Does My Child Have ADD?

Many of you know that Gabe is all over the place most of the day. He's a high-energy, highly motivated kid. He's persistent in most things, whether it's disobedience, a new skill he's trying to learn, or asking for something he wants to have or do. He has a hard time sitting still at the dinner table and might get out of his seat four or five or more times when he should be sitting down eating. If I'm talking to him, I might have to remind him three or four or more times to look at me while I'm talking to him. If I ask him to do something, he gets easily distracted and will stop in the middle of carrying out his task to do something else instead.

These and other "indicators" are often determined to be signs of Attention Deficit Disorder. So does he have this disorder? Hmmmm...

After hearing people suggest this a couple of times or hearing them compare Gabe to their children who have already been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, I began to think about this a bit. After weighing it out, here is my conclusion: I do NOT think that Gabe has something called Attention Deficit Disorder, and here is why.

He does focus on things. For example, he'll play with two toys in a sink full of water for HOURS at a time. Often he's just focused on something different than what I want him to be focused on. When he's supposed to be sitting at the table and is getting up four or five or twelve times, he's focused on something else... playing. He doesn't care about eating. He wants to play. He's persistently going after what he's focused on. He's disobeying, sure. He needs consistency in correction and training so that he is able to submit to authority even when he doesn't want to.

It may be irritating, because I want my dinner time to be quiet and relaxing and free of interruptions so that I can talk to Chet or just take a break from parenting. But I don't always get what I want, do I? Just as Gabe isn't getting what he wants (to focus on playing), I don't always get what I want (a dinner time set aside to focus on conversation and relaxation). Just as Gabe is sitting there struggling to focus on his assigned task (eating dinner), I'm struggling to focus on my assigned task (to parent him and train him up in the way he should go). In the end, we BOTH want to be doing something else, and we can both very easily be frustrated by the mandate handed down to us by the "one" in authority. In either case, there is a departure from the Lord's will. We're both sinning, because we want something other than what the Lord has given us.

Do not read this as an excuse for my child's behavior. There are no good excuses for dishonoring God-given authority. I'm simply suggesting that he doesn't need to be medicated into doing what I want him to do. He needs to be trained up to do God's will, which is to submit to rightful authority... which means that we, as his parents, often have to submit to the authority of the Lord who commands us to do the hard, labor-intensive work of focusing on training our children... even when we'd rather be doing something else.