Stolen Focus

Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”

Parenting takes place in an environment—and if that environment floods parents with stress, it will inevitably affect their children.

He explained that when you’re very young, if you get upset or angry, you need an adult to soothe you and calm you down. Over time, as you grow up, if you are soothed enough, you learn to soothe yourself. You internalize the reassurance and relaxation your family gave to you. But stressed-out parents, through no fault of their own, find it harder to soothe their children—because they are so amped-up themselves. That means that their children don’t learn how to calm and center themselves in the same way. Their kids are, as a result, more likely to respond to difficult situations by getting angry or distressed—feelings that wreck their focus.

Alan told me, and a crucial factor was “the amount of chaos in the environment.” If a child is raised in an environment where there is a lot of stress, they are significantly more likely to then develop attention problems and be diagnosed with ADHD. It turns out that the
elevated levels of stress in their parents’ lives usually came first. He told me: “You could see it unfolding.”

All you are saying, when a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, is that a child is struggling to focus. “It doesn’t tell you anything about the ‘why’ question.” It’s like being told that a child has a cough, listening to the cough, and then saying “yes, the child has a cough.” If a doctor identifies a child with attention problems, that should be the first step in the process—not the last.

“ADHD is not a diagnosis. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s just a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together. That’s all it is.”

He said that with the vast majority of cases of kids with attention problems that come into his office, if he listens carefully
and offers practical support to change the child’s environment, it almost always reduces or ends the problem they have.

But the choices he was confronting me with, I said, shouldn’t exist. His hypothetical concedes too much—it takes a dysfunctional environment for granted, and assumes that all we can do is try to adapt to it and take
the edge off. We need better choices than that. “I mean—reality shouldn’t be the choice,” he replied. “It’s what we have, you know? So you have to work with what you’ve got.”

I was worried that by muffling their signals with drugs, he might be encouraging their owners into a kind of fantasy—that they could take a creature, ignore its nature, and make it live a life that fits the owner’s needs, not the animal’s, without any cost. We need to hear the animal’s distress, not suppress it.

They’ve got all these instincts that are all intact, that they’re unable to utilize.