A few years ago, I did some substitute teaching in the local public schools. In them, I noticed something strange: the boys labeled “ADHD” were perfectly normal.
Sure, a few boys had trouble focusing and paying attention. But from what I saw, this resulted from conditions in their schools and homes, not from any flaws in them.
Our schools stigmatize spirited boys.
The students most often labeled “ADHD,” which stands for “attention defecit hyperactivity disorder,” are high-testosterone boys, wired from birth to be more spirited than most. It’s usually when these boys hit middle school, and their male hormones really kick in, that they’re labeled “ADHD.”
To do well academically, these sorts of boys need plenty of physical activity during the day. Unfortunately for them, schools no longer recognize that. In the local middle schools, for example, what used to be a half-hour recess has been turned into study hall. This isn’t good for any student, but it’s especially hard on high-testosterone boys, who need an outlet for their energy. If they can’t burn it off outside, they burn it off during classes, in ways that schools interpret as “ADHD.”
I saw many examples of this, but the clearest was in a high school, where I met a bored student who was acting out in class. He looked like an athlete, so I asked him, “Do you play sports?” He told me that he was a linebacker on the football team. His position told me that he was aggressive by nature, a high-testosterone young man. As we talked, he said he’d been told that he “was ADHD.” To me, however, he just seemed like the guys I’d played football with: guys who loved being outdoors and hated sitting at a desk.
Schools regard boys as defective girls.
Why had the linebacker been labeled “ADHD,” when young men like him 30 years earlier were considered normal? It was because the schools had changed:
- Men tend to understand boys better than women do, but there are many fewer men working in schools now than there were 30 years ago.
- Because schools are now run according to woke ideology, the men they hire these days tend to be effeminate. Such men can’t easily relate to masculine boys.
That young man was labeled “ADHD” because the schools had lost touch with the rule Take Natural Gender Roles. They had no clue as to why we should Bring Boys Into Manhood, so what looked like normal behavior to the men who ran my high school seemed aberrant to the people who ran his.
The catcher on my son’s Little League team provided a good example of how “ADHD” designates natural, normal boys. That boy paid close attention to everything on the field. He was whip-smart, and a natural leader. Being familiar with the sorts of boys who get labeled “ADHD,” I asked his mother, “Has anyone ever told you he had ADHD?” “Oh yes,” she said. “The school wanted to put him on drugs, but I wouldn’t let them.”
It’s not just me who’s noticed how normal boys are now seen as aberrant in our schools. I spoke with a former teacher and current counselor who told me there’s nothing wrong with the boys we label “ADHD.” She thinks that diagnosis is bogus in all cases. Drugging boys, she told me, is just a lazy way to make them easier for women to manage.
The writer John Michael Greer agrees with her. He summed up the situation on his blog, Ecosophia:
“This is a bleak and bitter time to be a young man in America…maleness has been pathologized in our schools, so that boys are systematically punished and penalized for the crime of not acting more like girls. Those boys who can’t handle the demands for passivity and obedience imposed on them can count on being drugged into submission…”
Attention issues begin at home.
Most boys labeled “ADHD” are just too energetic to function well in today’s schools, but some who get that label are struggling with their home environment. Boys who lack structure and discipline at home can behave in ways that get them labeled “ADHD”.
I saw a good example of that on the soccer team of 12-year-olds I helped coach. At the first practice, one of the players goofed off constantly. I asked one of the other coaches about him, and I was told that he “had ADHD.” I was skeptical. To me, he just seemed like a kid who’d never been made to behave.
To test my assessment, I imposed strict discipline on that player. Several times I banished him from the field, to show him I meant business. At the same time, I complimented him whenever he did something good. It turned out I was right about him: it took only a few practices for him to start behaving well.
Examples are not data sets, but they tell us things that data cannot. What that particular example told me was that my impression of “ADHD” being a spurious label was largely accurate. If anything, students who have trouble paying attention should be screened first for what might be called PIAI: “Parent-Induced Attention Issues.”
Some doctors understand the situation.
Dr. Leonard Sax, the author of Boys Adrift, has a similar take on why some kids have a hard time paying attention in school. He identifies the broader culture—namely, kids’ intensive use of cell phones and video games—as a big contributing factor. He says:
“This boy tells his parents that he’s having trouble concentrating and focusing and they take him to a board-certified child psychiatrist. And the child psychiatrist says, ‘Ah, sounds like maybe ADHD, let’s try Adderall or Vyvanse and see if it helps.’ And oh my gosh, what a difference — medication helps enormously. The child, the teacher, the parent and even the prescribing physician saying, ‘Hey this medication was prescribed for ADD, it’s clearly been helpful, therefore this kid must have ADD.’ But he doesn’t.
“The parents bring him to me for a second opinion and I ask some questions like, ‘What do you do in the evening?’ and the parents have no idea, he’s in his bedroom with the door closed so his parents don’t know what’s going on and they think he’s asleep but he’s not. He’s staying up ’til 1 or 2 in the morning playing video games night after night. He’s sleep-deprived. And if you’re sleep-deprived you’re not gonna be able to pay attention and all the standard questionnaires, Conners Scales, etc. cannot distinguish whether you’re not paying attention because you’re sleep-deprived or because you truly have ADD.”
Dr. Sax also says that pharmaceutical “solutions” for kids’ attention issues are causing serious problems themselves. For example:
“There’s been an explosion in prescribing amphetamine and methylphenidate to American kids. All these drugs when administered to juveniles damage the motivational center of the brain. I saw a 27-year-old guy who spent most of his time playing video games and looking at porn. He didn’t have a career or girlfriend. This is the new normal. This boy was on Ritalin from ages nine to 17. Can I say with certainty this is due to the meds? No. But we have very good research suggesting these substances damage motivation.”
“ADHD” is an American invention.
“ADHD” is unknown in the vast majority of the world’s countries. Outside the US and a couple of of its satrapies, like Germany, it doesn’t exist. For example, fewer than one in 200 kids in France has attention issues, compared to one in 10 US kids who are diagnosed with “ADHD.” Why? Because the French see attention issues not as a biological problem, but as a cultural one. Instead of labeling students defective, the French examine the conditions at home that may be making them agitated.
There’s also the fact that French schools regard students’ behavior in a more common-sense way. As Dr. Marilyn Wedge puts it in her article “Why French Kids Don’t Have ADHD:” “The definition of ADHD is not as broad as in the American system, which, in my view, tends to pathologize much of what is normal childhood behavior.”
The French have also identified another important factor in kids’ attention issues: food. French doctors have noticed that attention issues increase in kids who eat foods that contain artificial colors and preservatives, so French school lunches typically feature lots of fresh food, carefully prepared. By contrast, American school lunches come mostly out of cans, and include a lot of artificial ingredients.
There’s a sure-fire cure for “ADHD.”
The Bicycling magazine story “Riding Is My Ritalin” describes how one boy shed the “ADHD” label simply by riding his bike. “When I was off the meds and rode a lot,” said bike racer Adam Liebovitz, “I’d feel great. I could concentrate.” He developed a plan to cure his attention issues through riding, and:
Almost immediately, the drug-free experiment was a remarkable success. Adam cruised through the first half of his senior year… Adam’s progress was so impressive…that he cut a deal with school administrators to graduate a semester early.
Adam’s experience is consistent with the results of the very first experiments with attention medication. At NIMH, in 1978, a Dr. Shipman used running as a treatment for hyperactive kids. He found that:
The running kids started acting as if they were getting extra doses of medication. After a while, the doctors who monitored the behavior of each child began lowering drug doses for most of the runners… The doctors who were administering the doses didn’t know which students were running; the changes in behavior were that clear.
Did the study lead to exercise-based treatments for attention issues? Sadly, no. In fact, the opposite happened: doctors started writing prescriptions for attention drugs. One wonders if that has more to do with the drugs’ profitability than their effectiveness.
The exercise-based, “run ’em around” approach to addressing attention issues is gaining ground nonetheless. For instance, two adults in my cycling group told me that regular cycling completely eliminated the “ADHD” they’d been diagnosed with.
It’s time to let boys be boys.
As we know from the rule Take Natural Gender Roles, boys will be boys, and that’s a good thing. When we let them grow up naturally and normally, understanding and honoring their masculine essence, they thrive.
It’s time to stop labeling boys as defective, and start running them around so they can express their essence in healthy ways. When we do that, we will find, as my fellow cyclists have, that “ADHD” signifies “Natural Normal Boy.”
Leave a Reply