ADHD or Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a term increasingly bandied about in the world today.  It is used to describe a number of behaviours from being overly noisy, over-active and inattentive to impulsive and generally disruptive. As any parent of a child with ADHD knows, this condition is no laughing matter.  But equally serious, is the informal ADHD diagnosis, which may hide root causes with more damaging, long-term results.

In a Physorg.com article,  Dr Linda Graham, a recent recipient of the AARE Award for Doctoral Research in Education, pointed out the hazards of applying the easy label of ADHD to children's behaviour. Back in the early 1990s, ADHD was a relatively obscure condition, one which most people didn't know much about unless they had a child with it. Today however, its become something everyone knows about, often resulting in an almost pop-culture explanation for why children behave in certain ways. 

While behavioural issues may be real, merely labelling it as ADHD is dangerous because it doesn't offer teachers and schools adequate direction on how to help a child through school. This gap can make the child's situation significantly worse than better.

Dangerous Misdirection

An somewhat distrubing example cited by Graham, was of a boy who had speech problems and learning difficulties from the age of six. He had been described numerous times by schools as having 'ADHD-like behaviours'. This label was used to describe everything about the boy, using catch-phrase words such as impulsiveness, inattention and hyperactivity.

"This turned out to be a big problem because his first school, as well as subsequent schools, became fixated on this label, informally diagnosing the boy," said Graham. 

The real issue actually lay in his speech and language difficulties, which explained why the boy was explosive and acted out. If he was verbally challenged by another child, he, in frustration, was more likely to hit out. Unfortunately, because of the red-herring effect of the ADHD label, his behaviour was misinterpreted as impulsivity with terrible, long-lasting consequences for the boy concerned.

If it Looks Like a Duck

The problem is that people tend to think all children with a particular diagnosis will be the same. The informal diagnosis acts like a signpost, saying a child is likely to do certain things. It's a bit like owning one of those medical books of diseases and symptons and self-diagnosing your ailments.

Unfortunately, according to Graham, an authority on education, the more dominant these diagnoses become in mainstream society, the less inclined a teacher or school might be to work out individually what will work with these kids. Added to this, is increasing disempowerment of schools and the erosion of the individualised and instinctive intuition traditionally used by teachers for years, often to the detriment of children and the teachers themselves.

Stepping Up

This is scary stuff.  Because we automatically assume the education and identification of any learning issues with our kids will be picked up and (hopefully) managed at school.
So what can we do about it? Quite a bit actually.

A common theme I am increasingly seeing with building children's reading habits and literacy levels, is that we as parents and care-givers, need to become more involved.  It's a theme that seems just as applicable to ADHD as it is to kids reading.
When your child seems to start exhibiting ADHD-like behaviours, instead of accepting it as the end-all diagnosis, dig a little deeper and see whether all other aspects of your child's development is progressing as normal.

Perhaps their language or speech development is lagging, or perhaps they are dyslexic?  Or perhaps their diet contains too much sugar or stimulants that affects their system more than others?
The causes of ADHD-like behaviours can be wide and given the risks highlighted in the article, it seems wise to take just that extra bit of time to find out a bit more.

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