Regarding ADHD

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Regarding ADHD

A few weekends ago it was Mid-Autumn Festival. We were in the Orange County area for celebration.

Separately from that, I met up with a friend for lunch. I brought my son along. I told my friend, my son was hyperactive. He looked at my son, and said he couldn’t see any sign of hyperactivity in my son. I paid a bit more attention, and the only thing I saw was, after finishing his pizza, my son would stand next to the door of the restaurant. When people came in or out, he would hold the door open for them ... My friend was right, my son was not hyperactive, anymore.

People simply cannot tell that, when my son was 2.5 years old, he was like a ping-pong ball, bouncing around the house. His attention span back then was like two seconds. Three seconds at most. He couldn’t look at static pictures, let alone read letters or words.

In the afternoon, together with the family of our children’s uncle, auntie and cousins, we went to a park where the Mid-Autumn celebrations were taking place. The organizers supplied some materials for people to make paper lanterns. I made one together with my son. The kids also got some free balloon swords from the balloon artists. They had fun running around the park.

For dinner everyone went to a soup-and-salad restaurant. It used to be like this: whenever my son finished his meal at a restaurant, he would start to ambulate around the entire restaurant, including going into the bathroom to flush the urinals. I usually would follow behind him. We’ve never had issues with other patrons. It seemed like people were always busy eating and never paid much attention to us. Walking around inside restaurants was a ritual for my son, until earlier this year.

However, in the last few months, my son stopped walking around inside restaurants. He is now 9 years old. His hyperactivity went down substantially. Even more interesting was, recently I saw him sitting at the piano keyboard all by himself, doing his music homework assignment. We’ve never seen him do that before. Doing homework by himself?

My son indeed has calmed down quite a bit.

So, how did we successfully get rid of ADHD from our son? Why was he hyperactive before, but not anymore?

My answer may come as a surprise to you.

My answer is: we never paid any attention to our son’s ADHD.

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As I have described, when my son was 2.5 years old, he was like a ping-pong ball, bouncing around the house all day long. For other parents, I guess they’d get exhausted dealing with ADHD children. Anyone would agree that it is impossible to teach these children, right? All teachers, psychologists, doctors would recommend the children be treated with medication, or at very least be given some supplements. That is correct, our own pediatrician has told us endless times that he would prescribe medication for my son.

But, to me, everybody was wrong. The underlying assumption everybody had in mind was: “ADHD must be treated, so that children may have a chance to learn.” Well ... that is what happens when people don’t understand autism. Without a physical/mathematical model to understand autism, people invert the arrow of causality.

Ever since when my son was 2.5 years old, I have come to understand that the above sentence was wrong. The correct sentence should be: “Children’s brains must be developed first. Once the children are developed, their ADHD would go away, by itself.”

That was why my wife and I have never worried about our son’s ADHD. To us, ADHD was not the problem. Our society has inverted the causality of things, and has neglected to develop the brains of autistic children. The children have always been problem-free. The adults are the problem. The root cause of the problem is a communication issue. We, as a society, simply have not been communicating with our autistic children, in the right way.

So, can you teach a child that has an attention span of 2 or 3 seconds? You bet. Back when my son was 2.5 years old, he had zero eye contact, couldn’t look at anything static, let alone read any letter or word. Did I whine and complain like other parents? Nope. Those two or three seconds were all what I needed. I took advantage of those two or three seconds. I was busy: my hands were busy. I was making personalized animation video clips for my son, adding in my voice and sound effects. I started with labeling objects, drawn as stick figures. Then I quickly moved into using speech bubbles to represent people’s talking and thinking. I used my son’s favorite video clips from YouTube, and inserted my own drawings and writing. My inserted frames only lasted for two or three seconds. While other parents were trying to communicate with their children via talking, I was using my hands to communicate with my son, via making animation video clips. Within a few days, he started to call me “Papa”, which hasn’t happened for over one year, despite all the ABA intervention. Within a few weeks, he was able to look at the static stick-figure drawings I made for him on paper. Within a few months, he was reading words and sentences. Before he was 3 years old, he was reading simple books, like Bob Books. Not only that, we saw his hyperactivity starting to tone down.

From pre-school to his current third grade, my son was always allowed to stand up and walk inside his classroom. Other students must obey rules and sit still, but my son had IEP accommodations that allowed him to walk around. We also prepared a stack of blank sketch pads for the classroom teachers, so, whenever my son was bored in class, he could doodle and draw pictures. I think my son has drawn over a thousand elevators that way. He didn’t need to pay attention to class: he was allowed not to pay attention. For this new school year, by habit I stuck a few sketch pads into my son’s backpack. When I walked my son into school, he got annoyed and pulled out the sketch pads. He said, he didn’t want to draw pictures anymore in class. I had to take the sketch pads home. Yep, instead of drawing pictures, he now preferred to pay attention to class.

From making animation video clips, to drawing pictures and writing down sentences, to verbal communication with my son, the development of my son’s brain never stopped. It was not just input, but also output. He also never stopped making building block toys, drawing, writing, typing, and assembling electronic circuits, etc.. He found out how to use Google Translate by himself, and made a lot of signs in Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese. A few weeks ago, I saw him write a sign in Korean, for the first time. This summer was great for my son, every day he would invent two or three new things. He has even composed and recorded himself a very nice tune, for the first time ... and this was after barely 4 brief sessions with his sister's piano tutor. Every day he had a surprise for us. At the same time, his hyperactivity and sensory/rigidity issues all went down, substantially.

Here is the tune that he has composed.



We never paid any attention to our son’s ADHD.

Recently I read the book about Carly Fleischmann. I felt tremendous sadness about her case. She has used numerous prescription drugs to treat her autism symptoms. The end result was that she developed severe OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), which stuck to her, for life. To me, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her when she was a child. Ignorance of our society about autism has led to all sorts of “treatment/intervention” procedures and medications that, instead of making things better, ended up ruining children’s lives, permanently.

The question is, when tragedies happen, who takes responsibility? Or do we just make up a bogeyman, and blame it all on autism? We choose to blame our children. A whole bunch of cowards. That's what we are.