Does your child always want to do what he feels like doing and only how and when he feels like doing it? Congratulations then! Your child is normal and healthy.
Take it a step further though, to where your child is uncompromising to the point where he really doesn’t care what you or others want and his stubbornness deteriorates into tantrums that he should have outgrown by now and his behavior is really trying your nerves… well, then, maybe he is displaying symptoms of so-called Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD, with or without the “H” for “Hyperactivity”, the disorder so frequently diagnosed in young school-aged boys (see these Fast Stats).
ADD is not a form of moral deviance due to rudeness, orneriness, or anything that may be within your child’s conscious control. Nor is it a mental or learning disability. In fact, although ADD is commonly believed to be an attentional deficit, it is not due to a lack of capacity for attention or to "selective inattention”. It is in fact just a set of behaviors related to poor impulse control due to the immaturity of the frontal lobe cortex, the part of the brain responsible for filtering out irrelevant information, thereby enabling us to stay task-focused despite a constant flux of competing ideas and urges.
The more active your child's mind, the more difficult it may be for him to stay focused and self-controlled. Since this part of the brain is well-known to develop more slowly in boys, this may explain why boys seem more impulsive and scatter-brained than girls. Because of this developmental discrepancy, boys in some parts of the UK now start primary school one year later than girls. Normally, with time, the frontal lobe catches up to other parts of the brain such that an ADD child without other learning problems, although he may always remain more spirited than others, will surely grow into an adult with a very active and creative intellect.
Really bright boys are bored out of their skulls by the garbage they have to sit and listen to for hours daily. They should be doing demanding, non-contact sports (their bones are not yet ready for football), and, when they are around 12 or so, get really smart men to teach them and raise Cane with them when they mess up.
ReplyDeleteI was at the absolute bottom of my classes at public schools until I was 11 but, when I was sent to a private military school, by the second year my grades and SAT-like scores were the highest in th school. Also, I had more demerits for misbehavior than anyone before me, but I loved it. We being Enlightened, drug our brightest and best to keep them dumb.
I like this quote:Many children struggle in school because the way they are being taught is
ReplyDeleteincompatible with the way they learn.– Peter Senge.
I think this is more in keeping why children may act out in school. ADD may not be a learning disability in itself, but it does cause many children to suffer in school and if we, as educators and parents, learned how to teach and work with these children more effectively, perhaps they would have more success. It takes patience, motivation and proper instruction to be a successful role model.