What’s the Real Lesson?

Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot:  Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.

Child says, “I can’t do this.”

Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.

Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.

Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.

The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.

The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:

-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.

-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.

-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.

-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.

I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.

But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.

#I wonder if this might potentially apply to people with autism as well?#because I haven’t been diagnosed with adhd but MAN do I fee this#and like I had the situation a lot of people went through#breezed through elementary and high school and in gifted and talented#but then college happened and I was LOST

There’s a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits.  Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because I’m a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges. A lot of “help” for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who aren’t, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.

Well shit this explains so much about me

Yes, I am autistic without ADHD, and this is…how a lot of things happened to me.  I’m an adrenaline addict, too, and this is why.

And I’m not going to say that that mode of operation doesn’t have its uses.  But it is a really, really counterproductive way to teach kids how to take the time and focus to learn to do something well and sustainably.

It can also make kids look lazy who aren’t, because you start to learn that you’re only good at things if you can do them PERFECTLY, IMMEDIATELY, RIGHT NOW and you don’t learn how to work through your anxiety and processing difficulties to actually practice and understand something.