Recipe for Teen Disaster

Children’s behavior is the concern of many parents. Kids can be diagnosed with ADD, ADHD or ODD, when in fact, it is the various choices their parents have made throughout the course of their kids’ lives that make kids act the way they do. Yes, I know this is hard to accept, but I believe that if you were to give me a normal child – boy or girl – I could, by making a simple choice to act in a particular way, single-handedly turn this child into a problematic beast with social problems, difficulties with authority, declining academic achievement, lack of motivation, depression, anger and anxiety, just to name a few.

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Opposition Defiance Disorder – What an ODD Name

Opposition Defiance Disorder (ODD) is another name people who like labels use when they need a budget for helping children. Someone has worked very hard and probably spent many dollars to research kids and teens (they say ODD can start as early as 1-3 years of age) and come up with a nice label. Since ADHD worked so well, ODD should work quite well too. Labels are a good way to attract funds, but I am not sure they are good to make things better.

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The War on ADHD

This is great! A couple of weeks ago, I posted my thoughts on ADHD in ADHD Must Be Contagious. This started quite a bit of a discussion on a site dedicated to ADHD families, in a post titled “Life coach wonders if ADHD is contagious”.

The author, who has kids with ADHD, agreed with some of my points, but did not agree with others. Others made some strong comments, describing their own experience as hyperactive individuals or their relatives.

I believe that awareness is very important and we need to discuss our agreements and disagreements regarding ADHD in order to find a solution for us all – kids, parents and teachers.

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ADHD Must Be Contagious

Active little boy laughing - that's not ADHD

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is very trendy. If you search on Google, you will see that there are 34,800,000 hits for it (this is today, but I am sure tomorrow it there will be more, if only because I am adding this post…). It is amazing that as the years goes by, the percentage of kids and people with ADHD goes up.

Do you have an explanation to this?

In this post, let me try to give you some explanation to this inflation in the diagnosis of ADHD.

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The ADHD Myth

Boy leaning against a stack of books looking sad

I go over 22 year of special education experience and can see a great inflation in ADHD. Well, it did start as ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder – and soon became ADHD with the “Hyperactive” addition.

The special education profession is still split on the existence of ADHD. Some say it is a brain malfunction, some say it is only children’s need to move a lot beyond the “normal” range. I think that no matter which approach you take, our society is sick with the labeling disease!

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