Hi everyone. I don’t have ADHD, but someone who joined my family some time ago does (we’ll call him T), and is currently going through some trouble which I find quite perplexing.
Some background: T has two daughters (8yo and 6yo) under shared custody with his ex-wife (they spend roughly the same time with each of them during the week). T has had some serious difficulties through his life, some of which are structural and will likely stay with him forever, such as difficulty to hold onto a job or keeping his house tidy (even less so when his kids are home), and others of which are temporary by nature, such as the recent death of his mother.
His daughters had been having some issues for quite some time, including school performance and very frequent misbehaving. I don’t particularly dislike kids, but holy shit, the very moment they got used to me, they became imps, almost constant screaming, fighting each other, not attending to reason, and so on. And I’ve barely seen them a handful of times. Anyhow, T decided to seek the root of these issues, discussed with his ex-wife the possibility of getting them evaluated for ADHD, and the ex-wife refused. T went forwards anyway, and the girls are now diagnosed with ADHD, and assigned to a psychologist who should theoretically have a session with them each month, but in practice, they’re given less than 5 appointments a year. In general, T’s complaints that he wanted more guidance on what to do with them have fallen on deaf ears.
A few weeks ago, social services knock into T’s home, and naturally, they find that the house is a mess, because it always is. They take note of it all, and recently summoned him for a meeting.
T’s current partner recently told me how the meeting went: social services claimed that the kids are sometimes late to class and they sometimes don’t go at all, attributed all the responsibility to him, and he refuted that, while he’s sometimes late when it’s his turn to take them to school, they only completely miss class when they’re staying with their mother. Social services disregarded this (shouldn’t they have the means to corroborate it?), and proceeded to explain that, as a person with ADHD who cannot keep his life in order, he doesn’t seem to have the competencies to raise the kids, so they want to impose a change in custody where they would stay with him less than 33% of the time.
What I’m getting from this is that the only thing the administration will take into account when determining whether you should be raising your kids or not is your medical conditions and how disorganized is your house. The kids have some issues, sure (I’m not arguing that they being late to class or missing at all is ok), but if there are two separated parents, and one has an ADHD diagnosis and the other doesn’t, is it ok to attribute all issues on the diagnosed parent rather than checking where the problems are coming from? Shouldn’t the fact that the kids have ADHD a reason to want to make sure and the parent who does also have it to be more involved in their upbringing, since the one who doesn’t will have less experience with it and its difficulties?
It makes me sad to read these stories. Neurotypical people have an incredibly difficult time understanding that their lived experience is not the same as other people. They try to force a square peg in a round hole and when that fails they accuse the peg of non-compliance and set about knocking the corners off it.
My daily task is to sit with my daughter and tell her she’s ok and remind her of all the amazing things she is and does. She didn’t choose to be like this, none of us chooses our DNA, parents, environment, preferences. Let’s stop pretending that free will exists and accept each others lived experience. That’s the path to compassion and love.