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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

As a June baby in a state with a July cut off, I was always nearly a year younger than the majority of the class. It caused me no end of difficulty in school, to the point I loathed school, barely graduated high school with a 2.0 GPA and more than the legal limit of skipped days, diagnosed with ADD, and went straight to career in the valley. It was only when I was close to 30 that I sort of realized I actually was smart and could do well in school, and quit my lucrative career to get highest honors at UIUC CS- a very difficult program where graduating with C’s was an achievement - but I pulled off a 4.0 (A+ at UIUC adds nothing to the GPA). When I had my daughter, born in late May, I held her back a year in preschool and put her in a private school that mixes multiple years in the same differentiated class. She is so happy in school, and I just hope that she doesn’t have to experience the years of misery and failure I experienced that led to an adult life filled with anxiety that I’ve only recently conquered. Public school in the US is not structured in a way that is adaptable to the various states of human maturation you see in kids that all mature in different ways at different rates. It’s factory education, and if you’re not a widget of the right shape it cuts you up.

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I have the feeling that for me it's the exact opposite. Born end of June, cutoff is the June the 30th, but my parents insisted to to let me start a year later. This lead to me being up to a year older than anyone else. School stuff was always too easy for me (I might be also a bit smarter than the mean, but who knows?), so I never needed to really work for school and when the topics came where rote memorization and repetition helps I always fell a bit back. To this day I never really memorized the multiplication tables for example. Ask me what 7*8 is and I have to do math in my head. And this is only the most basic example.

Because I never really pushed training the binomial formulas I later run out of time when I had to solve more complex formulas where having those ingrained helps "finding the shortcuts" instead of "brute force".

We have a saying, that I "never learned how to learn". But it may also be that I suffer from undiagnosed ADHD (on top of that).

Very, very similar to my experience. I'm now approaching my mid-30s and under investigation with my therapist for ADHD.

School was always a breeze, I would get hyperfocused during classes paying attention to instructors and content but could never, ever do homework. Any kind of school work outside of school hours was a struggle. Still managed to be always on top of my classes.

I never actually learned how to learn, studied statistics in university and was hit by a brick wall on how to actually learn things which depended on more than just passively absorbing content...

To this day I don't believe I have a decent strategy for learning, it's a very scattered approach where I dunk into the subject from multiple angles and slowly build a mental model based on the patterns I see repeating from multiple sources. I'll start with an introductory book to gather an overview of the subject and then will jump in between other books and more advanced sections to see earlier concepts already applied and then backtrack to the gaps I see missing in my knowledge.

Somehow this way of learning is much more motivating to me than simply parsing through a linear approach of theory building. Whenever I try to go front-to-back with a textbook I get terribly unfocused.

You don’t really sound like someone with ADHD to me. You sound like someone who is smart and gets bored with easy tasks. I’ve worked with kids with clinical ADHD and it is very obvious to everyone involved.

HN (and probably the Bay Area which usually is reflected here) has become a weird echo chamber of nerds all claiming they think they have ADHD. When really, it’s that smart people get bored very easily. And most of what we do in our jobs are boring. Of course, stimulants help with this - why do you think we all drink so much coffee. Prescription stims are even better and are well tolerated. The right western doc will happily diagnose and prescribe for ADHD regardless of the severity.

I know ADHD is a spectrum, but I believe that diagnosis is only really warranted for those truly clinical - people who literally cannot hold any job at all and would be homeless otherwise. I guess there is the argument we should all just be allowed to take whatever drug we want and there is certainly merit to that.

Even the most productive coders, writers, musicians etc talk about their struggles to stay focused. It takes grit and intense self discipline to sit for 8 hrs doing work that isn’t immediately satisfying. Most people can’t do this, it’s not abnormal. People goof off at work all the time in most jobs, because they can’t hold their attention for so long.

I don't live in the Bay Area, I'm not American, I'm not going through this investigation to get medicated, I'm actively avoiding pursuing this path due to the impact that getting medicated with Aderall/Ritalin/etc. had on close friends.

I have not yet been diagnosed with it but my therapist felt it was important after almost 3 years of therapy to check it. I believe my therapist has a bit more of insight into my mental health (and mental health in general) than a random HN comment.

I appreciate your point of view but feel it can come off wrong, I have multiple signs that warranted from my therapist a deeper investigation and I will trust them.

Again, I'm not looking into getting medicated to focus, I don't want to be constantly on speed to function.

I feel like your kind of comment is exactly what made me not ever think about this. I can hold a job, I could do well in school (but not in university, at all), it's not because others might have it much worse than I do that I'm not worth to be checked on. You have no idea about the state of my mental health and struggles to be able to judge if I'm just smart and bored or if there is something else underlying it all.

I just bring this up because I feel your comment comes from a good place of caring but it's ultimately unhelpful and, depending to who else you could have directed this comment, could be actively harmful.

Okay, sorry, I made some assumptions that were wrong. I think if your therapist is recommending it, it is definitely worth looking into it further and I hope you can find some treatment that works.

Me personally, being on HN, I started to believe I too had ADHD reading peoples' stories on here. After a lot of therapy, and even going for an ADHD evaluation myself (a huge pain in the NHS), I realized it was more a result of burn out and depression. Thankfully, with a lot of therapy (almost a year now), I am slowly regaining my focus, and even improving my ability to deal with boring tasks (which I had convinced myself, based on stories on the internet about adult ADHD, that I could never do).

If I had been in the US, I would have self referred to a psychiatrist, gotten an ADHD diagnosis, and been on meds by now. Problem solved? I don't think so, I never would have treated the fundamental psychological issues that actually were causing the problem. But I would have gotten ADHD diagnosed and think there was something wrong with my brain forever. I feel this must happen a lot in the US. Adult ADHD is actually very rare - it is very hard to go unnoticed as a child with ADHD.

I would strongly suggest anyone reading HN stories about adult ADHD first to see a psychologist and do talk therapy first. Also, make sure to get a second opinion on a diagnosis like adult ADHD.

Thankfully, I don't feel like I am "on speed" at the dose I take. The goal was to increase the levels of neurotransmitters I'm not good at producing/not sensitive enough to while stopping short of noticeable stimulation. I honestly don't want to feel high or like I'm "tweaking out" because that's just as distracting.

But the inability to maintain focus held me back for many, many years as my parents did not believe ADHD was a "thing". I didn't get medicated until I was in my 30s and it has made a world of difference. It's not a panacea and I still have my own tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. But it's more like wearing glasses instead of having to squint for my entire life. Sure, I'd survive without it, but it's a tool to somewhat make up for a biological shortcoming versus the accepted norm.

I wish you luck in your pursuit of self improvement and I hope you discover effective ways to get closer to where you want to be. It's a good thing to explore and learn about for sure.

I find that hearing people talk about their experiences with ADHD really damaged my initial outlook on the disorder. I have it too, and to be honest, I kind of expected a panacea by how people -- even professionals -- talk about treatment.

According to various sources, ADHD is the single most treatable psychiatric condition. But I guess what I expected from treatment, and what technically constitutes as treatment were misaligned.

> a weird echo chamber of nerds all claiming they think they have ADHD

autistics tend to do that? :)

I was given ritalin as an adult to see if I had ADHD. The test was simple, take it, do you feel you concentrate/focus better? if not, you don't have it.

> I don't want to be constantly on speed to function.

As someone with ADHD that was professionally diagnosed on multiple occasions, I would say to keep this up if you can.

If you can find something that works, then keep at it. I chose the medication route many years ago, and it's been rather... bittersweet to say the least. But that is just my experience, and I believe I am somewhat of an outlier -- at least with the information I currently have.

Thankfully there are also other drugs being researched for people who cannot tolerate some drugs well - I believe they are looking at Fascoracetam in Japan for children.

I also do really believe we should be meditating more or something similar - when I try to read a novel these days (even one I am interested in) I find it is significantly more difficult to do it than it was when I was much younger and had generally lower reading comprehension.

There are also many types of ADHD and also severity - a spectrum like you say. Probably everyone with it do not need major medication. But it is still probably valuable to diagnose everyone who is so they can properly develop habits to aid it.

The biggest thing I ask people about is the executive function aspect. Are you simply getting distracted because you are bored or do you also find you have tasks you legitimately WANT to do but for some reason your executive function does not allow you do it. That seems to be (as a lay person) the biggest tell for someone who actually has ADHD.

Totally agree with all of that!

I’m nearly fifty and got diagnosed with ADHD about five years ago.

I got expelled from school at 15 for just never showing up. Despite being one of the smartest kids in school, I would do so well I a new class and then it would tank badly.

I’ve never held a job for more than 18 months.

I’ve had the benefit of being a well spoken good looking white man that interviews like a god and is very good at writing a resume, plus I had good people in my corner giving me excellent references. In a booming job market, getting work was easy enough.

But my life was going off the rails. Depression. Risk taking behaviour. Anti social issues and so on.

Saw a GP for serious cyclical depression issues. I was self medicating with caffeine and flu meds.

She said have you considered you might have ADHD?

I hadn’t considered it all.

Got referred to a specialist. He said it’s very hard to get diagnosed with ADHD later in life.

90 minutes later after my life history we started a trial on Ritalin!

Overall - ADHD is a curse. It’s not a super power. And Ritalin, Adderall etc… are not miracles.

I could write a book on my experiences….

I think I got lucky. Late July with a school that (at the time) had a Sept 1 cutoff. There was only one person younger than me until middle school.

My kindergarten teacher, who was also a family friend, requested I do it again because I wasn't mature enough. And she was right, honestly; I'd fight against nap time, and remember no end to problems in first grade with sitting still.

However, while maturity played a roll, the problem was I was bored. I went in to kindergarten being able to add, subtract and read, and had already started doing multiplication with my mom (herself a high school teacher). Another year in kindergarten would've been torture for me. Thankfully I had an amazing first grade teacher who recognised the problem. Instead of insisting on ADHD, she gave me more challenging stuff and let me work on my own. She never called on me to read aloud, because she gave me other books to read behind the class's book. This lasted until my 4th grade year, where one of my teachers didn't like it. Thankfully by then I was mature enough to recognise what I needed to do, etc.

So really, I wonder how much of this is a mixture between multiple things and how many times kids get given ADHD diagnoses when what they really need is differentiated education. Granted, this is difficult; I was a math/science secondary school teacher (and I think it's even harder for elementary school teachers, for various reasons ranging from standards to their own competency in the subjects they teach), and it was almost impossible at times.

That said, maybe I do have ADHD. I went on an amphetamine for weight loss at one point, and there were times I noticed I could focus longer and easier. But I've always had a tendency to get bored of something easily, and I'm sure the Internet hasn't made it any better. So I avoid getting tested as it doesn't impact work or study or anything for me (anymore than the Internet itself does)

Interestingly my experience is a mix of your and the parent comment.

I'm born towards the end of the year, and where I'm from (Afroeurasia) there isn't a strict year based cutoff. So I had Jan-born peers almost 2 years older, and folks a year younger.

Fortunately I was always fairly bright despite probably spending a solid 30% of my time daydreaming. I could catch up quickly... until it started getting harder in high school. Uni and grad school hit me, and I finally got dx'ed some time back (still in grad school).

I think I have been lucky that in school, most teachers were fairly nice intelligent people, and I was always the good, quiet kid who'd ask good questions (because I'm interested in everything). Having a good structure at home also majorly helped.

But in retrospect? Anybody spending hours every day daydreaming... yeah, screen them for ADHD, that was kinda obvious.

That’s why I choose a school for my daughter that differentiates in the class. That means they adapt material per student by their abilities across subjects. My daughter is extraordinarily advanced in reading and math, but she is in a class of kids around her age but the material is adapted to her ability individually. The age component for me is about maturity in a social context.

I was “diagnosed” with ADD and was put on ritalin which had 0 affect on me. Wasn’t until later in life I realised I didn’t have ADD I just wasn’t enjoying parts of school.

Put me in physics class, technical drawing, cooking, math, I focused and did really well. Every other class was boring and non stimulating and so I acted up.

ADD is over diagnosed.

> Put me in physics class, technical drawing, cooking, math, I focused and did really well. Every other class was boring and non stimulating and so I acted up.

Being able to focus (sometimes to self-destructive levels) on things we enjoy are as much a part of ADD as being chronically unable to focus on things we find boring.

The last line is logically ambiguous. In Europe, I believe in 2019, they found two effects: a significant _underdiagnosis_, offset by a tiny over diagnosis; now you could argue phones and screens artificially raise the genetic baseline, or that America is inherently different. But I will tell you ADHD meds calm me down, or when measured with a heart strap monitor over a full day fairly meaningfully lower my heart rate.

It’s perhaps a meme now that adhd is over diagnosed, but I’d guess the majority is pill seeking individuals looking to compete at school or at work and less false positive diagnoses such as yours.

Net net you seem to have solved it fairly quickly so at least that’s good: even when you get the diagnosis wrong if you can backtrack without significant cost then maybe it’s not absolutely horrible.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying it doesn’t exist or the meds are pointless. Absolutely there are people with ADHD and meds work for them.

But sometimes I think difficult children are automatically labeled ADHD and the solution is drugs without trying to find the cause.

I reminded of this Ted talk https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_c...

In my experience it was the opposite - there were almost no kids labeled ADHD. Where did you live that everyone was labelled ADHD?

Most people blamed the behaviour of difficult children on their difficult parents.

That being said there are a lot of people who are purposely seeking ADHD meds who know they are not ADHD just to get drugs. Those people are kind of ruining it for everyone else. They are usually pretty easy to spot though

For people with ADHD though, the drugs are the cure. Stimulants are a miracle drug for those lacking executive function.

> Put me in physics class, technical drawing, cooking, math, I focused and did really well. Every other class was boring and non stimulating and so I acted up.

I’m curious what you think ADD is, since what you describe here is practically textbook symptoms.

Diagnosing every child who is bored and not paying attention with ADD and putting them on drugs is trying to shift blame from teachers and the education system to kids.

I didn’t say ADD/ADHD don’t exist. I said it’s over diagnosed. We just like to label kids and tell them they are broken and needs drugs when in reality most kids are bored of the sterile environment of learning with the dumbed down education system that teachers are forced to adhere to because acknowledging that not all kids learn the same way as other kids is too hard.

> I said it’s over diagnosed.

What makes you believe that? I hear people spout this all the time, but it's an irrational belief to me. The condition is still diagnosed via interviews, pseudoscientific psychometrics, and other arbitrary and vague heuristic. There are still no biological markers than can be used to diagnose the condition. At least, not with a high level availability nor a price point that would justify the mainstream usage of such methods.

Thus, if we have no clear and definitive way to know if someone has the condition, then, if you will forgive my poor analogy, it's all just Schrodinger's ADHD -- both over diagnosed and under diagnosed at the same time.

What is quite clear is that a subgroup of the population suffers greater in some areas than others, and we kind of found something that helps those people. I find that much more important than gatekeeping people who would benefit from treatment.

Funny you make broad sweeping conclusions based on your single experience.

Could also just be you have a mild form of ADHD and you do not need medication at all and Physics and similar is the thing you like to hyper focus on. For some people the ADHD is a huge gift if the thing their brain happens to want to latch onto is also something they enjoy and/or can make a career out of.

Also do we really want to be shifting blame onto teachers at this point? They are overworked and already taking enough shit from parents as it is. And the ones I know and have talked to are constantly finding new and creative ways to get kids interested in their teaching

> Funny you make broad sweeping conclusions based on your single experience.

Funny you make a broad and sweeping conclusion based on one single message posted on a forum.

> Also do we really want to be shifting blame onto teachers at this point?

Not just teachers. The education system as a whole. You know with math, there's often multiple ways to achieve the same answer. I failed math one year because even tho I showed the work to get to the solution and it was a completely valid method with a correct solution, I got 0 because I did not do it the textbook way. Teachers are not allowed to teach math any other way than what the department of education dictates. Math can be quite fun and engaging, but you know, better to keep kids dumb and medicated than helping them.

Oh and before you jump to conclusions and claim this is one single experience. It's not a single experience.

> Diagnosing every child who is bored and not paying attention with ADD and putting them on drugs is trying to shift blame from teachers and the education system to kids.

No, it's trying to see if they have a condition which is readily and effectively treated through medication. I have ADHD, and my daughter has ADHD, so I've been through this a few times with the docs. The _gold standard_ for determining if a patient has ADHD is treatment with stimulants. There are assessment surveys they have you fill out and such, but there's tons of other underlying issues which can cause similar symptoms and lead to false positives. The best, easiest, most reliable way to tell if someone really has ADHD is to give them Adderall and see what happens.

My psychiatrist says that he has done this even with patients who end up getting diagnosed with other issues like bipolar. Why? Because despite being a scheduled drug, stimulants are incredibly safe at pharmaceutical doses, without any serious side effects. It's harmless to try, and if it doesn't work you move on to try something else.

Btw what studies have been done have shown that if anything ADHD is under diagnosed, and severely so in the case of girls. A lot of people who have had other underlying issues have initially been misdiagnosed as ADHD, but this is not the same thing as general over diagnosing, and generally is because ADHD must be first considered and ruled out before moving on to conditions which require the use of more serious drugs.

> stimulants are incredibly safe at pharmaceutical doses

Wow no wonder america has such a drug problem…

Caffeine is a stimulant drug used all over the world. First-line stimulants used for ADHD are in a similar class. They work quickly and the side effects are quickly apparent. Stopping them isn't a risk to your health. Overdosing to the point of severe injury is difficult.

Over-the-counter pain medications are more far more dangerous in all categories: allergies, overdose, effects of long-term use, etc.

Correlation does not equal causation.

Stimulants are one of the safest medications used. There is plenty of data to support this.

> ADD is over diagnosed.

You concluded this just based on your single experience?

It could be wrongly diagnosed for many people and still be under diagnosed overall.

It had zero affect on you 15 years ago. Is α > 0.05 comment on ADD in thread on ADHD diagnoses (2018) considered flame bait?

How does this article's findings correlate in countries with other cut offs?

Like in Norway, everyone born the same year go to school together, even though the school starts in September. (Which confused me a lot when reading Harry Potter as a kid, as some dates there didn't "add up"). We segregate sports teams that way as well, making it often better to be a jan/feb kid, as you're always the biggest/strongest, and thus get the extra attention, training opportunities etc, so a bias towards those birthdays in our sports.

Same in Poland.

There is also a strange statistics with baby borns in early January and late December. There is a high spike of births in early days of January and a strange hole in births in the last days of December.

My daughter is usually the youngest kid in class (born middle December - here we put babys born in the same year in the same class) and usually has trouble because she is not as developed as kids born 11 months earlier - this difference will be less noticeable later in life, but know when she is 6 years old it is a bit sad.

I wonder if there is delayed reporting by some people/hospitals to get a better “year”.

I knew someone who came to the US as part of the Vietnamese boat people and his parents chopped a year or two off his age so he could start in kindergarten (and he didn’t know his actual birth year 30+ years later).

> How does this article's findings correlate in countries with other cut offs?

The result appears to be consistent across countries with different cutoff dates.

For example, British Columbia with a December 31 cutoff date.

https://www.cmaj.ca/content/184/7/755

That’s also how New York City does things for what it’s worth.

> It’s factory education, and if you’re not a widget of the right shape it cuts you up.

That's a fitting description that matches a factoid I read about mandatory education early days: the goal was to have workers who could read and count to operate industrial machinery.

it was also meant, like the army and later tv, to create a uniform national culture and erode local communities in favor of the newborn unnatural countries.

It’s even worse than that. John Taylor Gatto has written extensively on the problems with government schools.

I have a November birthday and started school at four during the last year the "at-least five by September cut-off" was implemented. I generally felt like everyone was way ahead of me for most of my school years. I was never diagnosed with ADD, but I never tried to find out either - I certainly wouldn't be surprised. I did alright in school, but I think that was because I studied extra hard because I always felt so far behind. I can't imagine that will work for everyone.

I appreciate your post. With a little one who is about to turn three, I've been thinking about school and the affects of going too early a lot lately. I worry about holding him back in case he'd end up bored and unchallenged. I've seen quite a few really smart people make some bad turns due to boredom. But, of course, I wouldn't want my kid to spend their life chasing all the "smarter" people either. That life has not done well for my self-esteem. Regardless, mixing multiple years in the same class sounds like an excellent way forward.

OTOH, I was born several months after you so I must have been the youngest in my grade, my birthday was usually after the first day of school. My parents might have even fabricated by age for all I know. My best friend in highschool was almost an entire year older than me. It didn't bother me in the least. I didn't even noticed it until I was in highschool. This caused me ZERO difficulties.

My cousin was born about a month after me and he was in a younger grade than me. We grew up together and I always felt bad for him that he couldn't get highschool over with a year sooner like me. He was jealous of me. He also got into a ton of criminal behavior and has been in and out of jail for the past 20+ years, so I could easily say that was caused by the trauma of him being a year back from me in school. Who knows.

What were your difficulties? As the youngest in both elementary school and high school (almost a whole year of difference to the oldest), I had no struggles specific to my age. In elementary school and early highschool I overperformed and in later high school I performed averagely.

Do you think there's something about the precise age (to within a few months) that a child begins school that drives this bias in diagnosis? Or would we have the same problem with a hard cutoff date, even if all kids started school an entire year later? Or is it largely a matter of how much development a child undergoes even in 1 month at such an age (eg, a combination of factors)?

I guess I ask because there will always have to be a cutoff, even if it's a soft cutoff.

As a non-parent, the best solution I can see is to give the parents the knowledge and freedom to make the choice, and to add this data to perhaps mitigate over-diagnosis (and any attached stigma).

Of course, as I write this out, it occurs to me how much of a burden on parents an extra year without school could be

>I guess I ask because there will always have to be a cutoff, even if it's a soft cutoff.

We could ditch the "academic year" idea entirely and just have kids join the classes when they are ready for them and not force a cohort to all have to learn and progress at exactly the same rate (one which, statistically, is either too slow or too fast for essentially every student).

I don't understand how that would work and solves the "I am almost a year older or younger than others".

You can teach a classroom with children from several years in it. Children then do the work that is at their level, whatever level that happens to be.

I don't think it's as easy as that. Planning and managing different lessons for the same time slot is way harder than planning and managing one lesson for the same time slot. The more kids in the room, the harder it gets.

the problem seems to be the difference between the oldest and the youngest kid in a class. OP had problems through his school life as they were always the youngest. so starting the same process a year later doesn't seem to help.

what would help is an adaption of the montessori model where an age range of three years is in a class, and the expectation of all kids behaving the same naturally disappears.

doing that at least in kindergarten will at least avoid a mistaken diagnosis for ADHD. but my hope is that montessori kids will also fare better in a regular school because they learned to be more independent.

Really inspiring story. Why did you pursue school so late in your career? Just to prove to yourself that you could do it?

Nice work, that program is no joke.

What changed at 30?

> I held her back a year in preschool

This (or backing up a year any year) might have helped you too.

> and put her in a private school that mixes multiple years in the same differentiated class.

This might backfire, for the same reason that you had trouble -- differentiation is difficult to do in practice. And your childhoold school might have been less differentiable than a modern public school, which has the benefit of computerized material and automated adaptive tests.

Of course, if the private school solves it by having a far lower student:teacher ratio, then of course that's better than a public school, all else equal.

Another thing parents can do is, instead of switching to private school, put that money toward hiring PTA-sponsored assistant-teachers in the classrooms.

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