Okay I would like to start by helping people understand a little easier about what ADD and ADHD are in an easy and probably comical fashion because this is my blog and I can, also because when it was explained to me it was vague and they were too similar, it was also confusing because I couldn't understand the big words he was using and also because he had a heavy accent. Anyway I was diagnosed with one of these but I feel like I was wrongly diagnosed because he fell asleep a lot and I'm starting to feel like psychiatrists aren't being completely legit, but we'll deal with that when we come to it so let's commence with the defining.
ADD- This is where you don't have an excess of energy to burn off like ADHD kids do but a doorknob seems as interesting as an explosion and the slightest thing can draw your attention. And you will stare at that thing for hours until someone becomes worried about you, you'll also probably space out a lot. Pretty simple.
ADHD- Okay so this is the one where you are on imaginary crack all the time. You figit all the time and just want to run around in circles like a happy puppy chasing its tail. With ADD you will stare at a doorknob but that's pretty much it but with ADHD it's a little more extreme. Your all like "GUYS LOOK AT THIS DOORKNOB, LOOK AT HOW INTERESTING IT IS!!! HOW DOES IT WORK? I NEED TO KNOW!!! OH MY GOD IT'S SOOOOO SHINY!!! WHO WANTS TO GO FOR A RUN, MAN IT'S
SO NI- IT'S A FUCKING SQUIRREL LOOK!!! Yeah something like that.
That's a quick overview but if you want to really good details I'll put them here for you:
Attention Deficit Disorder- A syndrome, usually diagnosed in childhood, characterized by a persistent pattern of impulsiveness, a short attention span, and often hyperactivity, and interfering especially with academic, occupational, and social performance.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder- A condition, usually in children, characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness.
Literally the same definition but that's just not being specific since I'm trying to keep this easy to understand.
Okay so you remember how a bit earlier up top there I said the psychiatrists weren't being completely legit? Well here's my theory (Just a theory). Often times you are diagnosed as a child when parents are being protective of their little munchkins and are wanting an explanation for everything. Now when you are being bombarded with client after client after client with young parents who are breathing down your neck you begin to quickly realise that saying the child has a disorder is a lot easier on you than saying there's nothing wrong with them and nothing you can do. Why is little Joey not paying attention? ADD. Why does Anne look like she's ready to run a marathon? ADHD. Bam! done. You get money and the parents leave feeling like their finally in control again. But even though sometimes those diagnoses are right, for the most part it's not and your giving your misdiagnosed child the medical pill equivalent of speed. Go ahead look up Ritalin...I'll wait.
Let's go back in time to a land when survival was key and young boys often had to grow up fast. Children grow and develop at an alarming rate and often adapt to their surroundings fast, why? well I'll tell you why. You see childhood was a time when you learned to adapt and survive before hitting adulthood, it's when you developed muscle and were able to soak in and retain all the knowledge you could which often led to your head doing almost a 360 to take in information. As a child you have an insane amount of energy...or did before the 21st century happened and kids got lazy, but all that energy used to serve a purpose and that purpose was to give you the endurance and stamina to survive, adapt, and hunt. This was encoded on our DNA so all our offspring could do the same.
Imagine a vibrating bouncy ball, what's it going to do? Bounce everywhere it can, now take it and put it in an uncomfortable chair in a boring white room with bad pictures, white paper with words and numbers, and a black board with stuff it's supposed to read for 6 hours a day and only letting it free for an hour and a half. What is that ball going to do? It's going to want to move around as much as it can because it is now restrained energy. Now make it go home where it has to do chores, eat supper, do homework, and go to bed without getting an opportunity to run around and play (not saying this is always the case). That ball is going to do 1 of 3 things, adapt, try and continue it's natural ways, or go crazy.
Let's see the consequence of each.
Adapt: It slows down and loses energy, only wants to sit down and do something that doesn't require a lot of energy to do (just like sitting in a desk at school doing school work). It is now a lazy ball that can be controlled and has no freewill.
Doesn't adapt: The ball tries to continue to be fuelled by it's natural energy but can't be active like it needs to be. This ball isn't like the adapted ball therefore something is wrong so it is given a pill to get rid of that energy and conform to being a lazy ball. Or it isn't given the pill but instead is given the opportunity to be as active as it want's for a few hours before it has to continue to be inactive for 8 hours. This ball has freewill, maybe not the best grades but it's fit and happy.
Go crazy: well I'm sure you can guess.
Believe it or not but inactivity and laziness can be inherited through DNA. We as an animal species have inherited traits which help us automatically know what's dangerous and what isn't and gives us hair on our bodies and teeth to chew meat which is why we react the way we do when confronted with danger or why animals evolve overtime. And because of this, overtime and over generations we learn to keep the traits we need and dump the ones we don't. If we don't need that excess energy than we can just dump it (so no video games and junk food aren't entirely to blame, they just took advantage and made it worse). Kids already sleep for about 8 hours a day, go to school for 8 (well 6 1/2 counting lunch and recess), do homework for about 3, and spend an hour eating supper, that's 18 1/2-20 hours a day gone to no activity what so ever. So considering the lack of physical activity your kids are getting it isn't a wonder why we as a species are getting slow and lazy. And yet we're expected to keep all that up and later on get jobs all the while trying to do something physical like organized sports? Where's the time?
ADHD and ADD have become blanket disorders to calm kids down and get them to pay attention, but I have to wonder how many kids have been misdiagnosed because they were thought to have something they didn't really have. Medicines like Ritalin can help the kids that do have these disorders but can actually make kids who don't worse. Just like physical traits even mental ones if done enough can be passed on, like procrastination, commitment issues, fears, anxieties, disorders etc. Sometimes it's learned but other times it's inherited. But just because we dump traits like pointed teeth and hairy bodies doesn't mean it's gone, it's just stored away in our DNA library which is why some people have hairy bodies or canines and others don't. So if you think your child may have ADD or ADHD make sure it really is a disorder by doing research and asking questions, it may just be that they need to be handled differently.
ADD- This is where you don't have an excess of energy to burn off like ADHD kids do but a doorknob seems as interesting as an explosion and the slightest thing can draw your attention. And you will stare at that thing for hours until someone becomes worried about you, you'll also probably space out a lot. Pretty simple.
ADHD- Okay so this is the one where you are on imaginary crack all the time. You figit all the time and just want to run around in circles like a happy puppy chasing its tail. With ADD you will stare at a doorknob but that's pretty much it but with ADHD it's a little more extreme. Your all like "GUYS LOOK AT THIS DOORKNOB, LOOK AT HOW INTERESTING IT IS!!! HOW DOES IT WORK? I NEED TO KNOW!!! OH MY GOD IT'S SOOOOO SHINY!!! WHO WANTS TO GO FOR A RUN, MAN IT'S
SO NI- IT'S A FUCKING SQUIRREL LOOK!!! Yeah something like that.
That's a quick overview but if you want to really good details I'll put them here for you:
Attention Deficit Disorder- A syndrome, usually diagnosed in childhood, characterized by a persistent pattern of impulsiveness, a short attention span, and often hyperactivity, and interfering especially with academic, occupational, and social performance.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder- A condition, usually in children, characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness.
Literally the same definition but that's just not being specific since I'm trying to keep this easy to understand.
Okay so you remember how a bit earlier up top there I said the psychiatrists weren't being completely legit? Well here's my theory (Just a theory). Often times you are diagnosed as a child when parents are being protective of their little munchkins and are wanting an explanation for everything. Now when you are being bombarded with client after client after client with young parents who are breathing down your neck you begin to quickly realise that saying the child has a disorder is a lot easier on you than saying there's nothing wrong with them and nothing you can do. Why is little Joey not paying attention? ADD. Why does Anne look like she's ready to run a marathon? ADHD. Bam! done. You get money and the parents leave feeling like their finally in control again. But even though sometimes those diagnoses are right, for the most part it's not and your giving your misdiagnosed child the medical pill equivalent of speed. Go ahead look up Ritalin...I'll wait.
Let's go back in time to a land when survival was key and young boys often had to grow up fast. Children grow and develop at an alarming rate and often adapt to their surroundings fast, why? well I'll tell you why. You see childhood was a time when you learned to adapt and survive before hitting adulthood, it's when you developed muscle and were able to soak in and retain all the knowledge you could which often led to your head doing almost a 360 to take in information. As a child you have an insane amount of energy...or did before the 21st century happened and kids got lazy, but all that energy used to serve a purpose and that purpose was to give you the endurance and stamina to survive, adapt, and hunt. This was encoded on our DNA so all our offspring could do the same.
Imagine a vibrating bouncy ball, what's it going to do? Bounce everywhere it can, now take it and put it in an uncomfortable chair in a boring white room with bad pictures, white paper with words and numbers, and a black board with stuff it's supposed to read for 6 hours a day and only letting it free for an hour and a half. What is that ball going to do? It's going to want to move around as much as it can because it is now restrained energy. Now make it go home where it has to do chores, eat supper, do homework, and go to bed without getting an opportunity to run around and play (not saying this is always the case). That ball is going to do 1 of 3 things, adapt, try and continue it's natural ways, or go crazy.
Let's see the consequence of each.
Adapt: It slows down and loses energy, only wants to sit down and do something that doesn't require a lot of energy to do (just like sitting in a desk at school doing school work). It is now a lazy ball that can be controlled and has no freewill.
Doesn't adapt: The ball tries to continue to be fuelled by it's natural energy but can't be active like it needs to be. This ball isn't like the adapted ball therefore something is wrong so it is given a pill to get rid of that energy and conform to being a lazy ball. Or it isn't given the pill but instead is given the opportunity to be as active as it want's for a few hours before it has to continue to be inactive for 8 hours. This ball has freewill, maybe not the best grades but it's fit and happy.
Go crazy: well I'm sure you can guess.
Believe it or not but inactivity and laziness can be inherited through DNA. We as an animal species have inherited traits which help us automatically know what's dangerous and what isn't and gives us hair on our bodies and teeth to chew meat which is why we react the way we do when confronted with danger or why animals evolve overtime. And because of this, overtime and over generations we learn to keep the traits we need and dump the ones we don't. If we don't need that excess energy than we can just dump it (so no video games and junk food aren't entirely to blame, they just took advantage and made it worse). Kids already sleep for about 8 hours a day, go to school for 8 (well 6 1/2 counting lunch and recess), do homework for about 3, and spend an hour eating supper, that's 18 1/2-20 hours a day gone to no activity what so ever. So considering the lack of physical activity your kids are getting it isn't a wonder why we as a species are getting slow and lazy. And yet we're expected to keep all that up and later on get jobs all the while trying to do something physical like organized sports? Where's the time?
ADHD and ADD have become blanket disorders to calm kids down and get them to pay attention, but I have to wonder how many kids have been misdiagnosed because they were thought to have something they didn't really have. Medicines like Ritalin can help the kids that do have these disorders but can actually make kids who don't worse. Just like physical traits even mental ones if done enough can be passed on, like procrastination, commitment issues, fears, anxieties, disorders etc. Sometimes it's learned but other times it's inherited. But just because we dump traits like pointed teeth and hairy bodies doesn't mean it's gone, it's just stored away in our DNA library which is why some people have hairy bodies or canines and others don't. So if you think your child may have ADD or ADHD make sure it really is a disorder by doing research and asking questions, it may just be that they need to be handled differently.
