Breaking

I have mild ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  So does Alan.  In his case, it's not yet clear if the adjective "mild" is warranted... his ADHD isn't horrible, but on a bad day it can make all of us pretty crazy.

ADHD is one of those modern disorders: complex, still incompletely understood, and forced to go through a long trial period as a "syndrome".  As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, there was a large minority of specialists claiming that there was no such thing as ADHD.  As it turns out, not only is it a real condition, but it's something that can be seen without a microscope these days.  Scan the brain of a kid with ADHD, and he (it's usually a he) will have, on average, a smaller frontal cortex, especially in the right lobe.  The difference is structural and gross.  And people who have damage to this area of the brain -- injuries or lesions -- may suddenly develop symptoms of ADHD.

But what's it like?

Well, the best metaphor I've yet heard goes like this: attention, in a normal person, is something like a gyroscope: it holds the brain's focus steady on something.  If you're ADHD, you still have the gyroscope, but it's smaller and weaker.  So it's harder to stay focused.  Your attention tends to drift and wobble.

If your ADHD is mild, this can be overcome by an effort of will.  (Though it's not a lot of fun.  Efforts of will generally aren't.)  Also, if you're an adult, there are various coping techniques.  Mild ADHD is not a serious disability; it's occasionally a pain in the ass, but most of the time it's not messing up my life.  And it may be a strength sometimes.  My current job -- managing a complicated project with multiple workstreams -- pretty much requires me to skip constantly from topic to topic, all day long.  I don't find this hard.  I suspect a  more focused person wouldn't like it much.

There's also a physical aspect.  ADHD people are clumsy.  It's not so much lack of dexterity -- ask me to thread a needle and I'll do about as well as anyone -- as, well, lack of attention.  We drop things, we walk into things, we leave things lying on the ground and then step on them.  My father once walked through a plate glass door.  We break stuff, we ADHDers.  We break stuff quite a lot.

Except that I, mostly, don't.

I've got the classic suite of ADHD symptoms, including some that are obscure to any but fellow sufferers.  (ADHDers tend to love long firehose showers.  Me too.  A lot of us take up dancing or juggling or yoga in order to have some physical grace in our lives.  Me too.)  But I don't break stuff much more than an average person does.

I just recently realized why not: my parents trained me not to.  To be precise, they conditioned me.  The conditioning was classical -- Skinnerian, Pavlovian -- and aversive. 

I've forgotten most of it.  For which I am grateful, because I remember enough to say it wasn't pleasant.  We can skip over the details.  When I occasionally do break something -- knock a glass off a table, say -- I still feel the effects.  Feel them physically.  No, it's not like I fall to the ground clutching my head or anything like that, but I broke a glass the other day and I was still shaking a couple of minutes later.  And I'm not someone who shakes.

On the other hand, it worked.

You can probably guess where this is going.  Today Alan broke Claudia's camera.  He broke it in a way that was just silly, too... absent-mindedness was involved, of a sort striking even in a five year old.  Claude loved that camera -- she'd had it for years -- and she was pretty upset.

A recent article suggests that a kid with ADHD has the right frontal cortex of a kid 2-3 years younger.  That seems about right.  Alan's actions wouldn't be upsetting in a three year old.  (Well, okay, upsetting, but not in the same way.)

Anyway.  As punishment, he lost his Lego Mars Mission for a week.  The rationale was, Mommy lost something she really liked, so we're going to take away something you really like.  I scooped all the pieces together and put them in a drawer in our room.

The funny thing is, Alan accepts this.  ADHD doesn't affect intelligence or empathy.  He's really sorry he made Mommy sad.  And he's old enough to accept certain punishments as deserved.  He sees how this is equivalent to that.  So, when I took the Mars Mission away, his lip quivered a little but he didn't fuss.

But...

Taking his toy away may satisfy everyone's sense of justice, but will it stop him from breaking more stuff in the future?  I'm inclined to doubt it.  What my parents did to me, on the other hand, was unpleasant... but it worked: I don't break stuff.  Much.

At this point in my life, I'm glad they did it.  My ADHD is annoying enough as it is.  If I was constantly breaking stuff, I'd be a nuisance to myself and to everyone around me.  Okay, more of a nuisance.  The memory of how it was done has mostly faded.  So, on the whole, I'm grateful.

But I don't think I could use the same technique on Alan.  We're talking about something a notch or two beyond spanking.  -- No, my parents weren't freaks.  They just had a very difficult kid, and nobody knew about ADHD, and my Mom hated having her stuff broken.  So she hit upon a punishment technique that, in my case, happened to work. 

I suspect it would work with Alan, too.  But I don't think I can do it.  So we'll try to find another way.  I don't know what it is right now, but... something.  Meanwhile, stuff will get broken.

And that's all I have to say about ADHD tonight.
 

Comments

[Carrie]

Both my brother and my husband have ADD (neither are quite hyperactive). My brother is severely affected, my husband moderately. My brother was the first kid in the school district diagnosed. My husband wasn't diagnosed until he was an adult.

My brother was "conditioned" in a way that was perhaps similar to you, in his case by my father. Unlike you, it didn't take. And I cannot believe that there was ever any object so valuable, or household chore so important, that it was worth what that conditioning did to him.

My husband breaks and loses stuff all the time. Expensive stuff, and irreplaceable heirlooms. Drives me batty sometimes, and frustrates him. But in the end, it's just stuff.

[Christine]

My elder son has a relatively mild case of ADD, diagnosed at age 5. At that time, we did a lot of reading, and my husband kept saying things like "boy does this sound familiar". We're sure he's also ADD.

Neither is particular bad at breaking things, although my husband does go through PDAs like a hot knife through butter! I'm on my second in 10 years. He's probably on his 5th or so in about 12 years, maybe more.

But putting things down and forgetting them, oh yes. Keys. Reading glasses. Cell phone. And tripping over things on the floor. Oh yes.

Mind you, the ADD can also be a positive. It often provides the ability to hyper-focus. I've watched Andrew (my husband) do this while reading and coding. The rest of the world is gone, and he is completely somewhere else. Can juggle hundreds of thousands of lines of code mentally and figure out where the problem has to be. I've no clue how to do this, myself!

[lala]

this balance between "oh, god I am productive because of it" and "but, wait, I can't really do it; my partner's not into it; it's culturally unfashionable," etc is totally the tough-stuff mind-fuck of parenting that no one ever talks about on those shows where they talk about how, yk, "oh, it's just really so great and you're so lucky, lalalala, and the answers are so simple and everyone sleeps perfectly through the night at 3 hours old," etc. I will v frankly admit to a lot of handwringing at our house about these v issues and most of my girlfriends' houses as well.

on the bright side, you & yours have domestic help; have her lay down the laws while you go see a movie. then later, you can pretend to have known nothing! "whaaa-aaaat???" you can say.

[The New York City Math Teacher]

Ah, loca - the Mrs. Keeler solution... Of course, the 'rents themselves were closer to the beginning of the last century than they care to admit, when it comes to the, ah, physical culture aspect of parenthood. As in, the glory of having a broomstick broken over one's back, instead of the miserable, pitiable brutal ignominy - not that it was repeated in the decades of the '70s and '80s, but, still.

Regarding the clumsiness - not clumsy with things personally valued - no, not ever. And taekwondo at the age of ten and eleven did wonders for the sense of poise and place.

But there is a Lladro figurine, uh this one, which, upon decephalonization, precipitated battery with a leather strap. And there was this incident with a helium-filled balloon near the bookcase on which my grandfather displayed his German pewter, and a cushion I used to knock the balloon down. Well, I knocked other things down, too.

Oy.

[Bernard Guerrero]

"But there is a Lladro figurine"

I hear ya, bro. Those f*ing figurines were the bane of my existence. Them and the Murano glass. Though the "not clumsy with things personally valued - no, not ever" also rings true, which makes me wonder about the mechanics of the whole thing.

[Andrew R.]

This question is going to come off as naive, but don't they have drugs for that sort of thing these days?

[Susan (the Neon Nurse) Crites]

Whether you are a poster child for the cure being worse than the disease, only you can say.

You are on the right track with the retraining. Did you know that both the military and martial arts schools have a significantly higher percentage of ADD people in them than that found in the general population? One theory is that this is because ADD people instinctively seek a structured social/learning environment where they also find ways to deal with their ADD-type difficulties. Your dancing and juggling is the same response.

You might not be able to, or inclined to, find a martial arts class for Alan. But if you can find something he likes that teaches him eye/hand co-ordination in incremental steps, you'll have a tool for the good kind of brain therapy, minus the bad and ugly.

[Zyon]

this was a terrific blog! thank you!!!