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Last week a young mom called me, distraught about her 8-year-old son Owen. “He’s just in la la land,” she said. “I'll tell him it’s time for school and that he needs to get his shoes on and get ready for the bus. Ten minutes later I find him sitting behind the couch, playing with Lego, he’s forgotten all about his shoes and the bus. The other day the rest of us were waiting in the car for him for 15 minutes. When I finally got out of the car and went back into the house to see what had happened, he was standing in front of his wall sized map. I said, ‘Owen, what are you doing? We’re going to be late for dinner at Gran’s house!’ I was so exasperated. You know what he answered? ‘I’m just looking at Borneo, Mom’. It sounds cute, but his teacher says he’s not paying attention, and the last time she gave them a math test he got a zero. Every problem was correct, but the instructions had said to add and he had subtracted. He just seems out of it most of the time. I think he has ADD. Last week we went on a bike path, and I told him not to go so far ahead he couldn’t see me, and the next thing I knew, he was nowhere in sight. I was beside myself. I ran as fast as I could, the whole two mile trail, and when I got to the end, I was sobbing, sure something had happened to him. But there he was, happily riding around the parking lot, waiting for me to catch up. He is getting a punishment, because he must learn to pay attention.”
Soon after this conversation, I got the chance to see Owen in his house, with his family all around. We were eating dinner. I watched the adults laugh at the adorable antics of Owen’s 3-year-old brother, Kit. I saw that not one thing Owen said elicited a smile. As soon as Owen had finished his supper he left the table, went over to a big soft chair nearby, and settled in with one of his beloved Tintin books. As we finished the meal, his granny said to me, “Look at him, he’s a total space cadet. I’m worried about him. What are we going to do?”
The problem has other layers as well. His parents are not particularly avid readers nor are they academically inclined. Instead, they both love sports and were good athletes when they were young. Like most of us, they assumed their child would love what they love, and so from early on, they signed Owen up for a team sport every season. However, Owen is not particularly athletic and doesn’t enjoy sports much. His mother says he is just like Ferdinand the Bull when he is on the baseball field, forgetting to watch home plate, gazing up at the clouds, and getting absorbed by the flowers growing in the outfield. Kids have very finely tuned antenna. Owen is no dummy. He can tell that his parents are a bit mystified by what he loves and what he doesn’t love. Unfortunately, the more exasperated and alarmed his mother, father, teacher and grandmother become by his behavior, the more anxious and glum he seems. Getting lost in a book is a perfectly reasonable alternative to staying involved with people who are ever so slightly dismayed by you.
While some children do suffer from ADD (and benefit from various kinds of treatment), I don’t think Owen is one of them. True enough, he gets distracted, has trouble following through on various practical tasks, periodically separates himself from the group, and often doesn’t follow instructions. Those sound like symptoms of ADD, right? Until you take a closer look at the whole picture. Owen DOES concentrate on some things with extraordinary focus and patience — he reads for hours, builds complex Lego structures, and immerses himself in certain topics, such as dinosaurs, trucks, or maps.
And there are other revealing clues. Own learned to read early and easily, and he loves reading. He also loves calculating, and knows how to do it well. So whatever problem he has concentrating has not kept him from acquiring important academic skills.
In addition, Owen has a stealth weapon at his disposal: his interests — multi-faceted domains or activities he turns to again and again, wants to know more about and get better at. These interests lead him to ever more complex thoughts and skills, in other words they lead him to learn. Study after study has shown that children learn information more easily and more lastingly when they are interested in it. When children are allowed to spend time with materials or activities in which they have a sustained interest, they engage in just the kind of complex learning and skill acquisition so essential for intellectual accomplishment. Ann Renninger has shown that babies explore objects longer and use more gestures to find out about the object when they are given things in which they have shown a prior interest. Ruth Garner and her colleagues have found that school aged children remember more about a written text when it contained intriguing and surprising details. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Larsen’s groundbreaking study of adolescents showed that teenagers are psychologically healthiest when they are doing things they care passionately about – whether it is playing an instrument, painting, or competing in a sport.
And Owen is only 8. One of a young child’s greatest assets is their ability to be completely immersed in an activity. Early on, children make little distinction between work and play. They fling themselves into whatever seems meaningful and important to them- building a tower, wiping the table clean, or telling a story. The fact that one has been requested by a teacher, or another is useful to their mother, means far less than whether the activity is compelling to them. Young children are much more likely to engage in difficult, complex, and frustrating play than they are to stick with something easy and boring, just because they should. Owen’s behavior is telling his parents he is not ready to get himself out of the house on time, focus on tests he is not interested in, or stay at the family dinner table talking when he’d rather be reading.
Over time, of course, we want children to learn how to stick with dull tasks, work for a delayed reward, and comply with reasonable but unappealing requests from authorities. But it doesn’t come all at once, or quickly. Some day Owen might need help learning how to follow instructions, stay focused on tasks he doesn’t like, and get places on time. Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that as they acquire those skills they risk of losing the intense absorption that makes children such efficient and powerful learners. It would be great if Owen could hold on to the very proclivities that lead to the most impressive adult accomplishments. When his grandmother asked what could be done about Owen’s daydreaming, I should have suggested getting him some more Tintin books.
