by Eva van Loon

An expert in learning disorders posed a question to me: Faced with kids’ learning strengths or weaknesses, do we parents and educators react as rational or irrational beings?

To me, “a strength” refers to something that has been well learned. “A weakness” refers to something that somehow has not been learned although, by a certain time, we all expect it to have been learned.

Then, irrationally indeed, we usually grab for the medical model and blame the patient or learner or kid for being “sick”, “disabled”, or “deficient” or for “having” a disorder. As in the story of diseases like tuberculosis or AIDS, where poets or gays supposedly had only themselves to blame for their illness, the first chapter of the learning-disability story is all about how the student, or maybe the parents, are culpable.

Is medical diagnosis really a rational response to learning weaknesses?

Medical offices often render diagnoses found in the DSM-IV (the “bible” of psychiatry), but ADHD is not a disease or disorder in the true medical sense. It’s order that never happened. Was never learned.

That brain has no hope of learning it, either, until the personal climate of that learner undergoes a change.

In the term “personal climate” I include what’s going on, chemically speaking, inside the bag of water and gunk and electricity, slung on movable sticks, that describes the Earth creatures we are.

Remember GIGO, one of the first anagrammatic rules of computers? “Garbage In; Garbage Out.” Humans are not somehow magically exempt from that rule. (Recall that we created computers in our image, not the other way around.)

Manage the chemistry. Monitor the stuff that goes into the bag of human flesh through the mouth, the nose, the ears, the eyes, the skin. What you see, hear, feel, smell and taste alters your chemistry. (If you’ve ever fallen in love, you know this!)

Especially in very young children, you want to promote acetylcholine but discourage adrenalin during learning times. For little kids, learning time is all the time. Don’t let up on the peacefulness-and-unconditional-love theme for a minute. You want that new brain to be governed by a resting heart beat—60 beats per minute. That’s when order is learned and disorders are avoided.

TV does not move to 60 bpm. Pop music and traffic very seldom move to 60 bpm. Cellphones do not ring at 60 bpm. Busy busy busy! Our accepted, hectic adult lifestyle doesn’t promote learning in children’s brains.

Reduce the frazzle factor. Take time to cook real food—the stuff that comes together from ingredients instead of emerging from boxes or cans. Stay home often. Slow down the music, your speech, your speed, your food, your breath! Where are you going anyway, that you’re in such a hurry?

Remember, wherever you go, “there” you are, and you might as well get “there” in a state of calm alertness. As successful parents know, that state is the key to keeping children safe and nurturing them to adulthood.

Are we irrational or irrational creatures? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Often we use the rational to justify or explain our irrational responses. We like to call such thinking science, forgetting that, like all of Earth’s creatures, we are always...chemical.