We Can’t Ignore the ADHD Girls in School Anymore
Every class had those boys—the ones who didn’t do their work and always climbed out of their seats. They never finished a worksheet, threw pencils, and talked too loud. They never raised their hand. Mostly, we didn’t like those boys, the ones who were always sent to the office, the ones always fighting. We didn’t have a name for those boys. Today, teachers and administrators call them ADHD. Today, they have IEPs, fidget toys, Ritalin. This generation of “those boys” has it much, much better.
But another group lurked in the classroom. We were mostly smart, but turned in worksheets littered with careless mistakes. A teacher might talk to us about it, or show her annoyance through some red pen. Nothing else. We sometimes shouted out answers without raising our hands, or spaced out and didn’t bother to raise our hands at all. At times we talked loudly. But most of all, we forgot things. We forgot dates, names, permission slips, homework assignments, and books. We didn’t remember. We were quieter than “those boys.” But in the eyes of the school, we suffered from no less of a moral failing: How could we be so smart and so damn stupid?
A moral failure—this is what inattentive ADHD meant to me as a child.
I’d love to add on to this if it’s ok.
I read a study for one of my classes that followed girls diagnosed with executive function disorders (whether or not they’d also been diagnose with ADHD) from about age 6 until age 20 – an incredibly long study that showed a huge link between EFDs, ADHD, and a whole host of negative outcomes. They included dropping out of school, poorer grades, more behavior problems and suspensions from school. But even more worrisome, the study also looked into rates of self-harm and suicidal behavior and found that THOSE rates were also higher in girls with EFDs.
The study is called “Childhood Executive Function Continues to Predict Outcomes in Young Adults Females with and Without Childhood-Diagnosed ADHD”. Here’s a link through the site that leaked a bunch of academic articles:
http://sci-hub.io/10.1007/s10802-011-9599-yI can also upload the research review I did since it’s a lot easier to read and sums up everything in the study, which is admittedly really hard to read.