I haven't really seen a correlation between ADD/ADHD and home discipline.
Neither of the cases I'm thinking of involved home discipline. They are situations where extreme neglect exists in the midst of a facade of upper or upper middle class prosperity.
One boy, the one that is still here, belongs to an extremely rich family that owns a manufacturing business here. They have 8 natural children, and have adopted 5, all street kids from a local orphanage. They have several large houses, a fleet of luxury vehicles, a small army of maids and drivers. The parents seem more concerned with charity than with their own kids, who receive close to zero attention, though they are given anything they ask for. The parents are generally not around; the burden of making sure everyone does homework, etc, falls on the two oldest, a 16 year old boy and a 14 year old girl. The problem kid, Ben, was in 4th grade last year, and will be again this year. His attention span is zero, he never completes an assignment, in or out of class. He drifts off in moments, gets up and parades around the classroom. He is constantly borrowing bikes and leaving them off in odd places, or simply doing peculiar and inexplicable things. He is ignored by his parents, to the extent that he is often simply "left behind" when the kids are picked up from school. They've been known to call around at 1Am asking if anyone knows where Ben is sleeping. They do things that to me border on insanity... they bought the kid a dirt bike, and they will have a driver take him down to a deserted motocross track and leave him there, unsupervised, for a couple of hours.
Another family, close friends of mine with a boy about the same age, has sort of adopted Ben; he spends a lot of time in their house, sleeps over a lot. Oddly, when he's in their house, he seems a completely different kid. He does homework, he's respectful, he doesn't create nearly as many disasters (not a whole lot more than any 4th grade boy). When the drivers come over to bring him home he hides in the closet and cries; a very stressful situation for my friends.
Teachers report that he responds well and manages to learn in a one-on-one tutoring situation.
He was on medication for ADHD all last year, which reportedly kept him something close to manageable, though he still didn't learn much. At the end of last year I heard his father saying that they were going to hire someone to fly out from the US and administer a series of tests "to see what Ben's learning disability is". I wanted to grab the idiot by the throat and scream in his face that the kid's learning disability is that he needs a parent.
The other kid, the one who is no longer here, went through a nasty divorce, lived with his mother for a couple of years. The mother was having drug and alcohol problems, so they sent him to his father, who had since remarried. The father is often not around, and the second wife treated the boy as something like a 3rd class citizen. The little sister, her child, could do no wrong, and was showered with every imaginable gift and attention. The boy could do nothing right, and it was perfectly clear to all close observers, particularly him, that he was not really wanted. Now the family has gone back to the US; the father is still here, until January. Imagine how lost the boy must feel.
Naturally, he had major problems at school. The solution: drug him.
Obviously, these cases are not representative of all children who are on medication, but I wonder how often these phenomena appear. I would also note that these things are clear to the rest of us only because we live in a small community with a school of less than 200 kids. In a "normal" environment, we might never know about the home troubles these kids face.
One of the sad parts of the whole situation is that even in cases where the behavioural problem is closely related to the home situation, medication may be the only choice for a school system. If parents will not or cannot improve the situation, what else can a school do? They cannot force the parents to change, and they cannot allow a few kids with problems to disrupt classes to the extent that the other children suffer.
I must say that I am not comfortable with the idea of advertisers pushing these drugs directly to parents. A parent who wants to believe that a child's problem is medical - and let's face it, that is a very attractive belief in many situations - will eventually find a doctor willing to agree and prescribe. I don't think that is very healthy. |
