The premise of this book is that kids with behavioral challenges lack important thinking skills, an idea supported by research in the neurosciences over the past thirty years on kids who are aggressive and have difficulty getting along with people and those diagnosed with ADHD, mood and anxiety disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, autism spectrum disorders, and language-processing disorders. The thinking skills involved aren’t in the traditional academic domains – reading, writing, and arithmetic – but rather in domains such as regulating one’s emotions, considering the outcomes of one’s actions before one acts, understanding how one’s behavior is affecting other people, having the words to let people know something’s the matter, and responding to changes in plan in a flexible manner. In other words, these kids have a developmental delay, a learning disability of sorts. In the same way that kids who are delayed in reading are having difficulty mastering the skills required for becoming proficient in reading, challenging kids are having difficulty mastering the skills required for becoming proficient in handling life’s social, emotional, and behavior challenges.

Ross W. Greene: Lost At School, p. 7.

We’ve witnessed a disturbing trend in recent years: the almost automatic inclination to use medication to treat kids who have difficulty regulating their emotions.  While medication can be useful, even indispensable in some instances, jumping the gun on medicating kids whose difficulties are poorly understood is far too common.  Pills don’t teach skills, and there are many factors that could set the stage for a kid to be irritable or anxious that medication won’t address. Some kids are irritable or anxious because of chronic problems that have never been solved, such as school failure, poor peer relations, being bullied, or having an unrecognized learning disability. Medication doesn’t solve these problems.

Ross Green:  Lost at School, p. 21

The collision between short-attention-span kids and life-in-the-slow-lane adults is particularly evident in our schools. Here, students must often sit at desks for hours at a time, listening to monotone lectures, and going over textbook and worksheet material that is presented – not like MTV – but like MTB  (Material That’s Boring).  Kids who are labeled A.D.D. have a particularly rough time in such environments.  Studies suggest that “A.D.D. students” do most poorly in environments that are boring and repetitive, externally controlled, lack immediate feedback, or are presided over by a familiar, maternal-like authority…the traditional classroom model: one that has as its chief features an emphasis upon rote drill, externally controlled tasks (do the work on pages 143-145), and lots of sitting in one place.

Unfortunately, this kind of classroom is deadly not only for the so-called A.D.D. child but for all kids. In one monumental study of one thousand U.S. classrooms funded by over a dozen foundations, John Goodlad, professor of education at the University of of Washington and director of the study, concluded that America’s students spent by far the greatest amount of time in school being lectured to and working on written assignments – especially workbooks and work sheets. The study criticized the lack of exciting learning activities in our nation’s schools: “Students reported that they liked to do activities that involved them actively or in which they worked with others. These included going on field trips, making films, building or drawing things, making collections, interviewing people, acting things out, and carrying out projects. These are the things which students reported doing least and which we observed infrequently.”Goodlad lamented this educational poverty by commending: “Part of the brain, known as Magoun’s Brain, is stimulated by novelty. It appears to me that students spending twelve years in the schools we studied would be unlikely to experience much novelty.. Does part of the brain just sleep, then?”

Some students do in fact sleep, but many others respond with hyperactivity, distractibility, and other symptoms of A.D.D.  For it is this kind of classroom that students labeled A.D.D. are having trouble fitting into and this sort of school that  many students are being medicated into accepting.

Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.: The Myth of the A.D.D. Child, p. 30.