ADHD: Our Lost Rituals
This loss of ritual may also address the deeper conundrum of modern-day ADHD children: If ADHD is genetic, then probably many of these children’s parents are just as ADHD as their kids.
“With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth Cod’s work must truly be our own.”
—John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1/20/1961
In the late summer of 1995, I spent a week with Dr. Jane Shumway on an Apache Indian Reservation. We were doing in-service training for teachers and social workers, and spent most of our time with members of the tribe. We were invited to a number of sacred ceremonies, including a sweat and a puberty rite for a young girl.
This latter was fascinating. For four days, this girl and her family stood out in the desert. With the medicine men and friends and family supporting and encouraging her, she danced a religious dance to bring a blessing on her and to mark the transition from girl to woman.
Judy, one of the Apaches who hosted us, made a comment to me after we’d stood in the hot sun with this girl and her family dancing for six hours. “If she makes it through this, she’ll know for the rest of her life that she’s capable of anything.”
Virtually every indigenous culture in the world has rites-of-passage rituals for its young, a reality that was not lost on Carl Jung, Margaret Mead, and other observers of human nature. It seems that ritual is a critical component to developing emotional and spiritual strength. Family rituals such as meals together, vacations, attending church or synagogue, etc., all serve to build the ties within a family and strengthen the members individually.
But in modern Western society, our historic and constructive rituals are breaking down. In their place, new rituals will necessarily emerge: it’s a requirement of the human organism. And so we hear of gangs which require new members to rob or kill somebody, of fraternities who haze members to the point of death or injury, and roving gangs of suburban, middle-class teenagers who vandalize mailboxes, steal street signs, or compete to see how drunk they can become before they drive. These behaviors, as sick as they may seem, are actually fulfilling a basic human need for ritual and belonging.
But these rituals don’t produce the kind of deep emotional strength that the family and larger-culture rituals of the past did. In many ways they’re just hollow imitations, lacking in meaning and only transitory in their fulfillment of this inner need. This is similar to the way some people mistake sex for love, compulsively seeking it throughout their lives, never achieving satisfaction.
This loss of ritual may also address the deeper conundrum of modern-day ADHD children: If ADHD is genetic, then probably many of these children’s parents are just as ADHD as their kids. That being the case, how did those parents— themselves afflicted with ADHD from birth—become sufficiently successful to end up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood? How did they get through school, college, relationships, and into the workplace?
One answer may be that they had rituals. Church and home were important in the pre-TV and pre-social media days. For the generation of my parents, the most common ritual of adulthood was to go off to war or participate in the war effort at home (WWII in their case). For their parents, there was the work involved in surviving the Great Depression or participating in World War I.
Yet for my generation, going off to the Vietnam war was spectacularly unsatisfying and unnoble, and the protest riots were a poor substitute. Hippies and flower children sprang up as a community, context, and to provide ritual, but it was a largely dysfunctional culture for transition into “normal, American adult life.”
Our children have virtually no larger context for ritual, as families often no longer eat together (at least not without the TV), or worship together. Even the puberty transition ritual of graduating from high school has been minimized by the growing emphasis on a college education.
How can we re-establish ritual for our children so they can grow up with the maturity and emotional stability which will allow them to succeed with or without ADHD, as so many of their parents and grandparents did?
Organizations exist which have historically provided this sort of ritual and context of belonging to children, although they are nowhere near as pervasive or important in American life as they were a generation ago. The Boy and Girl Scouts are probably the most well-known, but there are also others, many of them specific to particular parts of the country or religions.
The Army, that rite of passage for my father, is still available but no longer mandatory. There are efforts in Congress to put into place public-service equivalents, commonplace in European countries such as Germany and Scandinavia where every teenager must serve in the military or in non-profit volunteer work after high school.
And, of course, working to strengthen family and local cultural rituals is an important step. Taking the kids to weekly worship, or to the symphony, or even to vacation together, builds that sense of shared experience and camaraderie that will become a strong foundation for later life.
Thom—You have, of course, opened up the whole range of work done by Joseph Campbell and Edward T. Hall. Much of their focus was on rituals as rites of passage.
When we focus on daily rituals, there are some important but different aspects for ADHD. One of the pieces that is missing in the design of our modern communities is the “third space” for gatherings. The historical European towns have some aspect of this with the markets and plazas. The gathering and relating rituals that take place in these spaces can moderate some of the more difficult aspects of ADHD by allowing mental stimulation needed but keeping things in a focused space.