One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is talking to a parent about his/her child. These conversations are insightful and the topics vary. I learn a lot about individual children with respect to developing quality educational programming.  One of the most recurring topics is the diagnosis of ADHD. 

There is a lot known about ADHD and there are many misconceptions.  For instance, did you know that the most frequently diagnosed demographic is Caucasian, middle-class boys? ADHD is the most commonly studied and diagnosed psychiatric disorder and is typically considered a deficit. 

Or is it? Consider this illustration: There are farmers and hunters. 

A farmer has the job of going out into the fields and grooming the land into long rows for planting. In the past, a farmer would sow seeds one or two at a time, tediously moving ahead in a predictable fashion for hours on end. 

A hunter might be standing around a campfire listening to a story when from out of the corner of his eye he sees a leaf falling in the woods. It catches his attention and he turns back to the conversation. Then, a moment later, he hears a twig snap. He grabs his bow and arrow and turns back to the conversation until he hears footfalls in the woods. In the blink of an eye he bounds into the woods.

I believe we would all agree that farming is a skillset and that hunting is a skillset.  Therefore, they both have value. In this illustration, the hunter is obviously the skillset of a child with ADHD.

Schools, however, typically function in the ways of the farmer skill set. Assessment usually involves a child’s ability to repeat small details in order to accomplish a bigger task. For a child with a hunter skillset, this is the most difficult way of learning. Sadly, the ability to express a powerful imagination, searching insight and unusual intuition is not highly prized in a typical classroom setting, according to Lara Honos-Webb.

Over the course of my career I have found that parents lament about ADHD. Most educational discussions regarding an ADHD child’s educational programming focus on turning the hunter into a farmer. Indeed, when hunters find themselves growing up on a farm, not farming is a bad idea. However, not hunting is also a bad idea.

Todd Mulliken, a Twin Cities family therapist, talks about it this way. The best strategy for helping (any child really) is to give them as many opportunities as is possible to travel in lanes of traffic that define their particular skillset. 

“We need to define our children by what we are for; not by what we are against," he says.

There are some obvious “lanes of traffic” in the case of an ADHD child. Honos-Webb, in 2005, wrote an insightful article about the gift of ADHD. It deals with transforming a child's problems into strengths. I believe the “strengths” are the lanes of traffic in which an ADHD child should be traveling. For the purpose of addressing what is an obviously pervasive concern for families and schools, I will address these strengths, or gifts, as a series of Gazette articles to finish out the school year. Consider this strength until next time. 

Seeing the Big Picture:
Children with ADHD are excellent at getting the big picture, in and out of the classroom. Students with ADHD may miss the little details, but they are masters at understanding the importance and meaning of material. For example, children with ADHD may be struck with wonder and awe at the miraculous workings of nature as they learn about photosynthesis and how plants take in sunlight to grow. They may wonder what happens in cloud-covered regions of the world and start to generate ideas for how to get sunlight to plants on cloudy days. As this example illustrates, children with ADHD are often deeply engaged in material in creative and novel ways. They may not remember any of the details about the roles of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis, but they are very curious and interested and typically try to create solutions to problems in creative ways.

There are few courses of study in the educational system that reward the startling gifts an ADHD child has to offer. The good news is that if your child can emerge unscathed from his education, he can find his niche in the real world that will reward him highly for his ardent curiosity, creativity, and ability to solve problems in innovative ways.

Lara Honos-Webb