From another letter to a frum publication, written by an 11 year old:
My younger brother has ADHD too. Even though he is already nine, he still bothers and pinches us all the time. He doesn't listen to anything we say and including him in our games always ends in fights. We have to hide our nosh and prizes because he takes them. He used to smack me a lot, until I learned how to be smarter. Now he mostly hits and bosses my younger brother; that hurts me even more.
Sometimes it gets so bad that I wish he was not my brother. We can never do anything fun as a family because he always takes charge and ruins it for everyone. It takes my mother so long to get him homework done that she almost never gets to help me with mine. My mother has explained ADHD to me but I still get angry that he can't just control himself already.
My friend's brother has special needs and their family gets to do lots of fun things with Chai Lifeline. It is not fair that no one knows what we are going through. People can't see ADHD so easily and we are not sure that we want others to know. I am glad he takes medicine now because it helps a lot.
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Tell me, when a child hurts other people, ruins games, and takes what doesn't belong to him, does that sound like a disease? A mental illness? Or like a toddler?
As Dr. John Rosemond puts it:
"There is no such thing as having ADHD. It is not a biological condition. It is not a disease. It is a lifestyle condition. It is a developmental condition. And I absolutely know from much personal and professional experience that the behaviors we call ADHD can be corrected, cured, by parents without the assistance of psychologists (or drugs) in a matter of 3-6 months. It is not rocket science. If you understood that this is just extended toddlerhood - that's the first step to dealing with it."
Two of my sons work with special needs children as shadows while going to school at night. Some of these children have behavioral issues with no apparent explanation. At the same time, autism has no current explanation either but those children are severely disabled and very few are ever cured. It is hard to believe that children with no ability to talk or care for themselves are that way due to faulty parenting.
ReplyDeleteIn countries such as France, childhood is highly structured but doctors might be also handing out fewer diagnosis of ADHD or not reporting those findings. It may be similar to comparing longevity, infant mortality, cancer rates, etc with countries that don't adequately diagnose or record those statistics.