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Treat the core emotions that cause ADHD, behavior problems and learning disabilities |
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.
ADHD, Behavior Disabilities, and Learning Disabilities: Branches of the Same Tree
We will look at how Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Behavior Disorder, and Learning Disability are related. For conceptual clarity, I will discuss each of these three problems separately, in their pure forms, which seldom occurs in the real world.
Generally, children will display all of these “disorders,” but they tend to capitalize on opportunities unique to their particular disorder. All three are variations on the same strategy, which is to escape noxious stimuli. ADHD children use an attentional strategy, whereas Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disabilities patients use behavioral escape routes.
Internal Attentional Strategy
Effram is an example of and ADHD child who attentionally avoids both by his behavior and his attention. Effram was a busy young man who seemed to skip like a stone across the water,never getting wet. One minute he would be working at a table with other children, the next minute he would be playing with something in his pocket, and the next minute he would be in the back room looking through the art supplies. He seemed to have the knack of moving on to the next activity before much could go wrong with the last one. He was all output with little input.
When I would ask him how he did today, he would always say “fine” no matter what had happened. If I brought up an incident that his teacher or parent had mentioned to me, he would just do another “skip” by changing the subject. He would pull something out of his pocket or ask me what something was or why I did something. He was an expert at slipping away from whatever focus I proposed.
These deflections were not clumsy like you might expect from some “disorder.” They were expertly timed so that Effram stayed just beyond reach. He was like a sparrow feeding on your lawn, who moves just out of your way, but not very far, expending minimum amount of energy.
ADHD Takes an Attentional Vacation to Fantasyland
Like Effram, the avoidance strategies of a particular ADHD child tend to be generalized to many academic, interpersonal, social, and situational cues. His responses are so diffuse and diverse that he spends a large portion of his time moving from task to task, situation to situation, and person to person in an effort to avoid noxious stimuli.
For him, many cues, such as the classroom itself, the other children, his desk, the teacher, and so forth, are conditioned stimuli that provoke unpleasant feelings in him. The only comfortable ground is to escape into fantasy, like Nintendo. This child goes on automatic pilot when he first senses the proximity of any negative cues. This may be seen as either passive “checking out” with no apparent motor behavior, or it may manifest as behavior problems, or some combination of the two.
When such a child attentionally avoids numerous cues, he may appear continuously detached and inattentive to the environment. His adaptations are not as clearly defined as either the Behavior Disabilities or Learning Disabilities child.
External Behavioral Strategies
The chaos that the Behavior Disabilities child generates is a decoy to distract attention away from his failings. He then avoids the threat of being thought dumb, which is less embarrassing to him than exposing his academic incompetence.
For example, he is more embarrassed by having to read a paragraph out loud in class than by the consequences of causing a classroom disruption. He also realizes that nothing really bad happens as a result of causing some uproar. The angry response distracts everyone, including the teacher, from the original intent. Therefore, his response to the teacher’s (or parent’s) original instructions is irrelevant after the chaos he caused.
To him, it is more important to avoid another failure experience than to take a little verbal flack for one’s behavior.
An example of this strategy was Jerry. Jerry was proud to announce to me that he had a “rep” with the other children in his ninth grade class. His parents and teacher reported that he was regularly disruptive in class. This happened most often when he was called upon. Instead of responding appropriately, he would wise crack, yell or cuss.
When I asked Jerry why he disrupted the class when he was called upon, he retorted, “I don’t have to do that f—ing crap. I have had enough of Mr. Dawson harassing me. Mr. Dawson isn’t going to trick me into letting the other kids laugh at me again,” he said. “Next time I won’t just beat them up, I’ll beat him up too.”
Jerry’s manhood was at stake, and he was going to defend it any way he had to.
Performance demands—such as reading and grades — are particularly threatening to the young male ego as the adolescent struggles for his position in the pecking order of other young males.
In trying to move up the pecking order, he is faced with a sharp contrast between the outcome of different choices. There is a great deal of reinforcement for aggression within the young male social system, for strength, toughness, speed, loudness, athletic skill, and intimidation skills. But there is great embarrassment at being thought a wimp. There is a small amount of reinforcement for being intelligent. But there is great embarrassment for being thought dumb.
When the young male is confronted with an academic performance demand that he is not confident he can accomplish, he has two choices. He can make an effort at meeting the academic challenge. Or, he can be aggressive.
If he chooses to meet the challenge and succeeds, he may get some reinforcement. The problem with this, though, is that from his point of view, there is little probability of succeeding. And, if he fulfills his prophesy and fails, he is faced with overwhelming embarrassment.
On the other hand, if he is aggressive, he will be highly thought of by his peers and certainly will not be classified as a wimp. He will also have avoided the embarrassment of having appeared stupid.
The experience of anger also feels better for the young male than the embarrassment of exposing his “stupidity.” Rather than experiencing the feelings of helplessness and weakness that come with academic failure, the anger brings feelings of strength, power, and control. From the Behavior Disabilities child’s point of view, the choice is clear, act out.
Tracing the Behavior Disabilities child’s experience of a threatening event, especially if it has caused disruption, is also informative. For example, the Behavior Disabilities child might sense the coming frustration of doing a math assignment when the teacher begins to pass out worksheets. As soon as the papers are passed to him, he feels a subtle sense of discomfort. He tries to avoid this discomfort, and resulting feeling of failure, by emitting distracting behavior.
He might do this by changing his perception of the math handouts from something dreaded to something more pleasant. He might imagine the assignment sheets as toys and throw the papers like a ball to the next student. When this happens, the meaning of the papers and the related situation is transformed. The failure feeling produced by math assignments is transformed into an object of play, something to throw to another student. And that feels much, much better.
From the child’s point of view, this is a clever, skillful, adaptive strategy. Class uproar and scolding by the teacher is better than feeling anxious or dumb. It is important to see the Behavior Disabilities child’s behavior as self-preserving, skilled, and effective.
It is a myth that these acting out behaviors occur because “He can’t control himself.” He quite effectively controls himself, the teacher, the other children in the class, the vice- principal, and his parents, just not in the way we want.
Learning Disabilities Use Dumb to Avoid Conflict
I too worked hard to help Brad, but nothing I did seemed to make any difference. Still, his parents were pleased because he looked forward to seeing me each week. (I saw Brad before I began the 3-day intensive therapy model)
— I had “such a good relationship with him.”
The clue to what was happening occurred when I found that he had few friends his own age and his teacher, counselor, and reading tutor were all in the same predicament with him that I was. We were all working too hard, making no progress, and he seemed to be enjoying every bit of it. He had discovered how to hook each one of us into giving him a great deal of undivided attention, which he preferred to peer attention.
The story changed dramatically when we changed the rules for adult attention. We all made our time with him contingent on his successful performance, rather than his frustration and failures. He could no longer come to us to tell us his hard luck stories. He had to read better, behave better, and be happier to spend time with me. His parents would make an appointment for him with me when he could come show me some evidence of his improvement. This might be a good spelling test or a story about having spent a good day at a friend’s house.
This coordinated effort by all of his adult helpers to change the rules in his life dramatically improved his mood and performance.
The “pure” Learning Disabilities (LD) child’s approach is the opposite of the Behavior Disabilities child. He is quieter and more socially endearing. So, while he may fail at a task, his behavior does not elicit the angry, negative feedback that is evoked by his overly active and abrasive counterparts.
In fact, the LD child is willing to own and absorb the problem as his personal academic defect, rather than suffer disapproval for his behavior. His compliant demeanor combines with his academic failing to garner help and caring from adults. But the adults very efforts to help can be one of the child’s reinforcers for LD. That’s because the LD child yearns for this one-on-one adult attention.
Usually, the LD child’s avoidance is focused on a particular academic task or subject. This task, be it math, reading, or social studies, arouses strong emotional responses in the child. For example, he might take the math worksheets and begin to work diligently until faced with a difficult problem. Some preconditioned cue in the difficult problem, be it the quantity of numbers, or maybe the operator [+,-,x.,/], ignites the failure feelings.
When this happens, the LD child becomes so anxious that he cognitively blanks out the material to be learned, like stage fright or blanking out on an exam, and internal dialogues of failure take over his mind. The child’s learning abilities are overwhelmed by his anxious state. Indeed, LD children become so anxious, worried, and depressed when they are confronted with a learning task that there is little cognitive ability left for learning or retrieval of information.
Emotional blocking of intellectual abilities has long been noted on intellectual tests such as the Wechsler intelligence tests. When children are emotionally stressed, performance drops on sub-tests that require sustained attention.
Soon a child can becomes so intellectually inefficient that he learns little and appears to be learning disabled on LD tests. In essence, though, the child has a circumscribed phobia of a specific academic task. Since he blames himself for his failing, depression is often also part of the picture.
When these children are desensitized in therapy to the academic situation—task, teacher, schoolmates, etc.— their grades usually rise systematically. Many children make sudden dramatic improvements, just from reducing anxiety.
For example, a high school junior with a long history of poor academic performance was failing German. In the week after CAER was used to desensitize his fear of learning German, a national standardized German test was given. He received the highest grade in the school. Both he and his teacher were startled.
CAER did not teach him any new German, but his anxiety was reduced so that he could access the German he had been learning all along. The procedure was repeated with the rest of his subjects. He subsequently earned some of the top grades in his class in several other courses.
How ADHD, Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disabilities Fit Together in Real Life
(For simplicity of discussion of ADHD, Learning Disabilities, and Behavior Disabilities problems, the larger scope of emotional problems, neurological variations, and academic learning history brought with the child into the school system are not discussed here. These factors may contribute to some ADHD, Behavior Disabilities, and Learning Disabilities problems, but, in my estimation, they do not account for the majority of the problems.)
Academic Survival
The Academic Consequences of ADHD and Behavior Disabilities
While special classrooms tend to lead to better academic progress and fewer behavior problems, they can also lead to less experience and skill in dealing with actual real world demands. Therefore, the reduced demands of these special classrooms often act inadvertently as a reward for the child’s previous acting out. Sometimes kids even resist being placed back in regular classrooms because of their increased demands.
The Academic Consequences of Learning Disabilities
The school system is yoked with the task of adapting to the Learning Disabilities child’s learning style. Special teaching techniques are offered that the child may find easier. Such approaches are predicated on the idea that the Learning Disabilities child’s learning or sensory modality is defective, at least when compared to that which is culturally dominant.
Teachers and counselors will say that the child is “auditory” or “kinesthetic” in learning style, not visually oriented, which is the culturally dominant style. So, they say, a different way of inputting information must be used.
I have seen high-level school personnel argue this point with reference to a child who regularly demonstrates outstanding drawing skills. This child could not be a good artist if he did not have good visualization skills, in fact better than most.
For the vast majority of the children labeled as either auditory or kinesthetic, it is likely that the therapeutic effect of using an alternate teaching strategy is the result of the Nintendo effect — there is no negative learning history with them. They are simply using procedures and materials that are novel to the child. Like Nintendo, he attends to them, at least until they become conditioned with an aversive emotional tone.
It is, in all probability, this lack of negative learning history that makes these alternate teaching strategies work, not the sensory modality they supposedly represent.
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