When our second son was in third grade, he was assigned a reading specialist, an angel named Ann. My husband and I met with her somewhat regularly, and the first time she gently told us our boy was “on task” about twenty percent of the time in the classroom.
We had experienced him coming home from school and trying to do his homework, but he just wasn’t interested and therefore couldn’t focus. So it became a painful and useless drill that we went through with him on a daily basis. My mother, a retired first grade teacher, spent an entire summer trying different ways to interest him in reading, to no avail. He loved listening to stories, but reading took too much continuous concentration.
It wasn’t as if he couldn’t concentrate at all. Saving up his allowance money to buy increasingly complex Lego sets, he would spread out in the living room and, with a little help from our two cats, was unmovable until the set was finished. (The directions for Legos are not in words, they’re in diagrams.)
So we were stumped. Clearly, not being able to read and comprehend words was a game changer for an adult, and not in a good way. He was falling farther and farther behind in school, since reading is key to understanding the subjects being taught there, and just, well, functioning in the world.
I’m a farmer. I stick with a project or task until the sun goes down, then I’m up at dawn to continue hacking away at it. My husband Larry, on the other hand, is lightning fast at doing what he loves (which includes anything to do with technology, aviation, or photography), and not so much with stuff that doesn’t interest him. He spent the final ten years of a twenty-eight year career in a major symphony orchestra almost never bringing his bassoon home to practice. (Too boring…) As a violinist with millions of notes to learn, I grumbled a little about this to myself.
We went to see a child psychiatrist, at Ann’s urging. That person told us the best way to deal with the so-called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) issue was with administration of a drug, specifically Ritalin. (To be clear, another disorder, ADHD, which includes a hyperactivity component, can also be treated with Central Nervous System stimulants like Ritalin. However, that was not what we were dealing with.) Larry balked. He hated this idea, and stuck to his belief that drugging a child is never the answer to any problem.
I agreed, but I also knew that allowing our child to grow up without a basic skill like reading would cripple him in the big world of Getting a Job and Living Happily Ever After. The fact that public schools hadn’t worked out a way to deal with children like our son other than prescribing drugs was not going to change. So we went back and forth, and at some point, the viability of our relationship, when we had two such disparate views on this critical juncture in our son’s life, entered the picture.
We compromised, and went with trying Ritalin to see what happened.
The first day our son took Ritalin, he came home and did his homework. Not only that, but he began to listen with real interest in what I had to say. My relief was accompanied by a wave of guilt - what have I done to my little boy to get his attention? It took about three years for him to catch up to all the things he had been missing in school, but fortunately his teachers were all aware of the history and helped get him current.
We had done a fair amount of research while going through this episode, and knew about the speculation that since humans came from hunter-gatherer societies initially, before turning to farming, that that could be an explanation for different brain function today. These two activities use the human brain in dramatically different ways, and it makes sense that we all have a little of both in our genes, or sometimes more of one than another. Since Larry, a hunter by nature, married me, a farmer, it also made sense that we’d have a mixture in our progeny.
Our son grew up and went to college in Boston, then Italy for a masters degree in business development, learned Italian, moved to Los Angeles, got married and has a son of his own, works for a major streaming company, and is, by all appearances, living his happily ever after after all. He stopped taking CNS drugs after college.
A note about Ann, the reading specialist who guided us out of our quandary with grace, love, empathy and care. She had lost her own little boy at age five from a bowel obstruction. She never forgave herself for her son’s death, and she succumbed to cancer a few years after she had helped us with our son.
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