The Paradox of ADD
October 7, 2008 by Brenda
Filed under ADD, Life Skills
You will be glad to know (at least I was) that I heard back from the dad giving away products in exchange for a donation to the Autism charity. It turns out that I was right and that the links were broken (although they are fixed now). Yay for me.
This brings up something that I bet you’re unaware of, unless you have Attention Deficit Disorder.
People with ADHD are infamous for not paying attention. That’s why they call it Attention Deficit. Duh.
The paradox of ADD, though, is that we aren’t paying attention to one thing - we’re paying attention to many things. We missed 5 minutes of the teacher’s lecture because we were paying attention to 20 other things instead.
Your child may not be able to tell you what tomorrow’s math homework is, but they might be able to tell you who was cheating on their test, or copying someone else’s work, or who was passing notes or sleeping during class. They might even be able to tell you about the person that got pulled over outside the school.
If you go to Thom Hartmann’s website and read his theory of hunters and farmers, it will make much more sense.
Imagine yourself in the jungles of Africa hunting lions. Who would you want with you? The person who got all A’s in school but can only concentrate on one thing at a time, or the one who didn’t do as well in school but notices everything going on around him?
That’s what I thought. Go thank your kid for saving you from being lion lunch.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
