adhd - School is where many ADHD problems appear

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.

malevolence if they lack understanding.

—Albert Camus

From the perspective of how to influence another person’s behavior, there are two main explanatory models of how behavior is caused: the deficit model and the learning model. The deficit model states that problems occur because of a lack of something. At the simplest physical level, this could be lack of such things as food, heat, physical comfort, sleep, or exercise. At the psychological level, this could be a lack of self-control, social skills, confidence, willpower, good intentions, or knowledge. In this schema, our accurate understanding in the arena of physical needs is inappropriately extended to the psychological domain.

When you have a broken leg, you have a clear “deficit” in functioning, in that you cannot walk. That is best dealt with by temporarily “filling the deficit” with a cast and crutches. If you are not able to think clearly because of lack of sleep, that problem is corrected by filling the sleep deficit. It is unlikely that providing these supports to fill the walking deficit are going to shape getting more broken legs, or getting more sleep is going to shape fuzzy thinking.

Deficit Model inappropriate for learned behaviors

However, when this deficit model, appropriate for helping with physical problems, is inappropriately transferred to learned problems such as emotional, skills, and psychological difficulties, you often get results that are exactly opposite of what you intend. You often get the psychological equivalent of more “broken legs.” Strategies of “filling the deficit” that are effective for physical problems can backfire for learned problems because they actually reinforce the problem behavior, as we shall see below.

Most of our behaviors, including those that are dysfunctional or problematic, are governed by the learning model. The essence of the learning model is simple, “a behavior is maintained by its consequences.” A behavior occurs because it works to get a person what they want, at least in the short-term.

Consequences are whatever follows the behavior whether the consequence is truly caused by the behavior or not, or whether it was intended or not. The more immediate the consequence, the more influence it has over the behavior it follows. An example of an unintended consequence might begin with a wife sitting down in a particular chair at home. Her husband happens to pass by and gives his wife an affectionate pat. This consequence is experienced as reinforcing by the wife which may cause her to sit in that particular chair more often without even thinking about it.

Behavior is not, as is commonly thought, restricted to overt motor behaviors, but also includes thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and ideas as well as many internal biological processes. They all operate by the same rules.

The problem in recognizing that behavior is governed by the learning model is that the deficit model is something psychologists call “domain specific.” That is, our brains have been hard wired for millions of years to understand human problems from a deficit model.

For most of human history for the vast majority of people, physical needs were primary and survival depended upon filling deficits, such as hunger. If one feels hungry, they have a food deficit. Therefore solving this problem means they need to find food to fill that deficit. If one is cold, they need to find shelter. They have a deficit of warmth, etc. This deficit way of thinking about problems is wired in to us and therefore tends to be our automatic way of thinking about problems, even when it does not apply.

It is only in the last hundred years or so that psychologists have begun to understand and articulate the learning model. Therefore, it often does not have the intuitive “right” feel that the deficit model does. Whether it feels right or not, thousands of controlled research studies clearly demonstrate that the great majority of human behavior is driven by the learning model.

In a practical sense, this means that one has to take special efforts to understand and apply the learning model even when your intuition would be to follow the deficit model.

In relation to helping your child, understanding the difference between the learning and deficit model is critical. If you use the wrong model, it is very likely that your efforts to help your child will actually make his problems worse. Many problems result from trying to help using the wrong model.

Deficit model distracts from accurate analysis of behavior

Once you are aware of the different models, it is easy to tell which model is being applied by listening to how adults talk about children’s problems. They say thing such as, “Collin was distracted by…” or “Collin cannot control his temper.” Both descriptions imply that Collin lacks the ability to control his mind or actions.

Or, think of all the “can’t…” stories(link to #11) enumerated elsewhere. If you study the stories, it seems as if children are “one quart low” of something like math or reading skills, attention, social skills, self-control, social perception, etc. The implication is that the problem would be resolved if you could top him off with a quart of… to fill this deficit.

In the deficit model, the child is perceived to lack some skill or ability to accomplish a task or resist the power of things outside himself to control his attention. In contrast, the learning model says there is utility in his actions. His behavior works. In some way it provides a convenient escape from tasks and situations children do not like. Or, the behavior produces some reward such as adult attention, or peer approval, etc. that the child does want.

The truth is that children are intelligent, self-serving, active agents who are skilled at shaping their world for their own benefit. They are not defective, deficit-laden victims. The child who has learned to use his fingers, pencil, or an eraser as props for a fantasy is active in creating an activity that is more appealing than his assignment or chores.

It is the child’s skill in using these props to support their imagination that should be appreciated, rather than seeing this as a deficit in their ability to attend, or their being a victim of distractions. The point is, they can attend and are attending very well. They are just not motivated to attend to what you have selected for them to attend to.

The learning model says that the problem happens because it is a learned adaptation that has functional utility, at least in the short-term. According to this model, a child has good control of his attention, but has learned to direct it away from things he does not like, toward more desirable activities. In the long run, this adaptive strategy fails. However, children (and in large part adults as well) focus on the short-term payoffs.

You might pass this distinction off as nit-picking or of little consequence. Not so. This is a very important issue, not academic or semantic games. How you understand your child’s problems has a profound impact on how effective you will be in resolving them. ADHD gets worse when adults try to fix it in the wrong way. The best intentional efforts can fail if they are misdirected.