Youngest Kids in Class at Higher Risk of ADHD Diagnosis

Hey, have you seen The Lawnmower Man movie? Because you have that coming.

> The youngest students were between 20 percent and 100 percent more likely to get the diagnosis or ADHD medication than were the oldest students in the cohort, says Helga Zoëga, an epidemiologist at the University of Iceland who worked on the Icelandic and Israeli studies.

> "Within that age range there is a huge difference in developmental and social and emotional maturity," says Dr. Adiaha Spinks-Franklin, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Texas Children's Hospital who was not involved in any of the studies. "A 6-year-old is just not the same as a 7-year-old."

> And yet a first-grader might stand shoulder to shoulder with another student nearly 12 months her elder. "And the way we diagnose ADHD is we talk to the parent about the child's behavior, and we mail the teacher questionnaires," Spinks-Franklin says. "The teacher will be comparing the child's behavior relative to other children in the class."

That is disturbing. It is clear they aren't taking age into account except at the broadest levels when handing out ADHD medication.

This rings dangerous close to "That kid is too much trouble, just medicate them and move on."

As an adult male with ADHD that went undiagnosed until I was in my late 20s, who was one of the youngest in his class, who faced the potential of "corporal punishment" (spanking on the rear-end with a wooden paddle was the threat) both at school and at home (it was only ever administered to me at home by my parents), and who now has a daughter who has just passed through the elementary years at a school that does not practice any physical punishment, and who has never practiced any sort of physical punishment on my daughter, I strongly disagree.

The biggest change I've seen in the style of schooling between my elementary years and today is not the administration of corporal punishment. Yes, it was an option when I was a child, but it was rarely administered. Less than half a dozen times a year across six grades and about 1000 children, perhaps, is my rough guesstimate.

Instead, the biggest change I see is the near total removal of recess as a part of the day. When I was in elementary school, we had two 15-minute recesses, one 25-minute recess, and an additional 10-15 minute recess period after lunch. My daughter, throughout her elementary school years, was given a single 15 minute recess, and this was often taken away from the entire class as a collective punishment. To me, it's no wonder the kids can't sit still or pay attention. Children that age need to run and play without structure and with as few rules as possible. That physical energy has to go somewhere. And it too often goes to acting up and inability to pay attention in class.

I definitely understand why using fear to control children is a bad thing, but as for violence, it's at the root of all power anyway. Whenever you impose a disciplinary sanction, it's implicit that if the sanction is not respected, it will be replaced by an alternative, at least as harsh sanction, and eventually the alternative sanction will be violent.

Fear is clearly not a great way of controlling your children, but no one does it in any other way. If instead of corporal punishment you discipline your child by revoking privileges, you're still using threats and fear. The alternative is to reason with your child, to present a convincing argument for why they should listen to you. But kids aren't (always) rational actors, so that doesn't always work.

Both hitting your child and grounding your child are based on fear and violence. They each have their disadvantages. Hitting your child might end up teaching them that hitting people is OK, grounding your child gives them a lot of time to build resentment and keeps them cooped up with negativity and inactivity so that they're more likely to get into trouble again. I'm not sure which I would have chosen as a kid, but now I'd choose corporal punishment.

Exactly, it just changes which group of students are in the "too early" group. When I start a new job, they don't say, "Well, your job offer was made on 12-May, but our fiscal year starts in April, so you'll have no choice but to wait until 1-Apr to start work." The solution likely involves abandoning the model of childhood education consisting of fixed, arbitrarily-long cycles beginning on arbitrarily-chosen dates, progressing linearly. But when you leave it up to voters, abandoning "The Way Things Were Always Done" is about as impossible as curing cancer.