by Anna Wildman

Created on: March 29, 2009

ADHD is the newest way for parents to abdicate responsibility for their children. It is the best excuse a child can have for disobeying and running amok without punishment. An incident I remember well from my childhood proves this point. I and my four siblings ages 5-10 were sitting quietly in an airport reading books or playing travel games depending on what we preferred my mother was seated next to us. Across the way another woman sat with her 12 year old boy . Or rather she sat and he ran around yelling opening people luggage and grabbing things that didn't belong to him. Finally he grabbed my brother's game and my mother looked at the woman and said "Control your child please". The woman looked at mom and said "It's ok he has ADHD and there's nothing I can do it about it" At which point my mother looked at her pointed to the five of us and said "so do all of them."

The lady sitting across from my mother that day is a perfect example of what parents and teachers do. They hear ADHD and throw their hands in the air and mutter "impossible". People readily excuse behavior from a 12 year old that they would never tolerate in a 5 year old just because some doctor said the have ADHD. My mother alwasy said she refused to let us children use the diagnoses as a crutch an excuse to do whatever we wanted. Mom told us to find a way to make use of the so called disability. Then she proceeded to show us how.

My mother began teaching us to read and write at the age of 4 by 5 all of us children could do calligraphy. We lived on a farm and were taught to do chores by the time we were 6. Mom would write a list of chores on the blackboard and leave it up to us kids to determine who did what. The only rule was they all had to be done if we wanted desert at supper time. Then she left us to get them done. Compare that to the idea that an ADHD child needs to be constantly monitored. If you believe that then you will probably think my mother was crazy and we lived in a pig sty. On the contrary We lived in a 4000 sq foot 6 bedroom 3 batch farmhouse that while not immaculate was always clean.

By the time I was 8 I had taken over grocery shopping and cooking for my family of 7. I was just better at it then my mother. In the time my mother could get 1 item cooked I could make a seven course meal. Because I didn't have to keep my attention on one thing and could split it I saved my father 100$ a month on groceries because I could keep a list of prices in my head and comparision shop

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