And he is overwhelmed by this experience.
Second, he learns to escape this noxious experience through attentional avoidance. Although avoidance feels better in the short run, performance at home and school soon deteriorates.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that causes feelings of well-being, happiness, contentment, and enhances motivation, attention and memory. Contrary to what is implied by neuroimaging studies, levels of dopamine are not static, but can change quite rapidly, depending on the activities and the individual’s feelings about these activities. This is a key to explaining how ADHD works at a neurological level and how stimulant drugs work for children.
There is a convergence of neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and pharmacological evidence that dopamine levels are lower in the prefrontal lobes of ADHD children’s brains. This causes poorer attention and memory in those with ADHD. Some parents of ADHD children are pointing to this when they say “he does not want to do anything” or they cannot find any rewards for which he will work. While it may seem that this research supports the “chemical imbalance” theory of ADHD, as you read on, you will discover how this is a result, not a cause of ADHD patterns of thinking and behavior.
Think about sitting down to your favorite TV program or with a magazine you’ve been waiting to read. Now think about getting out all the receipts and forms to fill in your IRS return. Compare your own imagined experiences between those two scenes as you read the following.
The Conditioned Attentional Avoidance Loop Model, (link to 24-4)appears to be radically different, but in actuality it is a logical extension of traditional theories of psychopathology.
Traditional theories, despite their differences, embrace Sigmund Freud’s notion that psychopathology is the result of an earlier emotional trauma. The adaptation to that trauma results in the psychopathology.
ADHD works by the same processes and serves the same function as traditional psychological defense mechanisms. In fact, it is best thought of as a defense mechanism favored by children.
Freud talked about how repression, suppression, or denial, are ways of keeping noxious thoughts and memories out of one’s consciousness. That is, they are attentional avoidance mechanisms that work just like ADHD.
Freud saw defenses as the patient’s active efforts to adapt, but that ultimately, if overused, backfired. So too, it is with ADHD. Framed in terms of Conditioned Attentional Avoidance Loop Model, the patient is as an active, skilled adapter to the environmental stimuli, just as Freud saw his patients. However, in both cases, defense mechanisms have gone awry.
Like all defense mechanisms, avoidance behavior functions as a way to spare the ADHD child the unpleasant emotions — whether they are triggered by internal or external experiences. It does this by keeping annoyances out of consciousness. But the defense strategy suggested by the Conditioned Attentional Avoidance Loop Model is more obvious than traditional defenses since:
1) The behavior of children is less sophisticated and thus more obvious.
2) The noxious stimuli (parents, teachers, and school-work) are usually here and now a opposed to in the past or far away.
3) Adults are actively engaged in keeping the child from physically escaping.
4) Much to the chagrin of the observing or diagnosing adult, the defense mechanisms of the ADHD child are often a reaction to the adult.
5) ADHD is Felt as an Insult by Adults.
This last point deserves further discussion.
My perspective using the Conditioned Attentional Avoidance Loop Model allows me to focus not only on the ADHD child but also on the adults who play an important role in his environment.
Failure to consider the role of adults in the child’s world has made it difficult to observe accurately and understand ADHD. That’s because the role of the controlling and evaluating adult, whether teacher or parent, is crucial to filling out our picture of the child. The adult is part of the Conditioned Attentional Avoidance Loop and the adult is the one responsible for triggering the attentional avoidance.
The child, simply, is always maneuvering to stay out of reach, and he does this by directing his attention elsewhere. No matter what you ask him, you get evasive, escapist responses — “I don’t know,” “Doesn’t bother me,” “Sure, I have lots of friends,” or “I don’t care.”
These responses occur between bouts of looking away, fiddling with things, wandering off mid-conversation, outpouring emotionally, grimacing, or glowering. These responses are an efficient smokescreen that is both difficult and frustrating for the adult to comprehend and respond to rationally.
Seeing the role of the adult as causal to ADHD behavior may at first feel upsetting and disorienting. We do not like to think of ourselves as the target of someone else’s defense system. The message received is that the ADHD child is defining you as the enemy whether you like it or not.
This differs from traditional psychology that deals with patients who are defending against some internal or historical experience. The latter is much less aversive than when someone is defending against you. Despite his most caring and benevolent efforts, the ADHD child blots the therapist, parent or teacher out of his or her reality.
In fact, it is the nature of the ADHD child to refuse to connect interpersonally with you or conform to your demands. He does not seem to understand that you are trying to act in his best interests. Instead, suddenly, the adult is on the receiving end of rudeness, rejection, or insults. Since the adult feels helpless and frustrated in controlling the child’s behavior, he or she feels personally affronted. It is as if your well-meant offer of friendship is being rebuffed.
Because of this affront to you and your reality, it’s easy to see ADHD children as more defective than they are. Thus, it becomes even more tempting to categorize ADHD children in an unbecoming fashion — as we are likely to do to anyone who rejects us. If the ADHD child does not like us, he must have something wrong with his brain. So we come up with labels like “Minimal Brain Dysfunction” or “neurotransmitter hypothesis,” depending on what is in vogue.
While teachers and counselors insist that they are professionals and thereby do not react emotionally to the antics of children, inevitably they do respond. Not to acknowledge this emotional reaction is to blind ourselves to a major piece of the dynamics driving ADHD. We have been seduced into focusing on only one part of the feedback loop—the child.
ADHD, LD and BD children manipulate the world to adapt to the environment. How each “disability” reframes the aversive situation is its defining characteristic.
The ADHD child attempts to both avoid conflict and avoid being thought of as stupid. He attentionally checks out of the whole scene. Behavior Disabilities and Learning Disabilities children manipulate how the world reacts to them with behavioral strategies. The Learning Disabilities child would rather be thought dumb than deal with confrontation. The Behavior Disabilities child would rather provoke uproar and confrontation than to be thought dumb.
Which adaptation pattern develops probably depends on the child’s broader learning history and current reinforcement contingencies. The following examples illustrate the difference in the style and focus of the child’s attentional avoidance strategy.
In order to better understand ADHD, it is imperative that you see the ways in which all of our common, daily experiences are similar to the thinking, feeling, and behavior of an ADHD child.
This is important for two reasons. First, regardless of whether you are a teacher, parent, or researcher, little can be gained until you begin to see the world through the eyes of an ADHD child. Invaluable insights are acquired by mapping the experience of a child through on our own personal experience. Formal research experiments can only validate, not originate, these insights. Second, by personalizing the experiences of the ADHD child, we make an important discovery. This discovery flies in the face of traditional medicine, which wants to identify something as broken in the child's brain and fix it, i.e., medicate it.
Children hear stories from their families about who they are. These stories may be positive or negative. Children diagnosed with ADHD, LD or HFA(high functioning Asperger's) hear many stories that reinforce these labels. These stories may be about his problems, diagnosis, disabilities, conflicts, and failures. They also might be telling jokes about his clumsiness, criticizing him for not getting his homework done, or on the positive side, applauding his getting a good grade on a test, or praising his athletic ability.
Songs with violent lyrics increase aggressive thoughts and emotions, suggests a study in US college students. The study contradicts a popular suggestion that music loaded with violent imagery, such as some rap and heavy metal, are cathartic in venting aggression.
The lightning speed of the ADHD child’s emotional responses to instructions often preempts listening to what a parent or teacher says. The parent says, “Clean up your room.” But before the parent finishes saying the word “clean,” the child is furious and their listening shut down.
That’s because this interaction has a history. The child has a conditioned emotional response to the parent’s voice, tone and words. That response is to his feelings of anger, rather than his parent’s instruction to clean up his room. Indeed, the response is so strong that the full request is barely, if at all, heard. The child then acts on his feelings of anger, rather than the merits of the parental request.
The original learning for ADHD consists of two processes: attentional depletion and attentional avoidance. While there are no pure cases of depletion or avoidance, attentional depletion tends to happen first with avoidance following that. For the purpose of clarity, I will discuss them separately. The first section describes the usual, but not rigid, progression in the development of attentional depletion. Following that will be a description of attentional avoidance.
In order to break the destructive cycle of Homework Help Hell(link to 82-10), one has to focus on the emotional dynamics that drive homework difficulties between parents and children rather than on the intellectual content of the homework itself. When this happens there are often dramatic improvements in the apparent academic skills and performance.
Socially clumsy children usually do not usually have a social skills deficit. Rather, some social situations, particularly with peers, trigger emotional arousal so the child does not have the attentional resources to learn new social skills or demonstrate the social skills they already have. Remove the anxiety and you will see a far more accurate picture of what they can do.
Choice of treatment for ADHD is on the basis of cost, availability, effectiveness and risk, not on subtle variations in the ADHD diagnosis itself. So, before you spend your money, ask those offering testing how different testing outcomes will predict which of the real, available treatments you are considering will be most successful for your child. If they don't give you a persuasive answer, you may be wasting your money.
The argument that because ADHD tends to run in families, it is of genetic origin, is poorly thought out and false. Here is why. Those who argue that ADHD is hereditary will point out that one or more, usually male, ancestors of the patient also showed ADHD symptoms. Thus, they demonstrate a correlation between ADHD symptoms across generations. But correlation is not causation. For example, there is a strong correlation between the midsummer pavement temperature in New York City and the banana crop in Brazil. I'm sure that hot asphalt in New York has nothing to do with making bananas grow faster Brazil. However, both are caused by a third factor, warmer weather.
Girls are taking the nation's colleges by storm. They're streaming to campuses in greater numbers, earning better grades and graduating more often. The same phenomenal success shows in high schools, where girls dominate honor rolls, hold more student government spots and rake in most of the academic awards.
So says a just-released report from the U.S. Department of Education.
Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.
GETTING BY IS HARD ENOUGH IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. IT'S HARDER still when you've got other things on your mind-and Andrea Okeson, 13, had plenty to distract her. There were the constant stomach pains to consider; there was the nervousness, the distractibility, the overwhelming need to be alone. And, of course, there was the business of repeatedly checking the locks on the doors. All these things grew, inexplicably, to consume Andrea, until by the time she was through with the eighth grade, she seemed pretty much through with everything else too. "Andrea," said a teacher to her one day, "you look like death."
Mice treated with the antidepressant Prozac early in life grow into adults with emotional problems, a new report concludes.
High tech scans of brain metabolism are often cited as evidence that ADHD children’s brains are different, and this is the cause of their symptoms. Though the data from these studies is indisputable, their interpretation is fallacious and misleading.
Research has shown that children watching TV mirror the unrealistically fast paced TV images. Every hour preschoolers watch television each day increases their chances of developing attention problems by about 10 percent. Is it any wonder that more and more children are taking drugs for ADHD?
Watching movie stars light up on screen is the biggest single factor in influencing teenagers to smoke, suggests a new US study.
Since 1988, Ciba-Geigy, maker of the popular A.D.D. drug Ritalin, has quietly propped up the national A.D.D. 'support group' CHADD (CH.A.D.D.) (for Children and Adults with A.D.D.) with more than $1 million in grants and valuable services. As the Merrow Report reported, CHADD (CH.A.D.D.) has been distributing misleading information to hundreds of thousands of parents and teachers that exaggerates the benefits of drug therapy, including Ritalin.
Parents, wake up! Do you really believe that your child, seemingly normal until eight (the average age of diagnosis) has a "brain disease" due to a "chemical imbalance of the brain," diagnosed by a teacher? I don't think so.
Administration through a skin patch developed by Sano Corporation of a widely used anti-anxiety medication may provide a safe and effective treatment alternative for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the results of a pilot study presented at a National Institute of Mental Health conference by Duke University researchers.
