ADHD (hyperactvitiy) and Intellectual Development

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ADHD (hyperactvitiy) and Intellectual Development

It's not uncommon for children on the spectrum to be rid of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Discorder, I use "hyperactivity" here for short) as they grow up. And then these children also achieve good intellectual development. Therefore, we observe:

(A) Hyperactivity disappears,
(B) Successful intellectual development.

Usually we take it for granted that A ---> B, that is, A implies B. Therefore, parents, teachers, therapists and doctors all aim their energy at getting rid of hyperactivity. Drugs are used often. Their argument goes like: "we must get rid of the children's ADHD, so that they can get a chance to learn."

It's the same argument used before for justifying getting rid of the stimming behaviors of autistic children. If we have learned anything at all in these 73 years since the formal discovery of child autism, it's precisely that stimming behaviors should not be eliminated. Rather, stimming behaviors should be encouraged and leveraged for the education of these children. All this is now well-known and well-accepted (see for instance the Son-Rise program.) Today, we know that autistic children can perfectly learn along with their stimming behaviors.

Now coming back to hyperactivity, is it true that A --> B? Or is what actually happens a case of B --> A?

The scary thing about these 73 years of child autism is, parents/teachers/therapistcs/doctors have been wrong, all along. It's not A --> B, but rather B --> A.

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This is the video about my son that I took a few days ago. He was reading the book titled "Superworm" that my wife borrowed from the library. He had fun doodling and writing down the story on a big piece of paper. Listen to his giggling. You may not believe it, but this is Ivan's life on a typical day at home. Both of my children are always happy and smiling and giggling. It may be even harder to believe that, once upon a time, Ivan couldn't stay still for 2 seconds, and couldn't look at any static object/image, let alone have any ability to read.



In the video, there was no deficit in his attention to some of his favorite activities: doodling, reading, writing. There was no hyperactivity. One could only see full focus on doing what he likes to do. And there was plenty of giggling. He clearly enjoyed what he was doing, and had fun doing it.

When a person is intellectually developed, of course your mind would be doing some deep-thinking activities. When you are doing deep-thinking activities, of course you are focused and cannot be hyperactive. So how do you achieve intellectual development of autistic children?

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Recently I was in a neuroscience conference, and surely enough, a neurologist presented the spectral coherence study of different regions of the brain. The frontal cortex area of autistic people was out of synch as compared with neurotypical people, same with the verbal area. It's only the visual cortex area that exhibit the usual ~10 Hz brain wave as compared to neurotypical people.

The fact that autistic people are visual is not just some random observation. It's a fact. So that begs the question: how come we are not raising autistic children visually?

More accurately, we should be raising our children visual-manually. Autistic children become intelligent through seeing their own manual output/creation. You must allow autistic children to close their "outer feedback loop." For some children, this means doodling. For some other children, this means building things (all kinds of building block toys.) By allowing autistic children a chance to develop visual-manually, they build up their association capabilities in their brains and their deep-thinking skills. These are the same skills that later will be re-cycled for their verbal development and social development. What we have been doing in these 73 years is to turn the lives of these children upside down: we emphasize on social and verbal development, and totally neglect to develop these children's visual-manual skills (including early reading).

And in order for them to develop their own manual output, they must have received sufficient visual input early on, in their childhood. This means you need to draw pictures for them and teach them to read, and make stick-figure-style video clips as necessary. Where do you think Ivan learned his doodling and writing skills from, if not because of all the video clips, picture drawing and book reading we have done for him?

Some parents struggle with their children's ADHD for 5 years, some struggle for 10 years, some struggle for 15 years, some struggle forever. All the while, they neglect to develop their children in the visual-manual direction. Masochism, I guess.

Great video! Ivan is obviously very smart, as many hyperactive, energetic children are. Continue to encourage his interests. The ability to read and create things will serve him well in the future.

Although I absolutely agree that kids shouldn't be forced not to stim before they learn, I don't believe that concentrating on activities one enjoys counts as having got around ADHD. ADHD is very well known for attention for enjoyed activities but not for other activities. This is because, it's increasing the stimulation in the brain through reward pathways. Not because of using deep thinking.

My own varies - sometimes I can't muster up focus for anything but generally I can read books I like, etc but can't focus enough to cook alone. For me, active lessons (the ones where you get up and do things - I was lucky to have teachers who did this right up to 18) helped me learn best.