The Wizard of ADD?

My Twitter friend Anthony Whyms replaced his picture a few days ago with a picture of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. I asked him about it - was it his Halloween “costume”?

Today he sent me a link to a post he wrote on his Moving4ward Internet Marketing Blog.

In the article, he compares building an online business (or really, acheiving any goal at all) to the journey undertaken by the characters in The Wizard of Oz.

Each character was searching for something:

Dorothy - the love and comfort of home
The Scarecrow - to prove his intelligence
The Tin Man - to show he had a heart and feelings
The Cowardly Lion - to show that he was brave
The Wizard - to share what he had learned with others

Anthony asked me which character I was, and I told him, the Scarecrow. Having Attention Deficit Disorder always means proving your intelligence over and over.

I suppose in some ways I am the Wizard, too, since I try to share what I’ve learned with all of you. At times, I guess, we can be any or all of the characters.

It’s the Scarecrow, though, who holds a special place in my heart, just as he did in Dorothy’s. I guess it’s because I know how he feels. It’s hard to feel stupid when you know you aren’t, and worse yet to have to prove it over and over.

Keep him in mind as you raise your own wonderful and amazing ADD child.

The Wizard only needed to give the Scarecrow a diploma to make him feel good about himself. You might need to do a little bit more.

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ADD and the World We Live In

Have you ever considered how perfectly your ADD child fits into today’s culture?

If your child is still in school, then maybe not. School can be one of those things that ADD students are ill suited for.

Think about it. It requires sitting quiet and still for hours on end. It requires lots of listening and paying attention. It requires deliberate, slow thought processes. And there’s very little “audience participation”.

In general, in many ways, school is being taught today the way it was taught centuries ago. George Washington sat in a school room and listened to the teacher speak and was expected to learn that way. Are things much different at your child’s school?

Contrast that with the way the rest of the world works. Instant messaging, cell phones, increasingly faster internet connections. Do this while you’re doing that. Information is coming at you from all sides and in various different ways, and most of it at an alarming speed.

This was the world Attention Deficit Disorder was made to live in. Except when the rest of the world realizes it, they won’t call it a deficit or a disorder anymore.

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The Elusive Side of ADD

I think that learning is one of the most important things you can do, and I don’t think it should stop with graduation. Life long learning will keep your brain active and make you a more interesting senior citizen.

When it comes to learning, people with Attention Deficit Disorder may struggle with the process. There are a lot of reasons for that:

Being easily distracted and unable to focus means the information may not get through to begin with
People with ADD tend to be poor auditory learners, which is the way most teachers teach
Many people with ADD have poor executive functioning, which controls how information is processed and stored
ADD has an elusive side that can put you two steps behind where you were yesterday

That last point probably didn’t make much sense. Here’s what I mean: a person who doesn’t have ADHD can learn something on Monday and recall it on Tuesday (or any other day of the week).

A person with Attention Deficit Disorder can learn something on Monday, not remember it at all on Tuesday, and yet have a basic grasp of it later in the week. This is tied into the executive functioning process.

A person without ADHD learns about saltwater sea life and stores in it a “file cabinet” in their brain under science or sea life. That way, it’s easy to find when you need it.

A person with ADD, however, learns about saltwater sea life and one (or both) of two things might happen.

Saltwater sea life reminds them of their trip to Florida when they were 12 and their grandpa took them deep sea fishing. Maybe they even caught some of the sea life they’re learning about. But in this case, the information might get stored under vacations, childhood memories, or grandpa. Not so easy to find when you’re looking for information about saltwater sea life.

The other thing that could happen is that the executive functioning messes up the connections. It could take longer than usual to store the information in long term storage, or it may file it in a completely random spot, like math. Now you have a problem retrieving what you’ve learned on a reliable basis.

If you add in the pressures of taking a test and trying to retrieve this information, it becomes easier to see why thngs they knew the night before have suddenly disappeared.

If this elusive side of ADD affects your child, it probably always will to some extent. Repetition is the best way to deal with it; giving the brain more and more chances to store the information properly.

You might also teach them to be alert to connections they make in their mind when they are learning something. There’s nothing wrong with storing saltwater sea life under grandpa as long as you know that’s where it is.

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