Her 5-year-old son is aggressive at school, he tears his bedroom apart and it takes Judy Greenwald hours to coax him into the tub for his bath.
“Timeouts don’t work; he simply destroys his room,” she says. “He scrapes paint off his walls; he pulls his curtains down; he bangs on his door and tries to break it down.”
But rather than getting sympathy from friends, relatives and other parents, the San Jose, Calif., mother says she is blamed for Harry’s behavior and told she is an older, inconsistent, jittery, overindulgent parent who can’t set limits.
She has taken him to his pediatrician, a child therapist, a child development consultant and to a psychiatrist, all of whom say that Greenwald must exert more authority.
Even though Harry has yet to be finally diagnosed, Greenwald is convinced Harry has Attention Deficit Disorder, which some doctors say is neurological and genetic. Others say the behavior of children like Harry is the result of family problems and the inability of parents to set firm limits.
Both sides agree ADD has become the designer disease of the ’90s that covers a range of behaviors from lack of control, stubbornness and impulsiveness to aggression and the inability to sit still and concentrate.
Some specialists say brain scans prove neurological differences in ADD children. Many children, they say, suffer needlessly for years, lagging behind at school and labeled as “bad,” when, if treated properly, their problems could be controlled.
“You wouldn’t wait five or six years to have a leg taken care of or a breathing difficulty,” says Dr. Joseph Lebenzon, a Santa Cruz, Calif., physician who works for the Children’s Diagnostic Unit. “Why wait that long for ADD? By the time the parents do come in with their children, they are often feeling horrible.”
Lebenzon says recent studies show as many as 11 percent of U.S. children may suffer. But diagnosis is still difficult, and controversial, especially in younger children.
But Greenwald believes she is finally reaching the end of a medical maze. Instead of feeling constantly guilty about being a bad parent and angry with her son, she feels vindicated. For years, she says, she has been worried and sought the advice of child experts but has not been taken seriously. As a toddler, Harry didn’t walk until he was 18 months old, didn’t climb stairs until he was 2 1/2.
“But the doctor always told us that he was within range,” she said. His language was also delayed and his pronunciation quirky. Experts say early symptoms of ADD include delayed development of motor and vocal skills.
At a San Jose Montessori nursery school, Harry was oppositional, and his teachers set up a blocked-off cubicle for him, yet he always loved the other children,” Greenwald says. “But he’d be so aggressive he’d sometimes upset them and their parents.”
Increasingly concerned, Greenwald consulted a number of experts, including a Kaiser child therapist who led a group for difficult children.
“Her conclusion was that he seemed like an `over-indulged, articulate child’ who was around too many adults with too few children,” Greenwald says. “She told us that he was basically normal, but we just needed to put him into nursery school for longer hours and to pay less attention to him.”
Therapists also told her that the problem was hers, not her son’s. Friends and relatives said she was not firm enough and was a wimpy parent. So Greenwald took a parenting class at Harry’s preschool and consulted Harry’s pediatrician, who told her he didn’t have ADD. ADD often co-exists with other problems such as low self-esteem, depression and aggressive or anxious behavior.
Totally frustrated, Greenwald joined a YWCA support group for parents of children with special needs, many with ADD. The group is led by Kathy McNamara, an intern therapist, who has a challenging 16-year-old son and understands how much patience and skill is needed to parent such children.
“Most parents get sucked right in like a vacuum cleaner, then they are in the dirt along with their children,” McNamara says. “I help parents get out of `the system,’ connect with themselves and say, `Hey, Wait a minute, I’m the adult here!”‘
“Suddenly I saw myself and my son reflected in the experiences of all these other families,” Greenwald says.
She bought six books about ADD and is now convinced her son has it. The next step is to get a firm diagnosis, she says, and possibly medication, such as Ritalin. But she is concerned about the effects of long-term medication on a growing boy.
“The good news would be if two psychiatrists told us that there was nothing neurologically wrong with him. But I do fear it will be bad news. There are just too many examples-in the hundreds every week-of Harry not perceiving, remembering or understanding. He’s just too extreme, too oppositional. This isn’t normal.”
