Does your highly active, distractible child have ADHD?

Feb 23, 2022 | Testimonials

Over the past 20 years, more and more attention has been given to the mental condition known as ADHD, or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The number of children diagnosed with ADHD has grown substantially too and recently even young, pre-school children are being medicated to improve their attention span and behaviour. But should we be labelling all high-energy children, or children who have some difficulty focusing, with ADHD?  There isn’t any test for ADHD – nor is there any medical procedure that can definitively identify the presence of this disorder in a child.  Instead there are behavioural symptoms that are used for diagnosis.

True ADHD is a chronic condition that involves problems with inattention or distraction, hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour. Some people use the term ADHD casually for any child who has trouble focusing on a task for long or one who can sustain high levels of activity for a long time. But it’s helpful to recognize that most healthy people are occasionally inattentive, hyperactive or impulsive.

For example, it’s normal for pre-schoolers to have short attention spans and be unable to stick with one activity. Even older children and teens show varying lengths of attention span during the day. Young children also are naturally energetic and some simply enjoy a higher level of activity than others. Children should never be classified as having ADHD just because they’re different from their friends or siblings.

A critical distinction between typical childhood behaviours and those of ADHD is that ADHD symptoms consistently and significantly disrupt daily life and relationships. Children with true ADHD don’t have it only in one environment. If a child has significant problems at school but is fine at home—or the other way around—something other than ADHD is going on. Two other key characteristics of ADHD behaviours are that they begin when a child is young (before age 12), and they last more than six months.

Following are questions to ask when considering the possibility of ADHD. Is the child often easily distracted? Is he constantly on the move? Does she always fail to think before acting, to the point that it raises safety concerns? And most crucial: Do issues with inattention, distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity significantly impair all aspects of daily life?

If the answers to these questions are yes, then a consultation with an experienced health care provider may be needed. Assessing a child for ADHD involves several steps. The first is to rule out other possible concerns, such as health (including allergies or possible diet-related issues leading to sub-optimal health) hearing or vision problems, or learning, language or other developmental disorders.

The health care provider also should talk with the child and the parents about the child’s symptoms. Other family members, teachers, sports coaches or child care providers may be asked to fill out questionnaires about behaviours they regularly see in the child. This can give a more complete picture of the child’s condition overall.

There are many factors that can lead to behaviours looking like ADHD but which may not benefit from medication.  It is vitally important to try to get to the root of the problems, rather than resorting to a quick fix solution that usually involves a prescription for drugs.

 

 

 

 

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy.  Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this  interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation. 

Image supplied by Freepik.