The Filene’s Basement Anti-ADHD Technique

Buy extras of the non-essentials

Image by Temel from Pixabay

A few years ago I heard Hugh Lightman speak at a CHADD confer­ence. Besides being a brilliant speaker, he had a really great suggestion for parents of ADHD kids, and for ADHD adults.

Dr. Lightman pointed out that most ADHD kids are constantly losing things: mittens, socks, pens, caps. He lives near Boston, and he said that he was always hearing from parents who were upset that their kids were losing their gloves. And from adults who couldn’t keep track of their pens.

Instead of getting upset or angry, Dr. Lightman counseled his audience to use “The Filene’s Basement Anti-ADHD Technique.”

This seemed to startle the audience, so he explained.

Filene’s is a department store in Boston. When things don’t sell, they move them to their basement, where they’re radically marked down. There’s all sorts of cheap stuff there, from $60 dresses to $3 mittens.

So, Dr. Lightman suggested, if your kid is a chronic mitten-loser, at the beginning of the winter season go to Filene’s and buy five or ten identical pairs of the cheapest mittens you can find.

“Why get upset over behavior that you really can’t do much about?” he asked, as a roomful of parents bobbed their heads in agreement and sudden revelation. “These kids need positive reinforcement right now: they’re struggling just to get by. They don’t need us in their faces about losing a mitten when they’re failing in math. Just get extra mittens.”

This brilliant and simple strategy, which Dr. Lightman conceived as a way of reducing the volume and amount of criticism that ADD children receive (he calls their learning style “fragile”), works well for adults, too.

Many of the ADHD success strategy stories which I received from adults over the years had to do with buying cheap pens by the box, buying socks by the dozen in an annual binge, and buying toilet paper by the case.

Along these same lines, the only official biography of former Presi­dent John F. Kennedy, written by William Manchester while JFK was still alive and with Jackie’s help and support, noted that JFK constantly lost things.

According to Manchester’s book, he lost his reading glasses and had to buy a new pair at least once a week, and lost pens and his comb several times a day during the 1960 campaign. A large stock of combs and glasses would have been an easy solution, and apparently this is what he eventually came around to.