17	Keeping School Performance in Perspective

You may recall the story of Steve’s mother (in the Introduction), who had come to our clinic because she was having trouble with her 8-year-old son. When I asked her (as I usually do) what had brought her to us, she threw me for a loop when she said simply, “Help me. I’m losing my child.” It was a plea, and an interview, that I have never forgotten, for it summed up in a few words the excruciating pain felt by so many parents of children with ADHD.

In the rest of my interview with her, I learned that the problem with her son had begun innocently enough, with a teacher conference about her son’s poor classwork, lack of attentiveness, and erratically completed homework early in first grade. It was further nurtured by her natural desire to help her son do better in school. Her mission at that level had been accomplished very well indeed. But she was not celebrating this achievement. To her, the schoolwork that had seemed so important and was now being done well seemed a hollow victory. Something more primal was being lost in the process here that made academic success rather paltry by comparison.

As a result of that first teacher conference, Steve’s mother began to set aside virtually all of her other activities and responsibilities after school and in the early evening to spend with Steve on schoolwork. Initially Steve enjoyed the time with his mother, and initially she thought that helping her son complete his unfinished classwork and do his homework would take only about an hour a day. But of course his carelessness and inattention complicated matters, and soon it was not uncommon for them to be spending several fitful hours on this work every day.

Despite some teaching experience she had to support her efforts, Steve’s mother quickly became frustrated, angry, and bitter in the face of her son’s failure to respond to her “help.” From being upbeat, cajoling, prodding, and joking, she moved to threatening to withdraw privileges. He might work then—sometimes with tears faintly visible in his eyes, at other times angry and resentful at having to do so much schoolwork. Later in the year he also began to challenge her about the nature of assignments, even though the goal was clear.

In time, sporadically at first, Steve began to avoid his mother after school, sometimes lying to her about what work he had to do. When the work was finished, he would retreat from her quickly to his room or the family room. Gradually the arguments and conflicts began to permeate other daily activities that involved the two of them, like mealtimes and bedtime.

Over the year, Steve’s grades improved, and he finished first grade with an above-average grade, to the delight of his mother. The sarcasm and withdrawal that had grown over the school year abated during the summer, though Steve went to great lengths to avoid the weekly tutoring sessions his mother imposed. When second grade began, bringing a return to the rigors of the first-grade after-school schedule, Steve began to dig in his heels in earnest. Now it was his father, who had only nominal responsibility for schoolwork, he sought out for company at home. When Steve’s mother tried to hug or kiss him good night, he merely stiffened at her embrace, turned his cheek, and replied in a monotone, “‘Night, Mom,” with little feeling. She was devastated. She would retreat to her bedroom to cry quietly or complain bitterly to her husband that while he still had a son, she did not seem to have one anymore.

Once again Steve finished the school year with excellent grades. She set about tutoring him again that summer, but it was the worst summer of their life together.

Why was she losing Steve? she asked herself. Couldn’t he see how hard she was working on his behalf? Didn’t he realize how important school was to his future? Where was his sense of priorities?

This crisis ultimately led her to call me for an appointment at the beginning of third grade. She did not think she could go through another academic year following the same course. She was growing increasingly depressed. She envied her husband’s closeness with Steve and resented his limited involvement with schoolwork, though she knew she had volunteered for this role. She tried to assuage her sadness with the consolation that Steve was succeeding at school. It didn’t work. She now realized that something very precious was being taken from her, probably in part by her own doing. She was no longer sure she wanted to pay the price she was being asked to pay for creating her son’s academic success.

My interview with Steve only affirmed what his mother had already sensed: he was consciously avoiding her, in a sense really letting go of her. All his mother thought of, he said in essence, was school and how well he was doing and so forth. When asked if he was pleased by his report cards, he shrugged his shoulders. “So what?” he seemed to be saying, as if they were his mother’s grades, not his. The bitterness and anger were almost palpable, but I also detected a substantial degree of forlornness like his mother’s. He too appeared to realize at some (not fully conscious) level that something precious was being taken from him.

Steve’s mother and I both knew, and his father agreed once we brought him into our meetings, that the job before us was difficult. What textbook tells you how to repair a damaged parent–child bond? What trite little management technique or notebook organizer could reorganize this situation? What medicine corrects that underlying social and emotional substrate so absolutely crucial to a parent’s and a child’s life with each other?

From here these parents and I proceeded not as doctor and patients, but as a team searching for possible solutions to a problem for which none of us were well prepared. What we learned to do is explained later in this chapter. Along the way, however, we all learned several major lessons in family life.

LESSONS IN FAMILY LIFE

Lesson 1

A parent’s relationship with a child is a sacred bond and trust and ultimately must be appreciated by both parents and teachers as having a higher priority to and serving as a fundamental underpinning of any academic priority. Consciously acknowledge its existence. Give it full respect. And don’t trample it with unnecessary or excessive stress, such as the pressures of unfinished schoolwork that is sent home to complete with a parent.

Lesson 2

The failure to cultivate and sustain this relationship can have devastating emotional consequences for both parties.

Lesson 3

School staff members often may be too quick to let parents take over academically related responsibilities, to the detriment of family life and the parent–child relationship. When homework is assigned to an elementary-age child, in all honesty it is assigned to that child’s family, and particularly to a parent working with that child—not to the child alone. Thus assigning homework should be viewed as a delicate balance to be negotiated between the need to further the child’s education and the need of that child to have a well-rounded and fulfilling relationship with parents apart from schoolwork.

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that homework does not boost children’s academic achievement or success compared to children not given such homework. It is only in the high school years where a relationship between amount of homework and academic achievement can be detected as significant, and even then the relationship is a small one. Experts recommend that homework in high school be limited to 1½–2½ hours per night in total. There is no measurable benefit of homework above this range on school success. Yet with each passing year many schools, especially private ones, give more and more homework to younger and younger children as if it were not only essential to their academic success (it isn’t), but also a badge of prestige and exclusivity for the school. All the while this results in a progressive erosion of family life as schoolwork comes to dominate all weekday and Sunday evenings during the school year, displacing time families previously spent together building important family bonds and conveying family values, culture, and heritage as well as in joint leisure, hobbies, games, informal sports, and so on.

Furthermore, most of us as parents are lousy tutors and are mediocre in simply supervising homework. Late in the day we, like our children, are tired, sometimes irritable, and impatient—we simply want to get the homework done at all costs. Few of us even think of the impact of unfinished classwork and excessive homework on family life. Fewer still choose to raise this issue with a teacher as a reason for limiting such assignments.

Lesson 4

Even without confrontations over schoolwork, you may not be nurturing a relationship with your child or preventing harm being done to it. Your child may be filling this time with TV, video games, or time away from home just hanging out, and you may be permitting this to happen. Your relationship with your child does not sustain itself by its own momentum; it must be actively encouraged and fueled by your ongoing investment of love, intimacy, contact, attention, role modeling, respect, and acceptance of your child.

Lesson 5

The natural, gradual individuation of our children from us need not be accompanied by a loss of our emotional bond to them. We can, however, lose this bond or relationship prematurely by overemphasizing one priority of parenting to the near-exclusion of all others. Schoolwork, while it is critical among the developmental tasks a child must master, is not singularly so.

Lesson 6

As the example of Steve and his family shows, if damage to a parent–child relationship has begun to occur because of an excessive emphasis on schoolwork, it is not irreparable, at least not if resuscitated within the first few years of the discovery of this destructive process. Probably such damage can be partially reversed even years later. But relationship repair will not happen of its own accord.

PRIORITIES FOR PARENTS

Our first step in trying to repair the bond between Steve and his mother was to identify what parents’ priorities should be in raising a healthy, well-rounded, well-adjusted child, so we could see which areas were being sacrificed to the priority of academic achievement. This is the list we came up with:

1. The active promotion of the physical survival and well-being of the family unit and its members, through the provision of adequate food and shelter to sustain life and the provision of safety to its members.

2. The instilling of a sense of family, and of membership within it as a needed, loved, valued, respected, and responsible participant in its successful functioning. As Craig Knippenberg said so well in a column for the ADDvance newsletter years ago, there are two things we as parents give our children; one is roots, and the other wings.

3. Providing the foundation for a child’s moral development. This means making a commitment to the preparation of children to be socialized to enter society and benefit from the wisdom of its members. Morals are the “rules of the road” for how to live among, respect the rights of, and interact with other members of society that contribute to its smooth and peaceful functioning, limiting conflict as much as possible and resolving it peacefully and fairly when it arises.

4. The instruction in and development of interpersonal skills that lead to adaptive and successful social transactions, acceptance, and enduring friendships. Learning to wait, take turns, share, listen to, praise, forgive, problem-solve, and cooperate with their peers and others are just a few of the skills that parents must take time to teach their children, apart from the daily demands of school homework. This area can be a major problem for families of many children with ADHD, given the social interaction problems such children are likely to have. Evidence for the importance of this domain of children’s development can be found just by looking at the pain many parents experience vicariously through their children with ADHD when they have no friends and have never received an invitation to a birthday or slumber party.

5. The instruction of our children in a sense of community and our obligations to it as a member of a larger society. Whether we depend on formal organizations like scouting, houses of worship, or schools to assist us, we as parents carry the major responsibility for introducing our children to and eventually sponsoring our children’s entry into this larger community.

6. The proper development of our children’s physical and mental health and well-being—not just diet, exercise, hygiene, and the like, but also the acquisition of self-help and adaptive skills to permit the children to become self-sufficient. Moreover, this means seeing that there is adequate time for and attention to the pursuit of happiness and self-satisfaction for the children through leisure, recreation, hobbies, and informal sports. Sometimes we forget that children need a break too.

7. Instilling a sense of belonging to a larger humanity, of fulfilling our obligations to it, and of being an inhabitant of a finite planet with progressively diminishing resources. How we introduce our children to the multitude of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups in our world affects how well they will be integrated into a larger society.

Do you still think doing unfinished classwork is the highest priority of a parent in raising a child? Then think about the pictures in your family photo album or your collection of home videos of your children. Are any of them of you and your child doing schoolwork together? Probably not. Why not? Think about it.

Once Steve and his family—remarkably, without much effort—articulated these priorities, the importance of academic work began to shrink in relative significance. Ultimately Steve’s parents agreed that excellent grades, while laudable, were not to be mandatory; average ones would do just fine.

But that left the problem of the extensive unfinished schoolwork and homework. In a meeting with the teacher, we came to an agreement that Steve’s inability to finish classwork was itself a symptom of a larger problem in that classroom, not a problem in the home. If the problem was to be truly solved, the solution would have to occur in that classroom. This led us to the types of modifications of classwork typically made for children with ADHD and discussed in Chapters 15 and 16. Similar compromises were made on homework.

The next step was to divest Steve’s mother of much of the burden of schoolwork by having his father take equal turns at this task, and to shift her relationship with her son away from the solely academic. We also discussed using an academic tutor with Steve if necessary so that neither parent needed to play the role of schoolmaster. We began scheduling recreational outings at which discussing schoolwork was forbidden and encouraged her to give nondirective attention to Steve with positive feedback (but never feigned or excessive praise). Things did not change quickly. Steve seemed naturally suspicious of the changes we were attempting to make. Even so, as the changes became the routine, the edginess, sarcasm, and oppositional stance he took toward his mother began to subside. He even began asking to go places with her again and seemed faintly pleased by her presence at his scouting and sports events. Within a few months his mother reported that she sensed a reestablishment of her old relationship, but that its closeness was not yet where it had once been. Still, she was hopeful, as was I. Steve’s grades dropped somewhat, to C’s with occasional B’s, but his mother felt this was acceptable while they worked on their home relationship. When last I met this family, Steve and his mother were getting along well, and she felt their relationship was pretty much back to normal. The affection they naturally had felt for each other returned, and they were striving to keep academic work in perspective, relative to the other areas of family life and parent–child relations of equal importance. They seemed to have accepted Steve’s ADHD as a disability and to have adjusted their expectations of academic success accordingly, realizing that average students with ADHD can nevertheless be well rounded, morally upright, and just plain terrific apart from their class standing.

And so, as you pursue the academic achievement that your child can aspire to, do not lose sight of the other, equally compelling priorities of raising children. Do not sacrifice your parent–child relationships and emotional bonds on the altar of academic performance. If the academic wolf does come calling at your door, which it most certainly will, greet it and accord it just due, but by all means do not relinquish your children to it.