Stop Blaming our ADHD Children for Problems with the US School System

It’s both convenient and useful to label, blame, and medicate students rather than genuinely supporting or even reforming the system...

Image by Wolfgang Eckert from Pixabay

Education is the best provision for old age.
— Aristotle, 384-322 B.C.

While ADHD is a very real thing and a very real problem for many children, it can often also be an excuse used by school systems that, themselves, are struggling with issues of under-funding and being caught in a political whipsaw. It’s also more of an impediment to middle-class success than it was in our parents’ or grandparents’ generations when it was rarely diagnosed (and when it was it was diagnosed as “hyperactivity,” “learning disability, or some other general category).

For example, seventy years ago the percentage of children graduating from high school was much lower than it is today.

A high school diploma wasn’t considered “necessary” for many occupations, particularly those involving manual labor, farm, or factory work. It wasn’t uncommon for people to enter the work force full-time at the age of 14 or 15, as did Thomas Edison. It was most likely the ADHD individuals who dropped out of school and ended up working or joining the military at young ages.

Yet in those days — indeed, even as recently as forty years ago — these people weren’t considered odd or dysfunctional. They merely had chosen one particular career path, that of driving a taxi, for example, or working in a factory, or on a farm. (And this is very much still the case in Europe, where going into a trade school and doing an apprenticeship to be a baker, mechanic, or chef is considered highly respectable.)

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood, where several of my friends’ parents worked at the local Oldsmobile plant (my dad worked in a tool-and-die shop). Many had never finished high school; some were immigrants who spoke broken English. A willingness to work hard and membership in the union were their tickets to success, not education.

But today more children are staying in school longer. There’s more pressure for them to stay in school, and fewer opportunities for those who drop out. Many factories won’t even consider a job applicant without a high school diploma, for example, and even people applying for minimum-wage service-industry jobs find their resumes being scrutinized and themselves ranked by their high-school grades.

This emphasis on staying in school, and on succeeding in school, creates more of an opportunity for children’s ADHD to be noticed, diagnosed, and treated. It also can lead to an often justified near-hysteria among parents about their children’s educational achievement.

Consider the grandest paradox: if ADHD is genetically transmitted, why is it that the highest rates of diagnosis and treatment for it are usually in upper-middle-class white neighborhoods? Could it be that this is a condition that’s only transmitted among upper-income people of European ancestry? Most geneticists would laugh at such a notion.

The obvious reason for the higher diagnosis and treatment rate among more well-off families is that such parents are more aware of the importance of education and therefore more sensitive to their children’s school performance. In addition, children in upper-middle-class neighborhoods have better access to health-care professionals who can diagnose ADHD and prescribe medications.

The Medication of Children

But even setting aside considerations of income or class, there are still powerful reasons for a school to want to label and/or medicate a child.

When I was executive director of a residential treatment facility for abused children in New Hampshire, I remember one boy who was brought into our program from the state mental hospital. He’d spent the past several years in the hospital, drugged with the powerful antipsychotic Thorazine into a dull stupor.

After withdrawing him from the drug and running a few month’s worth of tests on him, our psychiatrist determined that he was neither psychotic nor even particularly neurotic, other than from the psychic pain he’d experienced from being locked up in a mental hospital for two years. He’d been dumped there as an emergency placement for a day to get him away from an abusive home because there were no beds that day in more appropriate places. Subsequently his case paperwork was lost or his social worker quit her job or something happened (we never did find out what) and he simply was kept there for a few years. This boy was locked in a little room, often tied to his bed, and, finally, continually drugged.

I asked his new social worker, who’d rescued him from the mental hospital and moved him to our program, why he’d been on Thorazine all that time. Her reply was both cynical and accurate:

“With all the financial cutbacks in social services, the hospital was in a crisis. They were overworked and understaffed. So drugging him to passivity was probably the easiest, cheapest, and least troublesome way to handle him.”

When I travel around the country speaking on ADHD, frequently teachers are in the audience. Many have come up afterward to talk with me, and I’ve done seminars and trainings specifically for teachers and school administrators.

In all of these contacts, one distressingly familiar theme keeps reappearing. Our schools and teachers are overloaded and under-funded; they’re not supported in their efforts by parents; and the most common scapegoats, those who have the finger of blame pointed at them when children fail, are the teachers.

Compounding this, hard-core rightwingers have decided to vilify teachers for political gain and the GOP has committed itself to destroying our public schools. Four Republican-controlled states have begun the process already, with statewide voucher programs with universal eligibility.

This is, of course, totally unfair. While there are some teachers who are just putting in their time, the vast majority are committed, caring professionals who are trying to do their best in a world of diminishing resources and increasing demands.

Part of the “solution” to this problem, for many put-upon teachers and underfunded schools, has been the diagnosis of ADHD. By identifying and treating children with ADHD several things happen which from the school’s point of view are desirable.

First, the blame for the child’s failure to perform at the level of his or her potential is shifted from the system to the child. It’s not that the teacher is overloaded, or under-funded, or the school is under attack financially — it’s that the child has a deficit in his ability to pay attention. Of course he’s not learning: he has a neurological disorder.

Second, by medicating or otherwise treating the child to reduce his or her ADHD-like behaviors (particularly those which are hyperactive as well), the level of disruption in the already strained-to-capacity classroom is diminished. This also benefits the teacher and the school. (It has the added benefit of improving the probability that students will be able to learn, but that’s a point to discuss in a later article.)

While far less Dickensian than the experience of our child referred from the state mental hospital, the root cause is the same, as is the potential for abuse. The simple fact is that American schools and teachers are hitting levels of overload.

Add to this the worried voices among the middle- and upper-middle-class shouting about the inadequacy of the schools, and politicians calling for privatization of schools, vouchers, and all the rest. It’s both convenient and useful to label, blame, and medicate students rather than genuinely supporting or even reforming the system.

That’s not to say that ADHD isn’t real, isn’t a serious problem for many children, or is just an excuse. But it does highlight how important it is for all of us to work with our schools to give them better tools and better funding rather than purely or simply blaming our children for their apparent inability to learn in a struggling system.