New ADHD Treatment: Discipline and Failure, a Piano Analogy

School is a major challenge for my son.  He's in high school now.  He forgets that he's supposed to see one of his teachers before school, loses papers, forgets to write down assignments, forgets to bring things home, and can't pay attention to one thing for more than 30 seconds unless he finds it interesting, in which case he can't pay attention to anything else.

We hear a lot of "At age x, he should be doing y without help."  "You should let him experience failure and consequences."

Basically, that we should discipline away his disability.  Or ignore it to death.

It's a problem faced by a lot of very smart kids with educational disabilities.  "If he can pay attention to that..." "Well, he remembers this easily enough..."  "How can he not remember he's supposed to do x?  It was clearly stated three times and he acknowledged he heard!"

Guess what.  It's part of the disability.  No amount of discipline or allowing natural consequences is going to help.  It really is necessary to remind a kid repeatedly until he remembers, just as if he was in elementary school.  Because in spite of the ability to recite every nation on the African continent or discuss meteorological concepts in detail, part of his brain IS still in elementary school.  And discipline and consequences will not suddenly take that part of the brain from elementary school to high school.

Here's an analogy.  Take two 15 year olds.  One has never played the piano.  The other has studied for years and reached a level of reasonable proficiency.  You want them both to learn a new Bach piece.

The piano student will barely be able to stumble through it.  You'll send him home to practice.  If he doesn't practice, he'll receive a poor grade.  He'll figure out he needs to practice, and maybe if some additional privileges are tied to learning the Bach piece he'll do it.

The non-piano student won't have a clue.  He doesn't know where middle C is, what a key is, or how to hold his hands.  He might listen to recordings of the piece and try to find the individual notes on the keyboard, but for someone who has never played the piano this is a daunting task.  He'll be quickly overwhelmed.  He'll make excuses in his lessons.  He'll give up practicing because it's way too hard and it isn't doing him any good anyway.  You'll say it's impossible to help him because he's uncooperative and refuses to allow you to help.  At age 15 he should be able to play Bach without having to be shown where middle C is and how to hold his hands and told what time and key signatures are or told the difference between eighth, quarter, half and whole notes.

For kids with certain types of neurological disabilities, school is like being expected to pick up a musical instrument and learn an advanced piece without ever having been taught the basics.  Their brains aren't equipped to learn these things at the same age or with the same ease as their peers.  In our schools if a kid doesn't pick these things up early, we stop teaching him, and say at age x he should be able to do y.  And if he can't, he should be disciplined.  Because you know, anyone can play Bach on the piano if they're old enough.

The Knee-Jerk "What"

This is a conversation that took place between my eldest son, my husband, and myself tonight.

Husband: says something to son

Son: "What?"

Husband: "You don't hear well!"

Me: (to husband) "You do the same thing to me all the time."

Husband: "What?"

The ADHD people in my family appear to have a bit of extra memory cache attached to their ears.  When somebody says something to them, it goes in that cache.  Sometimes all that gets to the central processing unit of their brains is the fact that somebody addressed them.  So the brain tells the mouth to say "What?" and it does.  I call this the Knee-Jerk What.

This is extremely frustrating, especially when I have a cold and don't feel like repeating myself with a sore throat.  But I discovered something.  Most of the time I can get them to access that cache without having to repeat myself.  Sometimes all it takes is a look.  Sometimes a short reminder to play back the cache.  So, many of my conversations with my husband go like this;

Me: "We need to add oranges to the grocery list."

Husband: "What?"

Me: "You heard me." (see, I just saved myself six words)

Husband: knits brows for a minute, then says "Oh, OK.  Let me get the grocery list."

What's really amazing is just how long what I said can stay stuck in that cache, especially when there is an electronic screen of any sort involved.  I have sometimes waited the better part of a minute before waving my hand in front of my husband's face, only to have him blink and make a perfectly appropriate answer to whatever I said what seems like five minutes ago.  Honestly I would have forgotten.

I do need to find something a little more polite than "you heard me".  Maybe "replay"?  Or "cache"?  I really like the idea of getting it down to one word.

I sure would like to hear the neurological explanation for this.

Invisible Disaster

Once, after dealing with a major crisis at work, someone looked at me and said "You don't panic for anything!"
Nope, I don't.  I don't waste my time.  Not at work.  It's the personal stuff that gets me.

See, as the slightly less neurologically atypical person in the house, I have an entire second career.  My other job is dealing with disaster.  It's a secret.  Nobody knows I do it.  I'm on call 24/7/365.  And sometimes, I really resent that second career.  I wonder how much it's held me back in my first career.  I wonder which one really is first.

Here's an example.

This morning, my husband nearly walked out the door with my car keys.  He used my car to run the trash down because he lost his own car keys and hasn't recovered them yet.  He realized I need my car today and took my spare set of keys to his car to go to work, and stopped himself just before walking out the door with my car keys in his hand as well.  He was in a hurry (ADHD people in a hurry are very dangerous, avoid them) and left my car keys on a window sill.  A low one.  That the two year old could reach.  He also left the gate to the basement open.  Which gave me a whole extra house level to search.

I spent over an hour madly searching the entire cluttered house for my keys, thinking about all the awful places my 2yo could have put them.  When I tried to ask my speech-delayed toddler, he just pointed out the window at my car.

I went through a whole gamut of emotions.  Frustration.  Rage.  Despair.  Why do I have to deal with the mess my husband leaves?  Why can't I call him and make him come home from work and deal with the consequences himself?  Oh, right, keeping his job and salary.
Now if my husband were doing this search, he would be dumping every container on the floor and leaving the mess.  Then there would be some reason why he couldn't clean it up (probably to do with going to work) and I would have to do it all.

Sometimes it feels like I'm dealing with an extra large extremely careless child.
 
So how much do I hold him accountable?  How much is he to blame?  He can't help having ADHD.  It makes him miserable too.  He doesn't LIKE losing his keys and forgetting his laptop on a bus in Boston and running out of gas in the middle of the toll road.

So I swallow down the rage and soldier on.  But sometimes I wonder, how much are both our lights hidden under his disability?  The enormous drain of time, energy, stress, and money is completely invisible to everyone else.  What would it look like if I could measure it?  We might both be working at the top of our fields.  We might have PhDs. We might be taking annual multi-week vacations to exotic places.  We've spent at least in the tens of thousands of dollars on ADHD and its associated conditions, between coaching, organizational consulting, lost time from work, and new experimental treatments for our son not covered under insurance.

Because my biggest fear, the thing that really does make me panic, is seeing my children living with this monster leech sucking on their talents.

Fifty Horses and Impulse Control

ADHD is a disorder of impulse control.  Guess what happens when you give a roughly 50 hp machine to a guy with impulse control issues?  Yep, you guessed it.  It isn't just the field that gets bush-hogged.  My husband couldn't RESIST tackling the brush and small trees around the outside of the fence.
Fifty horses are powerful.
Tall brush has lots of particulates.
Fences don't hold up well when trees fall down on them after being uprooted by fifty horses.
Radiators don't like grills full of particulates.
The fence-and-tree situation responded to elbow grease, a chain saw, and standard tools.   The radiator was another matter.  The tractor reached the verge of overheating minutes after being started.  Every time, no matter how much we let it cool off.
This may sound like an advertisement for Winchester Equipment's service department, but I have to say the folks there are my heroes.  My grandfather farmed with a team of Morgan horses, and later fixed and maintained his own tractor.  I went to college and don't have the first clue how to fix a tractor.  But these days there are cell phones, and I can take pictures and e-mail them to the service technicians, and they can tell me what to do.  Several of them have LOTS of experience with old Ford tractors.  I learned how to use an air compressor to clear particulates out of the grill.  Extra thanks to the stranger in Tractor Supply who told me which hose and couplers to buy.  And IT WORKED!!!   I wish all the other ADHD disasters were so easily fixed.

The Evils of Hyperfocus

My husband now has a job that enables him to telecommute at times.  Fabulous, I don't have to pay for childcare or impose on my friends to go to the dentist!  Right?
Wrong.
Ever hear "How can he have ADHD?  He can focus for HOURS!"
Yep.  The problem with ADHD isn't so much the inability to focus, as the inability to CONTROL your focus.  Something engrossing?  Buh-bye.  Maybe a pitcher of ice water to the head or an earthquake would make him look up.  The two-year-old opening the new organic bag of rye flour and "making pancakes" all over?  Nope.
Maybe that childcare isn't so expensive after all.

He did take pictures of the aftermath for me.

See what happens when I post too soon?

March has been slow to let go.  I would like to believe we're done with stuck cars and road clearing for the season, but I keep getting surprised.  My poor husband managed to get his car stuck twice more!  

Hide! It's a Two-Year-Old!

Everyone says my two-year-old is very smart.  They tell me his play is characteristic of a much older child, he has advanced spatial sense, and he observes and mimics the behavior of others rapidly and accurately.

He may be gifted, but he's still two.  So, combine a brain accelerated in some areas, behind in judgement, add opposable thumbs and mobility, and you have a compact, unpredictable, and highly destructive fragile energetic gremlin.  He turns thermostats up to the max, sticks his fingers in the paper shredder (that his father forgets to unplug), climbs into the refrigerator, opens tubes of ointment and glue, scatters small objects of any sort far and wide, and opens containers of liquid and turns them upside down.  Our house has no finished floor on the upper level, so liquids go right through and it rains downstairs.  Since there is an awesome racetrack on the upper level (we thought it was a loft with a stairwell in the middle) he loves to go up there.

All those people who "celebrate giftedness"?  They're nuts.  Now that I think about it, I should be awarded a medal for cooking a meal.

I wonder if it's occurred to anyone to sell ADD insurance?  Think about it.  What if we could buy insurance to pay for all these things:

• Bring your wallet to work service
• Lost wallet coverage
• Locked out of the house service
• Locked out of the car service
• Ditched car coverage
• Forgot your Kindle on the 'plane coverage
• Forgot your laptop on the bus coverage
• Ran over your Smartphone after setting it on your car coverage
• Ran out of gas somewhere random service

Oh, wait.  It wouldn't work.  Too many claims.

The Ditch that Eats Vehicles

According to the Kennedy Krieger Institute, Attention Deficit Disorder affects motor control.  So that must be why my husband regularly ditches vehicles.  Sure enough, he landed one yesterday.  I'm waiting for the insurance company to notice what a statistical abnormality we are.  And they don't know about the ones we pull out ourselves...
Here is yesterday's adventure, at the sharpest steepest curve in the driveway:

This is from 2010.  Same place.

And in 2007. 

Yep, he really doesn't like that ditch.