One reason less trauma happens to kids in a country like France is that they have massive social supports for families. Parents are better able to take care of their children with universal health carer,lengthy maternity leaves, government nannies, help paying for college, etc… And no child goes hungry in France.

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Definitely agree with most of your critique of this article; it’s always amusing how people will conveniently ignore facts to prove their own point! However I would dispute a few assumptions you and some of your commenters have made about the causes of ADHD.

From the perspective of someone who “has” ADHD (though I question the medical model which pigeonholes people as “having” a particular “disorder”, I do believe that ADHD represents an innate variation in brain function that causes very real problems with trying to exist in the society we find ourselves in) and has kids who seem very “ADHDish”, I would dispute the causal role of food additives, media consumption & trauma in classic ADHD. I grew up in a household where we ate real homecooked food most of the time & hardly ever ate sweets or other things likely to contain stuff implicated in hyperactivity/concentration issues. I watched very little TV as a child (when I was very young we only had a tiny black & white TV, and I grew up in the days when children’s TV was only on for a few hours per day; even then we watched less than most of my peers), and there were no gadgets/computers until I was about 9 or 10. I also experienced no obvious trauma – any trauma I may have experienced in my upbringing was largely a direct consequence of my ADHD tendencies, i.e. being punished for ADHD behaviours that were frustrating for my parents. Yes, I was occasionally spanked when I’d done something very “naughty”, but less often than the average child in those days (25-30 years ago when physical punishment was much more accepted). My parents were basically OK parents, not perfect by any means, but I don’t think they did a bad job in raising me in spite of how difficult I must have been at times!

None of this is to say that parenting plays no role in ADHD outcomes, or that diet has no effect on behaviour, or that trauma won’t produce ADHD-like behaviours in some kids, or exacerbate ADHD in others. But my point is that none of these things are CAUSAL; based on a combination of personal experience, my reading of the literature, and the experiences reported by other ADHDers, it seems people with ADHD really are born with brains that don’t quite work the same way as the “average” person. I can point to tangible differences in the way my kids (now preteens) were when they were babies & toddlers compared to the “average” child. For example my son, who is more “hyper”, was a very active, curious baby, and had a lot of trouble settling to sleep; eventually I used a fairly gentle form of controlled crying but only at the age of about a year after trying everything else I could think of! He also used to have meltdowns that went way beyond normal toddler tantrums, it was more of a blind rage where ANY input, not matter how gentle or empathetic, just made it worse (if I hugged, tried to talk, or was even nearby it would escalate!); the only thing that worked was just to put him somewhere safe by himself to calm down (essentially “time out”, but I didn’t really use it as a punishment, just as a way to let the emotions burn themselves out without feeding the fire). My daughter, who is more the inattentive type, was a very sleepy, placid baby – she was actually really easy to deal with until she was a few years old and it became more obvious that she also had trouble managing her own emotional reactions and was very distractible & forgetful, and it became even more obvious as she progressed through school. Because I recognised many of these behaviours as being similar to my own issues, I didn’t particularly label them as “naughty” and I think I was more empathetic than most parents would have been, so I don’t think I particularly traumatised them with the ways I attempted to deal with them. With hindsight I think I would have done some things differently (when they were young I didn’t really know about attachment/gentle/positive parenting so I tended to use more behaviourist methods, but on the whole I was relatively gentle with how I implemented them, and I’ve always tried to talk about things with them rather than just imposing rewards/punishments and telling them to do things “because I say so”), but I don’t think I handled it too badly. I firmly believe they both would have had a lot more problems if I’d been much more authoritarian or permissive, or if I’d allowed them to eat more junk, but I don’t think I could have done anything to totally eliminate the problems. I remain convinced that fundamentally, we have “ADHD brains” that predispose us to a different way of thinking that isn’t well suited to the way the world presently works.

All of the factors mentioned by yourself & your commenters can, of course, lead to ADHD-like behaviour, or exacerbate existing ADHD, but that is not the same as “causing” ADHD. Certain food additives have been shown to increase hyperactivity in some kids (including some who don’t normally have ADHD tendencies), and I know my son gets much more hyper (stereotypical “bouncing off the walls” kind of ADHD behaviour) if he’s eaten certain things, but there are many kids with ADHD-like symptoms who have very sensible diets (like my own – I cook from scratch with lots of fresh veg & wholefoods, rarely use highly processed foods, and avoid foods with artificial additives). To say “additives cause ADHD” is like saying “bereavement causes depression”; it is common for bereaved people to get depressed (especially those predisposed to depression) but equally not every bereaved person becomes depressed & many depressed people have not been bereaved. Traumatic experiences in childhood can lead to disruptive, ADHD-like behaviour, and can make ADHD symptoms much worse (e.g. turning “ordinary” ADHD into oppositional defiant disorder etc), but many people with ADHD have had relatively happy, stable childhoods. It wouldn’t be surprising, though, if many kids with ADHD had some trauma in their childhoods, simply because so many parents & teacher have no idea how to handle a kid with ADHD and end up resorting to strict punishments, rejecting the child, etc, and also because parents with ADHD are more likely to have kids with ADHD, and if the parents struggle with self control & have lots of unresolved problems due to their own ADHD then they are more likely to struggle with the demands of parenting a challenging child. And as for blaming media consumption, no doubt excessive amounts can lead to kids who get “bored” easily and find it hard to concentrate on anything that doesn’t have a screen, but lots of ADHD kids have had no more exposure to these things than any other child, and lots of children watch TV/play video games all the time and never develop ADHD.

I agree, though, that a lot of the difference in ADHD rates in the US vs France probably comes down to how the behaviours are perceived and dealt with. That doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that fewer kids in France have ADHD brains, it is just that they are less likely to end up with a medical diagnosis and their behaviour is dealt with differently by their parents & teachers. I’m not even convinced that this means kids in France are less likely to suffer from ADHD-related problems, because ADHD figures are based on diagnosed cases, so if they are less likely to medicalise it they are less likely to diagnose it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people in France struggling with undiagnosed ADHD.

There is one other possible explanation for differences in ADHD rates in the US vs other parts of the world, and this is that there genuinely might be more people with a genetic predisposition to ADHD in the US population, due to the way the nation was created. Almost the entire population of the US is descended from immigrants, people who made the huge decision to move halfway around the world, often to escape persecution for being “different” or because of a pioneering spirit. Thus it seems very likely that many of these settlers had brains that we would now label as “ADHD”, which made them more likely to embrace unconventional religious ideas, to feel restless in their ordinary lives and driven to seek the excitement of migrating to another country, to feel out of place in the societies they lived in, to have problems in their birth countries they wanted to escape from, or to be more prone to making impulsive decisions like hopping on a boat to a far-off place! It would be no surprise that the descendants of such people would also have higher rates of these traits, in fact it would be odd if that weren’t the case!

Sorry for the essay – that’ll be my ADHD brain at work!!

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