Illustration by Lumi Liu
Posted on 03/10/2026 8:40:39 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Isaac’s energy level, enthusiasm, and talkativeness were too much—at least for a traditional classroom.
He had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); one psychologist explained that he had a high IQ but low maturity.
Illustration by Lumi Liu
It wasn’t until Heather Rodden began homeschooling him in fifth grade that she realized what years of frustrated teachers couldn’t put their fingers on—what looked like a liability in one setting can flourish in another.
Like Rodden, other parents, researchers, and professionals are moving away from treating ADHD purely as a disorder that 1 in 10 kids have.
The word “deficit” in ADHD, they argue, obscures strengths—such as creativity, hyperfocus, and cognitive flexibility—that often accompany the condition.
“‘Different wiring’ isn’t automatically bad,” Dr. Daniel G. Amen, a psychiatrist and founder of Amen Clinics, brain-body clinics that use imaging instead of checklists for mental health issues, told The Epoch Times in an email. “Sometimes it’s simply diversity in how people think and create. ADHD isn’t a character flaw—it’s a brain pattern.”
At the heart of the matter is finding where and how people with ADHD will thrive.
One frustration for people with ADHD is that it’s rarely lack of knowledge that holds them back. It is that their brains don’t consistently concentrate.
Focus requires a coordinated effort between the brain’s frontal control system, which helps you stay organized and resist distractions, the basal ganglia, which regulates motivation by using the reward chemical dopamine, and the cerebellum, which coordinates timing and attention. In ADHD brains, that coordination is inconsistent—not absent—but unreliable under demand.
“That helps explain inconsistent performance,” Amen said. “It’s called a disorder because it can disrupt performance at school, work, and home.”
While most research focuses on the deficits of ADHD, some studies suggest that many who have symptoms also have specific strengths.
Those with ADHD outperformed others in divergent thinking, particularly in fluency (generating many ideas quickly) and flexibility (combining concepts in unexpected ways), according to findings reported in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
A study published in Comprehensive Psychiatry found small to moderate positive correlations among ADHD traits of hyperfocus, sensory processing sensitivity, and cognitive flexibility (the ability to rapidly switch tasks, behaviors, or perspectives).
Hyperfocus is becoming absorbed in a task, sometimes to the point of losing track of time and surroundings—called flow in someone who doesn’t have ADHD, Claire Sira, a neuropsychologist who specializes in coaching adults with ADHD, told The Epoch Times.
Sensory processing sensitivity is typically thought of as a low sensory threshold—being overwhelmed by stimuli such as light, sound, and smell. However, in the study, sensory processing sensitivity was defined differently—a sensory appreciation for aesthetics, nature, or architecture, for example.
Another study of adults with ADHD published in Frontiers in Psychiatry noted that impulsivity and hyperactivity are seen as positive by some people with an ADHD diagnosis.
In an analysis published in BMJ Open, adults with ADHD reported dual benefits in weakness traits. A 30-year-old woman noted that being overly active allows her to do more than her peers in less time: “Then I get to experience more.” Another woman reported that her inattention has led to overhearing “amusing conversations.”
Traits such as impulsivity and hyperactivity can become strengths, rather than liabilities, by focusing on neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to form new neural connections—possibly even after injury and later in life, Amen noted. Meditation, breathing exercises, physical activity, and learning new skills are all associated with improved neuroplasticity.
“Focusing only on deficits misses the point,” he added. “The real goal is to help people build a better brain so they can access their strengths consistently—especially when life demands concentration and follow-through.”
Life’s demands, however, may partially explain the prevalence of ADHD, which some argue may be more of an environmental problem than a brain disorder.
An article published in BJPsych Advances noted that children of generations past were not expected to sit rigidly and concentrate on academics for several hours a day.
“My feeling has been for a long time that we make ADHD into a disease state or abnormality that really runs along a continuum in different directions,” retired pediatric neurologist Dr. Andrew Zimmerman told The Epoch Times.
“And we tend to see it as abnormal because we want to see children sit still in class and do their schoolwork.”
Adjusting schools and workplaces will not only lift the stigma and shame of ADHD but also benefit everyone by making space for the skills and talents those with ADHD bring, according to psychiatrist and researcher Annie Swanepoel. “We need to recognize that variations are the spice of life,” she wrote in an article published in Clinical Neuropsychiatry.
Everyone would likely benefit from school and workplace adjustments aimed at improving focus, Sira said. Yet there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, she added.
For some, working in an open, busy office environment can offer accountability and motivation. For others, the visual distractions and noise can make work too challenging. They may need to work from home or behind an office door, Sira said.
“It would be way better if we could match the environment to the person.”
Zimmerman noted that children suspected of ADHD deserve a thorough evaluation, because in some cases, inattention and hyperactivity have underlying causes such as fetal alcohol syndrome, fragile X syndrome, and premature birth that are not always identified in schools.
However, in most cases, he said, ADHD is overdiagnosed and overtreated, when the real solution could be a different style of schooling altogether.
“If I had a child in that situation nowadays, I would certainly look for [an alternative school] where they could express themselves,” he said. “So much of what is important is relationships—it’s social development, to have kids learn fairness, and how to get along—all maybe more important than calculus.”
In less than two decades, the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses among children increased from 6.1 to 10.2 percent. Today, it’s 11.4 percent of children aged 3 to 17. Adult ADHD diagnoses—though they represent about 1 percent of the population—nearly doubled from 2007 to 2016.
Zimmerman has reviewed studies recently that show overlap of symptoms between clearly defined ADHD patients and typical children. He added that even children with typical brain patterns have shown to have improved focus and less hyperactivity on medication.
Such overlap blurs the line of certainty when it comes to who has ADHD and who doesn’t, he said. “It’s a question of: Are we unfairly treating the kids? Are we penalizing them, in a sense, by making them take medication? It makes the kids look better, but it doesn’t necessarily make them perform better or certainly not feel better.”
One reason for the uptick in ADHD, Sira said, is simply the expansive demands on attention in the modern world, including screen usage, larger classrooms, and physical and emotional distractions that make it harder to stay focused.
The key is to teach the brain to shift into focus mode when needed, Amen said. “The problem comes when the focus-and-follow-through network—especially the prefrontal cortex and its partners—doesn’t reliably come online when it’s needed.”
The brain can be supported with a healthy diet, good sleep, and regular exercise, Sira said. “If you wanted to actively build your ability to regulate your own attention, meditation practices do this because that’s literally what meditation is—learning to recognize when your attention has wandered and bring it back—whatever is happening with sensory awareness and mindful movement.”
For children, martial arts and dance can teach discipline with mindful movement and improve attention. Adults can also grow those skills and should, she said, as neuroplasticity should be a lifelong goal.
Read the rest here...
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Except for the firecracker you sound a lot like me. My report cards and parent/teacher conferences always included the phrase, ‘If he would just stay apply himself, he could do better. He is underachieving.’ It didn’t help that I had two prima donna sisters who were very academically oriented in the classical sense (A student types). I was tested as 142 IQ in the 5th grade well above either of my sisters. Also blew them away on the SATs and National Merit Scholarship test but was always a B-/C+ student. Scored a 97% on the LSAT but flunked but of college my freshman year. Bottom line I found school boring most of the time.
That’s one treatment ... another is letting boys run around outdoors breathing fresh air and getting dirty. Yet another is to recognize when they’re learning a lot faster than their peers and keep them from getting bored.
Fortunately, Einstein’s, Mozart’s, Copernicus’s, and DaVinci’s parents didn’t have amphetamines available to numb their child’s brain.
I remember way back when that it used to be called “Day Dreaming”.
Wow! We could have met each other! Holy M-80, that could have been fun.
Not only that, some people don’t want to learn some things but voraciously gobble up other things. My teacher battles centered around things like “The Scarlett Letter” vs “The Boy’s Third Book of Radio and Electronics”, or “The Box Car Children” vs “Railway Locomotive Construction”.
I think there are so many factors involved here. When I was young, my brothers and I would get up and watch Saturday morning TV. We’d sit through half hour episodes of Lassie, Sky King, Dobie Gillis and more, ALL TERRIBLE SHOWS, with stupid plots and poor acting, but we didn’t have 100 cable to change to. Kids have now grown up with so many options, on TV, video games, YouTube...they just don’t know how to sit still and watch boring stuff, which is a critical skill in when you go to school.
As someone with mild ADD (when did the H wander in?) I can tll you it’s a thing. It’s often hard for me to focus for too long.
Like trans is no longer a disorder? Don’t forget that this sort of “diagnosis” is being done by the same medical organization that changed trans from mental disease to a disorder than WE can treat for taxpayer dollars.
Fortunately, if we can get through without causing too much damage to ourselves or others, when we become adults and go out into the world, we can get the train back on the tracks, and those negative experiences we had as a kid can have a positive effect on us as adults, as our cognition and reasoning catches up and helps us see things in perspective.
Overall...I regard it all as a positive thing, but in retrospect...hoo boy. I didn’t see it as positive in any way at all.
Isn’t it grand, though? (As an adult, getting where you are mentally going and all the side quests on the way!)
Yep, same trick. PLUS, we are sneakily teaching them to be capitalists! They learn to put more value on good behavior than bad.
As I have aged, I find more people who can identify with my experiences, and I realize I was not so alone as I thought at those young ages.
That is the thing, though-many of us lived in these narrow, emotional silos, and not only didn’t have the skills to talk to other kids who might have told us we weren’t alone...those kids were in the same boat.
A bunch of kids playing blind-man’s bluff, navigating those early years. A parent might (and often did) tell us that what we were going through was not in any way unique, but being the supreme self-centered beings we were, we would have dismissed that with a sullen “You don’t understand.”
Interesting article. Suggests ways for environments to accommodate the skills and talents of ADHD.
An acquaintance of mine started his own business in order to manage his ADHD. From time to time you would find him lying on the floor staring at the white celling when he needed to calm himself and focus. He kept lists of everything and took scrupulous notes or recordings at client meetings in case his mind wandered off. The hyperfocus gift made him very successful. He viewed his clients and their businesses deeply and did everything to enhance their personal advancement and their market position. He also had the ability to walk away from clients who just did not appreciate his output or his quirks by setting aside one day a week just to develop new business.
Sigh. I tell that story as an adult about the firecracker, and I am embarrassed by it, but...I can’t look away from it because it is part of me.
I wasn’t bored by school. I was terrified by it.
When I think about being a kid, those memories present to me with a kind of golden glow...they seem that way now, and I like it that way. That is how I want to remember them.
But back then, they weren’t golden at all going through them.
Every day was filled with potential peril, and I hadn’t learned enough of life to navigate it boldly to take it on. Back then, I would be completely reactive to events, a prisoner to them, not as if I were driving the events like a horse-drawn chariot instead.
I hated school. Absolutely despised it with a white hot burning passion. I was nearly crippled with anxiety when I was in school. I couldn’t learn anything.
And every report card was like a Presidential Election seems to me now.
My dread at having to hand my report card to my parents at the end of each semester was a cycle that was peculiarly familiar to me in later years when I began to seriously view the Presidential elections. As soon as one election was done, the eyes are already on the next one on the horizon. So it was with my report cards.
As soon as I handed that report card to my parents and endured the short aftermath, the next deadline for the delivery of the Report Card could pop up like a blazing beacon on the horizon, and it would begin to oppress me even before I walked out of the room and away from my parents. Like the Eye Of Sauron, I could feel it get closer every single day with the passage of time.
From handing in that report card, I got not even a break of a minute before I began to feel an ache in my gut again at the prospect of all those future “F”, “D”, “C” grades (with some occasional “B” marks in unexpected classes like Biology or in something wholly expected like gym) at the issue of the next report card four months from that instant.
And then four months later, the report card day would come and I would have to take my report card home to have it signed. My dad always signed all of our report cards.
One year, in third grade mine was so bad, I tried to forge my father’s signature on my report card. As I recall, this was when I was still learning how to write on that yellow paper there each line of writing had three lines on the paper, an upper solid, lower solid, and dotted middle. And we were writing with those thick, cylindrical pencils at that time, not the yellow painted #2 pencils.
So you can imagine how well that went with the teacher was reviewing the report cards that we returned to her. The next day, she called me up in front of class and said something like: “Forgery is when someone tries to present a fake thing as a real thing. Such as a signed name. Forgery is a crime. You can go to jail for twenty years for forgery.”
Another year (in fifth grade) I simply hid the report card in my mattress, and when asked, simply told my parents I didn’t get that one day. Oddly, they didn’t say anything other than a “Oh.”
And that is what terrified me most: That look my parents gave me, and my mother uttered that quiet “Oh.” They were angry, no doubt, but it was worry that was painted on their faces. And that made me feel just awful. They were worried about me to the point they didn’t know what to say, and that frightened me. If they had yelled or given me the belt, that wouldn’t have frightened me. But the look on their face did.
That meant they were worried I couldn’t learn, and that did frighten me. And it added the pain I felt for causing them that worry.
Anyway, fast forward to my senior year. Again, my dad had retired and we went to yet again another school system, and I did not fit in any crowd. Didn’t make any friends. And I had a Southern accent that attracted attention in that New England high school. As a result, I ended up by default falling in with the Misfits. There were seven or eight of them, and they had lunch together every day. And that was where I ended up. They were socially awkward, didn’t belong, and they had that in common. I did too.
Now, I look back on those times in childhood before graduating high school. I felt so much mixed joy and pain during those years, and when I got older...I found I could understand it so much better now than I had at the time back then, and there is something wonderful about that.
I thought I was so unique and special in my awkwardness and misgivings as a young person, but...as I aged and gained life experiences, I realized I was probably about average. Each of us lived in our own personal silo with little way to see into the silos that other people were in.
The point is, we all go through our lives in a state of disarray, and things we struggle with. One of those things we all struggle with is the opposite sex.
It is funny to consider that we boys believed that girls were shallow because they had limitations on just what kind of guy might be able to go out with them. A good looking guy, a jock, a musician, or a bad boy. But not those guys like us who belonged to the Misfits.
And it makes me laugh to think that we weren’t much better-as I recall, if a girl was good looking to me, not much else mattered. Yeah. We boys were pretty shallow.
I wonder about the question sometimes-as my muscles ache and arthritis creeps up on me-what would it be like to be 18 years old again, with an 18 year old body?
I think about how cool it would be to rear back and throw a football forty yards with no pain. To run. And I like the idea. A lot.
And in the same instant, I ask the question: “Can I bring my current brain and experiences back with me?” And I realize that, if the answer is “No”, then...it is a no-go for me. I would love to have that 18 year old body, but...I just don’t think the constant pain of learning unpleasant things and feeling like you are blindly bumbling your way along is worth it.
No. I would keep my brain now, even with the aging body I have now. I could never be 18 again if I had to learn those lessons again.
Look no further than Obamacare putting the Healthcare industry under the control and for the benefit of the health insurance industry.
All maladies will soon be normalized until nothing is covered except your obligation to pay for everything and everyone else.
Teaching boys in a classroom setting is stupid. Suited for girls, but not for boys.
Of course, besides the occasional tongue lashing, the most common response from my parents was a look of confusion, pain, and serious concern, and that made me feel even more stupid and abnormal, because none of my other five siblings ever got that look.
I think I might have been relieved if they had seriously punished me. But now, I can see they just did not know what to do.
And they tried hard. At least my mom did. She spent so much time with me that she never spent with the other five kids. She spent long hours during the summer trying to teach me the multiplication tables. I remember her spending time, I must have been four, trying to teach me the alphabet. And she did all this while my sisters and brothers were out with friends, playing games, riding their bikes.
And I was inside while she showed me flash cards. 2x2=4. 3x7=21. 6x6=36. And so on. You know, as I typed that, I could feel again myself, sitting at that kitchen table with her, my head in my hands, as she coaxed me to look up at the card, feeling that hopeless, dejected feeling that I was somehow slow and stupid. How I love my mother for doing that with me. My brothers and sisters all agree to this day that I was her favorite, and I agree, but not perhaps for how they mean it. I was born very prematurely in the Fifties, at 2 pounds 11 ounces. I think she just thought (probably correctly) I just wasn't thriving, and was determined to help me catch up.
I still remember the reward she gave me when I could recite the alphabet. My dad was serving as the XO on a destroyer out of Newport, RI, and she gave me this, which was the most singularly awsome, excellent thing I had ever received in my short life:
It was a toy destroyer called "The Fighting Lady" and it fired a gun and missiles, and had wheels on the bottom so you could roll it across the floor.
When I got older, I had to go to summer school for several years, they threatened to keep me back if I didn't. I had an ex-nun who was good friends with my mother who tutored me in 5th grade, I went to her house twice a week for a year, and she tried to teach me in all subjects.
In Seventh Grade, my dad (who was the XO of Subic Bay in the Philippines) hired a young enlisted man who came to the house in his blues. I recall he was a Radioman, and he tried to tutor me in math.
I remember that young sailor trying gently to talk to me as I put my head down on my crossed arms on the desk, refusing to even look up.
Sigh. All that comes back to me, and I realize how lucky I was. My parents never gave up trying. Never. How I miss them both. And I will be forever grateful to them. Always. It could have turned out much differently for me, if not for them.
Besides my wife, the US Navy was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was there that I found out I really wasn’t stupid, and not only could learn, but could do well at things.
I wear my Navy ball cap every single day to remind me the debt that I owe to my country, who gave that gift to me by allowing me to serve.
The brain is more flexible than the authors of the article permit, and what they see as “fixed” neurologically is, I believe, able to be adjusted by persistent and consistent training.
My youngest Sisters youngest son was diagnosed as ADHD. She took him out of school for a time, and home schooled him. They were heavy on discipline without force, but he had to focus when told to. He graduated from HS, had a GPA around 3.8. He is now managing a grocery stores fruit and vegetable section at age 22 and happy about it. He found his niche, which was organizing things and people. He will be Store Manager, and higher.
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