“ADHD. It is not a disability, it is a different ability”
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Raising a child with ADHD is not always easy, but it sure is never boring! It takes patience, it takes the ability to always stay calm and it takes the ability to not take everything so seriously. I am very lucky that my children taught me all of these traits as they were growing up!
Since both my husband and I have ADHD I don’t think that we ever realized our children had ADHD until they were heading into their teens. For us they were just regular kids.They had lots of energy, were creative, and were eager to learn new things. I suppose that they were not really strong at keeping their rooms neat and tidy, they were pretty good procrastinators and sometimes their energy was exhausting but that felt pretty “normal” to us. I certainly never considered that they might have a “disorder” or a “disability”. I still don’t.
Our family never looked at ADHD as a disorder. Disorder sounds so ominous and there was nothing ominous about the way any of else felt. The girls did sometimes have difficulties in school but through time and patience we were able to figure out what worked best for them. The girls knew that having ADHD was not an excuse to get out of doing their schoolwork – it just meant that they might have to work a bit harder or we had to find different ways to help them understand some lessons. There was nothing “wrong” with them, they just had abilities that were different from the other children in their class.
Those “different abilities” are what made them all so unique, so special, so lively, and so much fun. I believe that people with ADHD see and think differently than other people – and different is good. We need different. We need people to think out of the box. We need children who have ADHD so that they can grow up and be the inventors and innovators and entrepreneurs and be the people whose minds have “different abilities”. They might not be the round peg that fits into the round hole that schools seem to want right now, but someday their way of thinking will be an asset for them.
So…Don’t look at ADHD as a disorder or disability – look down the road and see your child as an adult using their gift of ADHD to change the world.
Have some fun today!
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