As the parent of a teen with ADHD, I find myself comparing my growing-up experiences and anxieties with his. I'm confident that if I were coming of age today, I would probably have been diagnosed with something because I was firmly a couple standard deviations away from the societal mean.
Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.
Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.
"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.
Because we didn't have as extensive diagnoses or therapies back in the 80s compared to now, I had my own phase of wondering what was wrong with me. There weren't any peer or adult role models available to me that really related to my experiences. As a result, there were some difficult years in there...but also, I had to find my own resiliency and ways of mapping my worldview to other people.
Fast forward 40 years. I am conflicted about which is better: to be left to figure it out on your own, or to have a support system that is (at times) overly biased towards leaning on the diagnosis as the explanation. But I can say with high confidence that at least for the coming-of-age years of my child, I am far more thankful that his experiences are different than mine.
"Being a human" is grossly inadequate as a lowest common denominator definition of the needs and experiences of children. Even as broadly discussed as it is, it's still only ~11% of US children and that's still a challenging hill to climb if their peer culture doesn't provide some sort of explanation or incentives for understanding each other.