Socrates the Ancient Greek philosopher complained that parents were more concerned with careers and status than caring for their children saying, “Fellow citizens, why do you burn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and take so little care of your children to who you must one day relinquish all?” How little things have changed after all those millennia. Our technology is vastly advanced, but greed and our baser instincts are unchanged.

One thing I noticed looking back at the history of parenting advice was that these great words of wisdom are about younger children, there is far less advice specifically aimed at parenting teenagers. I wonder why?

Although it is sometimes suggested jokingly to employ a teenager while they still know everything, there is some grain of truth in this. Looking back through the history of parenting advice, it seems that adults lose their common sense when parenting children. They listen to the daftest advice from arrogant experts who should have been jailed for child abuse.

Albert Einstein put a date to the age when our common sense stops developing, when he said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

If common sense were so common, then why is there so little of it? We tend to bow to experts and follow their advice even when it is nutty. Why don’t we have the self confidence to accept that we are more sensible than some arrogant nitwit? Where is that common sense when parents need it most, as when dealing with teenagers? By following bad advice we damage and abuse our children, and stop ourselves from hearing good advice.

So now we know why parenting experts throughout history got it so wrong, they lost their common sense.

If you are a parent and struggling with your child’s difficult behavior there is some common sense practical advice, with empathy and respect that really works for difficult young children and problem teenagers.

Really Bad Expert Parenting Advice

The philosopher John Locke in his  treatise on education, published in 1693, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” wrote, that it was good and healthy for children’s feet to be washed every day in cold water, and to have shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water.

This man, one of the greats of philosophy believed a child’s cold wet feet were character building, and so it seems did a few generations of education experts who looked up to him. This is a great tactic for guaranteed hyperactivity, keeping the child constantly moving to get warm.

These words of wisdom from a great philosopher were in the most influential book on education in the eighteenth century. It was translated into the major European languages during this time, and nearly every European expert on education, including the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accepted this wisdom.

Later as understanding of education and child care advanced, the idea of keeping children’s feet wet and cold was quietly put aside as new ideas developed. Some of these more modern experts gave advice that was sure to create dysfunctional sociopathic individuals.

Emmett Holt, in “The Care and Feeding of Children” published in 1894, wrote, “ Babies under six months old should never be played with; and the less of it at any time the better for the infant.”

This is a sure way of raising children who will suffer from Attachment Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and a number of other emotional disorders.

John B. Watson in “Psychological Care of Infant and Child” published in 1928, wrote, “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of a difficult task.”

To be a good parent, just do exactly the opposite of this expert advice and you will do well.

A quote from Groucho Marx puts this parenting advice in perspective, “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

To many, getting the diagnosis ADHD feels at first like a life sentence. To then have comorbities added sounds like a death sentence.

But there might not be any comorbidity. The so called “comorbid” condition could be the reason for the ADHD like behavior and there might not be any ADHD at all. A young child with anxiety or depression can act ADHD like, and hyperactivity or inattentiveness can both be the result of the thyroid gland not functioning as it should.

There are various conditions, physical, medical, mental and emotional which have some symptoms that mimic ADHD behavior. The usual ADHD checklists and the ADHD DSM-IV diagnosis (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) do not differentiate between ADHD and ADHD behavior. In fact the definition of ADHD is by behavior, which also shows up in bi-polar, autism, anxiety, depression, foetal alcohol syndrome, allergies, abuse, neglect, etc., etc.

ADHD has evolved over the last century from a single condition, with variations of names based on various morbid moral defects, through a couple of brain damaged defects until it was split into ADD (attention deficit disorder) and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Then in 1994 it reverted to one condition, but with three subtypes. This taxanonic revolution has not stopped. A new adjustment is due in two years time. . .

Over the last decade huge advances have been made in our understanding of neurobiology and the working of the brain. What has not kept pace with our understanding of biological and electro chemical processes is our common sense.

Reviewing the latest literature on ADHD, there are some excellent papers which have been published, but unfortunately most are stuck in some oversimplified model, digging frantically for the imaginary treasure of a magical ADHD cure. This idea that there is one or only a few causes for ADHD and therefore a simple cure, preferably a magical pill defies common sense.

The BAD NEWS is that ADHD is complex. If it were not, then we would have solved these questions some time last century.

The GOOD NEWS is that if we accept the fact that it is complex, then paradoxically it becomes easier to find a cure.

The reasoning is that it is easier to find a cause in a list of 50 or 100 possible causes, than to search for a figment of some academics’ limited imaginations devoid of common sense.

ADHD Causes are mostly treatable in some way. Medication is great for a tempoary fix, but a lousy cure if the real problem is lack of self esteem, diabetes or early onset bi-polar disorder.

Studies by the American Medical Association have shown that stress is the primary factor in over 75% of all illnesses medically treated today. Stress causes ADD ADHD like symptoms

“We have hunted for big, simple neuropathological explanations for psychiatric disorders and have not found them. We have hunted for big, simple neurochemical explanations for psychiatric disorders and have not found them. We have hunted for big, simple genetic explanations for psychiatric disorders and have not found them.”

Kendler K.S. Am J Psychiatry 162:433–440.

The changing attitude from attention disorder to attention dysregulation is something I can accept. I cannot accept having attention “disorder” as I experienced attention hyperfocussing. This was one of my strengths, and together with my intuitive insight during hyperfocussing, these were two of my talents that I valued.

These are typical positive parts of the ADD/ADHD psyche. When ADHD is considered a “disorder” the positive aspects do not feature. This might not seem positive to a parent calling a teen to dinner, but the teen is not being disobedient, probably tuned out of this world and absorbed in something s/he finds fascinating.

The daydreaming, considered a “symptom” of the “disorder,” was also valuable to me, as this is where my intuitive insights came from. I am an ADD personality (sounds nicer than a neurologically disordered patient) as I am not physically hyperactive. I seem to inattentively daydream a lot. On the inside though, my mind is hyperactive, and is constantly ticking over in my waking hours.

Well at least the attention disorder is likely to be erased from the next DSM. The term dysregulation refers to the fact that we are not average, but are either easily distracted or able to hyperfocus. The average person is usually in the attention area between these two extremes.

Another difference not mentioned much among ADHD researchers hyperfocussing on some “disorder” is that the distractibility is much due to boredom intolerance. The average person can endure boredom and still focus. This gives the average person the ability to concentrate on any task at hand, while the ADDer is unable to concentrate on a task experienced as dull.

For a classic and entertaining account of an ADHD person’s fight against boredom, read The Pile That Ate My Day – One Man’s Tale of Vanquishing ADHD Boredom. It is well worth the time and gives an amusing glimse into the ADHD mind.

The ADDer being boredom intolerant has great difficulty getting down to a task perceived as boring. Others often see this as procrastination. It is not because of laziness the ADDer is procrastinating, it is due to boredom aversion. Boredom is so painful to the ADDer’s soul, that the mind desperately searches for some excuse to avoid it, thus the easy distractibility. This is also the reason for daydreaming. The daydream is far more stimulating than the boring task at hand.

The exception is in a time of crisis. This explains why the ADD/ADHD personality procrastinates till it is too late, and then suddenly is able to complete the task working through to the early hours in the morning of the deadline.

The attention dysregulation is an inability to decide that now I am going to concentrate on this boring task. It is not a lack of discipline, it is an inability. Also there is an inability to choose what to hyperfocus on. The hyperfocussed subject is what the ADDer is interested in, not something chosen for him/her. There tends to be a shift between these extremes and little activity in between where the average person lives.

So true ADD ADHD is not an attention disorder, but attention dysregulation and boredom intolerance.

If a family member, a friend or we ourselves have ADD-ADHD symptoms we need to understand ADD and have confidence in that understanding. We need to assess what the doctors tell us based on our own understanding of ourselves, and not on some abstract “average” individual.

There are over 100 causes of ADD/ADHD like behavior, one of which is having an ADD/ADHD personality. The consensus says coffee will make us active and keep us awake at night. Coffee relaxes me when I am stressed, and I can drink a strong cup of coffee at bedtime, and easily fall asleep. I do not believe I am unique; there must be many people out there in the world who respond to coffee like I do. Consensus refers to a theoretical average person, not a specific individual.

Firstly, the term by which this condition is called has changed over the years (or at least the last century). Mainly because it has been serially misunderstood by science over the last century. Is it any different today?

The latest standard by which the vast majority of health professionals anchor their opinion is now 20 years out of date. The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th Revision) was published in 1994 (based on opinions that had to be at least a few years old to be considered consensus). The next revision, the DSM-V, is due out in spring 2012.

During the last decade there have been tremendous advances in technology enabling scientists to study the workings of the brain. These advances are not reflected in the current DSM-IV.  The new DSM-V will give a different standard than the current one.

This may be OK for a health professional shuffling checklists behind a desk. But where does that leave us ADDers? Our condition is not an academic debate, but something we live with daily.

The terminology used in the DSM-IV is suspect, as admitted in the DSM-IV itself; it is not based on a diagnosable disorder, but purely on subjectively perceived behaviour.
“There are no laboratory tests, neurological assessments, or attentional assessments that have been established as diagnostic in the clinical assessment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.”

(DSM-IV-TR, page 88)

Three of the latest scientific attitudes on ADHD are that it is:

• an attention dysregulation, not attention deficit
• that it is a neurological disorder
• it is genetic.

I will be continuing with these three points tomorrow.