The Venting Chamber

[MattP]

My oldest kid got diagnosed with ADD today. I love my wife, but she shared this news with me by trying to repeat as much as she could remember from the psychologist. Including stuff like statistically he's going to have a shorter lifespan, be more likely to land in jail, get addicted to drugs, less likely to finish college or possibly high school, etc.. I think she meant it as just background information, but i'm fucking reeling. We had discussed the possibility (hence why we got him evaluated), but I was kinda in denial of the possibility. I teach kids with behaviors way more extreme and my kid didn't seem to be anything like that.

I guess we'll start medication and go from there. It's just the first real roadblock in his life. It just really hurts knowing that he's going to struggle not just with one thing but many potential things and I feel helpless. He just seems so vulnerable and all I can do is hope that maybe the right medication will help. I hate trusting a doctor I haven't even met yet with the wellbeing and future of my kid. I hate trusting the field of psychology because it's always seemed to me to be one of the most inexact of sciences. Because it depends on personal physiology and brain chemistry and we don't seem to have that super understood yet. Just ends up being a lot of guesswork. I know I'm being unfair but this is just becoming stream of consciousness at this point.

Anyways. That's my venting for this evening.

Fwiw not that anecdote is particularly helpful, but I had such severe ADHD as a kid that my parents couldnt even take me to public places, I had to be on adderall through high school or my grades would immediately plummet, etc. And everything is now more than fine.

The majority of people with ADD don't even progress to having ADD in adulthood. Yeah it's definitely a hurdle but it doesn't at all even mean your child will have a flip of a coin chance of it lasting his lifetime / having long term impact. And at least I learned in school that ADD and jailtime/amoral behavior are completely absolutely different (conduct disorder is associated with increased jailtime with ADD not being at all).

I'm sorry you got a floodgate of scary info from your wife but A) it really isn't as bad as that all makes it seem and B) you're not helpless, you being a good parent will get your kid where they need to go, coming from a guy who had ADD and good parents who gave me the tools I needed to get through it

[MattP]

First off, I know there is such a thing as ADD. I've met plenty of kids who have ADD or ADHD and as much as I'm not a fan of medication, there are many instances where medication is definitely needed and helps. I'm just not sure if my son fits that criteria.

He's 8 years old, and he doesn't stay in a seat for 8 hours. The elementary school he goes to is a Grade A magnet school. It's pretty active and dynamic and it's not the rigid school environment you're thinking of (actually very few are that way these days but I digress).

One of the main issue has been his schoolwork. His handwriting tends to be very sloppy. I chalked it up to being left-handed and thought his fine motor control would get better, but that's not it. If he really tries one-on-one, he can make good letters. But he just writes at top speed and his writing because a scrawl. He'll also rush through assignments even though there's literally nothing to do afterwards and in his rush, he'll make really obvious mistakes. Like just before spring break he was doing math with coins in his math class. I know he knows how to count coins because we've worked on saving up for things and he's counted change plenty of times to figure out what he needs. But as I'd go through his homework or class assignments and he'd mix up the simplest things.

Behavior had been an issue as well. On his take-home sheet, he'll get a sticker for good behavior, a blank for a warning, and a conduct code number for a specific rule violation. He started off the year with mostly stickers, then the occasional blank, then the occasional number. But by the time February rolled around, it was nothing but numbers with no sticker in sight. The main problems were following directions, keeping his hands to himself, and talking. We set a meeting with the principal and teacher and started a "points sheet" to break down the day to AM/PM and how well he is following each target behavior and his behavior improved tremendously. Just having a shorter focus does seem to help curb his disruptive behavior.

Around the home, things are different. Most of the biggest issues with behavior exist because he has a 3 year old sister. So there is a tendency towards silliness which can result in "running/chasing/screaming/laughing" type play that drives us nuts. And sometimes it takes a few times asking to get him to stop. There are issues with sharing toys, etc.. But that's pretty normal. He tends to get really focused on making his Lego Technic creations and keeps bugging for more kits. He has a few chores like feeding the dogs and doing laundry. He can cook some basic meals. He loves doing science experiments. He is annoyingly silly at times (sorry, i'm trying to be honest). Like if he's doing some simple task (like walking through the house), then he'll choose to do it a silly way. Like making obnoxious mouth sounds or walking with a weird shuffle. I don't think it's outside of normal behavior for his age, but I feel like it should be happening at a lower frequency. Plus he still has a lot of issue with certain food textures but I don't think that's attention related.

Writing that all out, the issue is much more at school than home. But at home it's basically one-on-one attention. At school, he has to follow the directions without us supervising him and there is issues. I do share the concern about drugs mixing with a developing mind and do think that his behaviors seem manageable with just low-doses of positive reinforcement. Just.. I don't know. My head is still swimming. No decisions have to be made right away, and I think I'll definitely be taking off work to meet with the psychologist on the next visit.

This is just classic ADD description. Hey, I too would be worried if my kid had ANY diagnosis, because that's what a parent should do, and raising someone with ADD is definitely not easy. But you got this, and your kid is not going to be limited at all by it. In kindergarten, I one time went to the bathroom and took liquid soap and covered the WHOLE bathroom floor with it. I used to run through the mall and press every escalator emergency stop button. I never did my homework, half because of my attention and half because I wouldn't even notice the teacher saying we had homework. My parents tell these stories now because they're hilarious and so different from who I am now. Now I'm like the most type-A person in the world, it flipped completely when I became an adult. Really, for most people this is a childhood problem you grow out of. Even if you don't that's fine and I know people my age who still have it and take their medications and are otherwise super successful (my ex & my best friends bf both still take adderall). Itll be ok man

[MattP]

MattP, curious, did you eat candy, soda, junk food as a kid?

That's a folks tale.

[MattP]

MattP, curious, did you eat candy, soda, junk food as a kid?

That's a folks tale.

can you answer the question?

I'm not answering your question because it's a bad question but thank you for checking in again to see if I would

[MattP]

Oof

[MattP]

people born after 1990 are 4x more likely to get cancer than people born before 1990

First off, where did you get the 4x number? I even just searched it and there is nothing I can find that says that.

Also, what is your indicator of "sicker"? Living longer but accruing more health problems? Cancer risk is directly correlated to length of lifetime. Everyone would get cancer if they lived long enough to get it. Cancer happens because of a combination of genetic mutation (which constantly is occurring each time your cells divide because your cells need to copy your genome with each copy and there are set proportions of mistakes that occur with copying the genome. There are set checkpoints in your body to destroy aberrant DNA but they fail with a set expected proportion as well, and as you live long enough more genetic aberrations will persist and if all the right aberrations occur your cells will begin to divide with no control) and your body failing to destroy the cancer once it happens (we all have cancer happen to us during our lifetimes, our immune system is just supposed to recognize it as "other" and destroy it, but your immune system can fail at doing this because A) the cancer mutates in a way that the immune system cannot engage it and B) you are immunosupressed for whatever reason). As you get older you a) have accumulated more genetic aberrations and sequentially increase risk of having the right combo to have cancer and b) your immune system continues to weaken and become worse at detecting and destroying cancer (its the same reason older people get more infections in general, like pneumonia or flu, with those infections in general being more deadly for older people). People also are more likely in recent years to be diagnosed with cancer because we are using better screening tests for identifying a) cancer earlier and b) "cancer" that would have ultimately never been an issue during the person's lifetime because it is relatively slow growing, which ups the rates of reported cancer.

[MattP]

Youre also just picking some arbitrary thing (cancer risk is up 400%) to ignore that life expectancy has doubled

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... _50_80.pdf
This is based on cohort analysis and is backed by the UK gov using mortality rate data accrued to date and mortality risk projection