ADHD: Our Gifted Kids are Bored Silly

What makes this so very distressing is the number of children who are labeled as ADHD but who are also gifted or have above-average intelligence.

Image by Zol Tan from Pixabay

“Geniuses used to be rare. Today, thanks to popular interpretation of test scores, every elementary or secondary school has its quota.”
—John W. Gardner, EXCELLENCE: Can we be equal and excellent too?

It not surprising that it would take Forbes, the magazine that for years had as its slogan “Capitalist Tool,” to point out that the way money is spent in the field of education is truly bizarre. An article some years ago by Peter Brimelow asks the question: “Would any management worth a damn put most of its dollars into its weakest divisions and starve the promising ones of capital?”

The next sentence answers: “Not and live for long.”

Yet, as the article goes on to show in eloquent detail, that is exactly what is happening with funding for our brightest and most gifted children in the U.S. educational system. According to the Department of Education, state and local spending on gifted and talented children is less than two cents per hundred dollars spent. And federal funding for gifted children is never more than one-tenth of one percent.

According to the Department of Education, this is the way federal spending on education is generally allocated:

— 49.8% to “Disadvantaged” ($6.9 billion)
— 30.13% to “Other” including bilingual, vocational, & impact aid ($4.1 billion)
— 20.0% to “Handicapped” ($2.8 billion)
— 0.07% to “Gifted” ($.0096 billion)

What makes this so very distressing is the number of children who are labeled as ADHD but who are also gifted or have above-average intelligence.

James T. Webb and Diane Latimer in a recent issue of the ERIC Digest, list the entire diagnostic criteria for ADHD in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Version Three, Revised (DSM-1IIR), and then follow it with: “Almost all of these behaviors, however, might be found in bright, talented, creative, gifted children.”

The specific behavioral characteristics associated with giftedness that Webb identifies are:

1. Poor attention, boredom, daydreaming in specific situations.
2. Low tolerance for persistence on tasks that seem irrelevant.
3. Judgment lags behind development of intellect.
4. Intensity may lead to power struggles with authorities.
5. High activity level; may need less sleep.
6. Questions rules, customs and traditions.

Compare those with Russell Barkley’s list of behaviors associated with ADHD from his “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment,” as summarized by Webb, et al:

1. Poorly sustained attention in almost all situations.
2. Diminished persistence on tasks not having immediate consequences.
3. Impulsivity, poor delay of gratification.
4. Impaired adherence to commands to regulate or inhibit behavior in social contexts.
5. More active, restless, than normal children.
6. Difficulty adhering to rules and regulations.

Which brings us back to our schools. For bright children there’s often only a subtle distinction between giftedness and ADHD, and gifted kids are often misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Rarely, however, are ADHD kids diagnosed as being gifted. Even worse, children who are both gifted and ADHD are almost always merely diagnosed as having ADHD while their giftedness is ignored.

Psychotherapist Lamar Waldron (and my co-author of 2 books) is fond of pointing out that people will almost always frame problems in terms of the tools or experience they can offer as solutions. (As Abraham Maslow famously said: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem in the world looks like a nail.”)

Drug addiction, for example, is viewed by a physician as a medical problem, while a police officer sees it as a criminal problem. Over 80% of our national school resources for special education are for the handicapped, slower, less functional, or learning disabled children.

Since less than one percent is for gifted children, it should come as no surprise to anybody that the standard school response to a gifted ADHD child is to treat the ADHD and ignore the giftedness. Adding insult to injury, many gifted ADHD children find themselves, as a result of their ADHD diagnosis, in a slower-than-normal classroom environment, since they’ve been identified as having a “learning disability.”

Webbs, et al, point out that in a typical classroom, a gifted child may spend one-fourth to one-half of their entire time simply waiting for others to catch up:

“Such children often respond to non-challenging or slow-moving classroom situations by ‘off-task’ behavior, disruptions, or other attempts at self-amusement. This use of extra time is often the cause of the referral for an ADHD evaluation.”

And, in a rather depressing conclusion, they say:

“Do not be surprised if the professional [to whom your child was referred for the ADHD evaluation] has little training in recognizing the characteristics of gifted/talented children.”

Bright children with ADHD are often not identified as having ADHD until the fourth- through ninth-grade levels. This is because they can usually maintain grade-level work with a minimum amount of effort, and don’t “crash and burn” until they hit a grade level or classroom where a high level of performance is required.

By this time, however, they’ve developed a lifetime of skills to just get by, and have missed learning critical study-habit skills, usually absorbed by normal children in the middle elementary years. The result is that the child’s old strategies don’t work, and there are no fallback strategies to call upon.

This explains, in part, both the proliferation and the success of the study-skill classes that so many private tutoring institutions are offering; these are popping up like dandelions in middle and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. They teach children in junior and senior high school the basic study skills that their peers acquired in elementary school, but that they missed.

Those children who are most in need of these skills to make it through boring, mandatory classes (or when they hit challenging, demanding classes) have also missed out on the early-years opportunity to integrate these organizational and study skills seamlessly into their set of skills. Even when they learn how to organize their materials, learn how to study, etc., these skills are not yet habits. They’re not supported by years of practice and reinforcement, and are so far from second-nature that they seem counterintuitive to the child.

And so we see a consistent unevenness in the ability of these gifted ADHD kids to keep it together in school. They attend the study skills class, and their grades shoot up for a month or two. Then they crash and burn and need another dose of technique reminders, all largely because in elementary school their abilities weren’t recognized. The schools don’t usually have specific programs for the gifted even if they have identified them.

The schools’ response to this situation has been to encourage the use of medication and support groups, essentially pointing the finger of blame at the victims, instead of acknowledging the responsibility of an underfunded educational system.

In fact the problem for these bright children is often primarily in the structure of the schools. With less than 1% of total federal and state monies going to programs for gifted children, it’s small wonder that so many psychologists and psychiatrists marvel at the high number of very bright children being referred to them for ADHD diagnoses from schools.

Medication, Smaller Classes

Further evidence of this situation can be seen from the results that innovative schools can obtain with children who have failed in “old fashioned” schools, both public and private. There is no doubt that medication can produce a huge difference in a child’s performance in a school setting, but many schools obtain similar results by simply using smaller classes. This instruction moves at a pace commensurate with the child’s ability to learn, and the teaching is in an active, visual, hands-on fashion consistent with an ADHD child’s learning style.

During the “Ritalin scare” of 1993, stocks of the drug were depleted nationwide. Parents across the country petitioned government agencies and called their congresspersons and senators to demand that Ritalin be reclassified as a Class III controlled substance, easing up on its being lumped into the Class II category along with pharmaceutical cocaine and morphine.

How many of those parents, however, ever bothered to call or write to demand that our schools challenge our children to learn? How many asked that funding for bright children be increased from .07% to some higher number?

The vast majority of parents reading this are probably parents of children who are both ADHD and of above-average intelligence. There’s a self-selection process that’s hard to avoid. Those parents who make the effort to find, buy and read a book tend to be higher in income, and usually higher in intelligence than the average. Such parents tend to produce above-average-intelligence offspring both through genetics and environment.

Over and over again on the ADHD Forum on CompuServe we saw parents complaining that their ADHD-diagnosed children are acting-out in school more out of boredom than anything else.

“My son reads five grade levels above his class,” one parent commented. “He spends most of his time in class trying to sit quietly while the teacher is holding the hands of the slower students. It’s no wonder he gets bored and fidgets.”

The teacher’s prescription, of course, was to medicate this woman’s son. While that would have helped him sit in his seat for the entire class day, and thereby increased his grade scores, it would have done nothing to address the fact he was ready to learn more than the teacher was able or willing to offer.

There was a brief window during the late 1950s and early 1960s when America was shocked by the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik. As a result, numerous programs for gifted children were instituted in elementary and secondary schools across the country. There was a refreshing new emphasis on experimenting with new teaching styles, and teaching more of the hard sciences at early ages.

I was fortunate to be enrolled in these gifted programs from second through sixth grade, which kept me performing well in school and able to read and do math at a college level before entering middle school.

Unfortunately, the Vietnam War brought an end to virtually all of those programs, as national resources were siphoned away from education and moved toward the military. Today, the cost of a single B-2 bomber aircraft is greater than the entire national expenditure on programs for gifted children from 2000 to today combined.

Again, this is not a diatribe against medication or funding the military. The point is that our values have become scrambled in the years since the Nixon administration and then the Reagan Revolution both took an axe to public school funding. Private schools and home schooling grew in popularity because they filled a post-Nixon void left by public schools: educational opportunity for gifted children.

As Brimelow points out in Forbes:

“So the problem appears to be a classic one in economics: Resources are limited — where should they be allocated to get the best return?”

Here again, we see how some really bright ADHD children are identified as being distractible and impulsive: they’re too intelligent for their grade level and our educational system offers them no options. In short, they’re bored silly.

Programs for gifted children need the levels of funding they enjoyed during the Kennedy administration, before they were slashed by Nixon to pay for the Vietnam war and never revived. And we need to restore the funding that’s been repeatedly cut since Reagan took office and the GOP began to vilify public schools

This is an area where parents can advocate on levels from the local school board all the way to their Congressperson, Senator, and the President.