SUPPORTING STUDENTS WITH ADD/ADHD
Another area of exploration regarding time and pacing has to do with students who are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Educators and medical professionals have ex- pressed serious concern over the rapidly increasing percentage of students di- agnosed with and medicated for ADHD. Data from CDC (2017) validates those concerns:
p Approximately 11% of children 4–17 years of age (6.4 million) have ever been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2011. The average age of ADHD diag- nosis was 7 years of age. Boys (13.2%) were more likely than girls (5.6%) to have ever been diagnosed with ADHD.
p The percentage of children with an ADHD diagnosis increased from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007 and to 11.0% in 2011. Less than 1 in 3 children with ADHD received both medication treatment and behavior therapy, the preferred treatment approach for children ages 6 and older.
p Prevalence of ADHD diagnosis varied substantially by state, from a low of 5.6% in Nevada to a high of 18.7% in Kentucky.
In Ritalin Nation: Rapid Fire Culture and the Transformation of Human Con- sciousness (DeGrandpre, 1999), psychologist Richard DeGrandpre argues that ADHD has more to do with changes in time expectations in our society than better diagnosis of a physiological problem. Chip Wood (1999) wrote:
I see children who exhibit ADHD behaviors as suffering from temporal trauma. Sadly, they are serving as “canaries” in the cage of time, espe- cially in our schools, where their failure to thrive should tell us something about their environment.
School schedules speed up year after year, putting more and more pres- sure on children to manage a world filled with more transitions, extended curricula, less predictability, and less time to accomplish more. It’s tough on all children, but for these “canaries” who have a heightened sensitivity to time pressures, it’s impossible. Our society and schools are faced with
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PART TWO | MANAGEMENT | TIME
two possibilities. One is medicating more and more children in an effort to decrease their sensitivity to our ever faster, less regulated pace of life and education. Another is making changes in the structure and pace of school life to reduce temporal trauma for all of our children. (p. 23)