As far as I know (but there again I only have four children and eight grandchildren) children sometimes sleep ‘badly’, snore and report bad dreams. Believe it or not, it’s because they are human and respond in the same way as adults to what life serves up. They get scared, worried, confused, excited, even impatient – and then sleep just doesn’t happen as it ‘should’.
But now we are informed that such short-term difficulties are potentially dangerous, harmful to the brain! They might lead to the elusive ADHD – which not surprisingly means that after a bad night’s sleep it’s hard to concentrate. Wow, that’s terrifying. Quick, get a shrink, pick up a prescription, talk to your child about the dangers of snoring.
Or alternatively, ignore it and get a life!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17237576
Boadicea's Chariot 
Or they could just go out and run around a bit.
Indeed. The modern screen culture has taken over from good, old-fashioned going out to play.
Wretched psychologists and psychiatrists are all psychos. I’ve only met two who I would call ‘normal’ – but they’d probably say that that says more about me than them!
It does not surprise me that they claim that these short-term difficulties may lead to long-term harmful problems, such as the ‘elusive ADHD’. More work for them, and more money for the drug companies. ADHD may be a ‘real’ condition, but as far as I’m concerned it is usually down to parents who are not willing to accept that they are parents who are too lazy, too incompetent or too unwilling to do the hard work of disciplining their children – but why should they when Government does not allow parents to exercise control of their children…
What happened to ‘Common Sense’?
But this is an American study, Janus, which explains a lot.
Last week I was a guest at daughters book group because they were reading Dangerous Liaisons, which I had read at university. I was invited to lead the discussion and started by quoting the title of another American study: ” The temporal and focal dynamics of volitional reconsumption – a phenomenological investigation of repeated hedonic experiences”. In other words you can enjoy reading a book, watching a film or listening to a piece of music more than once! I had already checked there were no trick cyclists in the group. Everyone had a good laugh.
There are lots of these conditions abounding out there in schools – dyspraxia, dyslexia; Behavioural Difficulties; there is even a label for the academically gifted, ‘Able, GIfted and Talented.’
TO be honest, it is a bit logistical nightmare trying to cater for the needs of all this in class, let alone an exam room, with lots of different people with different finishing times due to the length of time allowed for their particular condiition. I don’t deny that there are genuine cases of dyslexia- ie, people who really do struggle to process/spell words. However, I daresay we have swung far too much the other way. It strikes me that educationalists in our time have peddled all kinds of mythical conditions which let pupils off the hook in the short term in school – but and ultimately do them a vast disservice in the long term and in the real world.
It strikes me that your attitude to this Janus is not really helpful. If you had experience of children with chronic sleep apnoea you would have an idea of the huge difficulties it can cause. As a nurse on night duty I remember reporting, repeatedly, my concerns over a child who regularly stopped breathing at night, only to start again with a huge gasping intake of breath… but this was largely ignored. And that was medical staff ignoring a trained paediatric nurse. Imagine if a parent had reported this: it would have been completely dismissed.
When I made a fuss and it was taken up it turned out that he had a condition that needed serious monitoring. With treatment he improved dramatically.
From the report note this:
Marianne Davey, from the British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Society, said that sleep problems in the young were an under-recognised reason for poor behaviour.
She said: “Often parents won’t make the connection and mention them to the GP, so this label of ADHD is given to the child, and sometimes they are even given drugs.
“This is wrong, as if the sleep problem is addressed, the behaviour will improve almost immediately.”
Now, you know I’m not one to get on my high horse or join in with discussions which lead to conflict, but in this case I find your attitude rather dismissive and narrow minded.
While I feel the pendulum has swung a long way since we were at school, Araminta, the truth is that there are a lot of people in our generation who could have benefited hugely from an alternative approach when they were at school and have been left feeling let down by the education system. In this respect different styles of learning are now taken more seriously. And as it is well known that those who have dyslexia or dyspraxia are those who make up a large percentage of those who end up in prison in later life, we owe it to them to provide a tailored education that takes account of their learning needs.
Two things strike me about this sort of debate.
1) It seems that society is very anxious to label people and classify them according to all sorts of minor behavioural characteristics or attributes. Thus we have ADD, OCD, learning disorders, dyspraxia, dyslexia etc each requiring special attention, care and consideration. And yet, society refuses to acknowledge the two most obvious classifications: sex and race!
2) There are some really thick people out there masquerading as sensible human beings. Ignore them. To your own self be true.
Nym, I do not deny their are genuine clinical cases which certainly fall outside the scope both of my experience and this post. And I do not claim that dyslexia (e.g.) is in the mind od the parents.
I do however have experience of teaching children from different countries and cultures and observed the damage that the fad for categorising children’s normal behaviour as subnormal or in need of treatment.
Sorry if you think I’m unhelpful, dismissive and narrow-minded – I’m surprised you haven’t witnessed the nonsense yourself.
PS I see you address Araminta in your comment – although she has not commented here.
Hello Pseu.
It is my comment, but never mind. I am afraid I am with Janus on this one, because, while there are undoubtedly some genuine cases of learning difficulties in schools, and in society at large, I think that the giving of labels, as if to accord to special status or importance, does nothing to solve these problems.
Most teachers are, if you scratch a little below the surface, deeply, deeply – no, profoundly, sceptical about special needs. Put yourself in our shoes; imagine restraining, sorry, teaching 32 barking year nine pupils on a wet Monday afternoon, all intent on swiping each other with empty sprite bottles, rulers and insistent on having their mobile phones out on their desks . What is the cause of their indiscipline? Take your pick from the following menu: sprite/sugar/ coke at lunchtime; lack of sleep due to x box/ facebook bullying in the witching hours; or perhaps just poor teaching in the school itself, or maybe the parents are preoccupied because they going through a rough patch and splitting up/finding new partners.
What I am trying to say is, there are huge behavioural and psychological problems/learning difficulties in the vast majority of schools; even those of leafy suburbia. It is as if educationalists and health professionals had got their heads together and come up with a list of fancy conditions to act as a panacea. But the reality is that this does nothing to alter the underlying rot and malaise Moreover, by caving in to the special needs brigade, we are giving pupils the impression that their rights as individuals surpercede those of the society in which they wish to live, which is a lie, because as Rousseau put it; man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.
Apologies to Ara for misdirecting my response to her and not to bleuebelle.
I take your points. I wonder, have you ever stood on the other side of the fence?
Janus you mention ‘short-term difficulties’ but the report states the problems were assessed over a lng peroid:
“Parents were asked to fill in a questionnaire in which both the level of snoring and apnoea were recorded in the first six or seven years of life, and contrasted with their own assessment of the child’s behaviour.”
The study is not looking at disturbed sleep from seasonal coughs and colds but chronic problems.
Well, I am a parent, so the answer is yes, very much so. But I would distinguish between that – a medical problem that poses a threat- and most of the conditions that I come across in schools.
It is a little disturbing, to me, how many of these dys- words seem to have been hijacked from the discipline of Speech Therapy to be bandied around with less than clinical accuracy as labels for a lazy or badly brought-up child. One might venture to suggest that the perpetrators are guilty of professional echolalia. 😀
Professional echolalia. 🙂
Echolalia – is that a Spanish entry for the Europops?