LETTER: Daydreaming isn't always ADHD

As one of many in the education field who is concerned about the over-diagnosing of cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, I was alarmed by the new government survey ["Survey: 1 in 10 children has ADHD," News, Nov. 11]. The researchers suggest that this presumed epidemic is due to better screening techniques. What truly needs to be screened - as in, screened out - are the factors responsible for these ridiculous numbers.

Students younger and younger are expected to sit longer for more demanding academic preparation, for the testing "race" that has swept our field. Physical education, play, self-initiated activity and even home recreation time are being cut, as homework is piled on. The demands on kindergarteners and first-graders to learn like "little adults" challenges everything we know about early childhood education.

If their attention wanders, to the imagination that was once the birthright of childhood, to their own impulses and curiosities and needs, to a way to escape all of this pressure and control and irrelevance and tedium and blather being pushed down on them . . . well, we have a name for that, and medication not far behind.

Rather than continuing to demand that they pay attention to us, we had better start paying attention to them. If we let them be children again, if we let them function and learn again in the ways that children do best, I strongly suspect that those numbers would deflate.

ADHD is real; these numbers are not.

Alan M. Weber

Medford

Editor's note: The author is an assistant professor of early childhood education at Suffolk County Community College.