Learning to Avoid Reading and Math Help Help
In my book, ADHD: A Path to Success, I discuss how the negative emotional feedback loops described above, develop. What I describe above regarding aversion to reading and math help can be more generally described as attentional avoidance of anything children or adults find unpleasant. The following is a more general description of the development of ADHD in children.
Attentional Avoidance behavior could be a result of a child’s exposure to interpersonal stress before the child is developmentally equipped to handle it.
Indeed, attentional avoidance may be the only mechanism for a young child to escape these early , since their physical mobility to escape is restricted and they do not have the verbal or intellectual skills to change the stressor.
Once this adaptive strategy garners some negative reinforcement, it is refined and resorted to more and more frequently. When the stresses of school arrive, the child has a well-refined escape mechanism to deal with the new demands. It works well for young children and we call it ADHD.
These children avoid negative emotional experiences and direct their attention elsewhere to avoid the experience of anger, performance anxiety, social deprecation, frustration, and ultimately boredom. They do this much like a baby turning its head away from something it does not like.
The thought of doing math makes him angry and depressed, feelings he would just as soon avoid. Although he dislikes the feelings he experiences during math class, he cannot physically avoid being in math class every day. However, he finds that if he fantasizes about skate boarding, being in math class does not feel as bad.
Thus, ADHD is not a deficit, defect, or deficiency. It is a highly skilled, coping mechanism that, at the moment, serves the child.
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Over time, due to negative reinforcement, he learns to fantasize sooner, better, and more automatically. He effectively develops greater protection from the feelings he used to get from math class.
Negative reinforcement is an often-misunderstood concept. Unlike common usage, it is not equivalent to punishment. It is like lying on the beach in the sun until you are very hot and uncomfortable, then terminating this aversive overheating, by running into the cold water. This temperature change feels good. This positive feeling of cooling off thereby reinforces dunking in the water when you have become too hot.
Therefore, negative reinforcement is the cessation of aversive stimuli, which by contrast to the aversion, is experienced as a positive or reinforcing change.
There are at least two other positive feedback loops that further exacerbate this process of learned attentional avoidance.
First, the refinement of attentional avoidance further reduces a child’s awareness of, and participation in, schoolwork. The child eventually begins to slip involuntarily into conditioned attentional avoidance and, as a result, he spends more and more time in his “own little world.”
Second, the teacher is shaped into being more demanding and coercive through negative reinforcementbecause of the short-term positive benefit of such efforts. This short-term success shapes increasing long-term negativeness in the teacher’s response to the child.
Learning to Avoid Reading and Math Help, continued
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