Nice News for Parents of the Tom Sawyers of the World
When Mark Twain was writing his masterpieces, the term attention deficit disorder (ADD) did not exist. Nevertheless, his Tom Sawyer creation was an ideal candidate for this category. And the difficulties he forced his Aunt Polly to deal with are much like those that today's parents confront.
Happily, parents can now breathe a well-earned sigh of relief. For years, the focus has been on the dire outcomes that loom in these kids' future. The typical report stressed how adolescence was likely to bring delinquency, drugs, alcohol and other woes. But the results of a recently completed three year study at Columbia University show that most children treated for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder improve greatly within a few years.
The research conducted on almost 500 children was published in the August issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
And the news gets better, particularly for families that are concerned about using medication. About a year into the program, the kids given medication, with or without behavior management, were doing better than those who got just therapy. By the end of the study, though, the advantage of taking medication disappeared and the improvement covered all groups--medicated and unmedicated..
The research also yielded some insights about the reasons for the previous dire predictions. It did find that the children overall were more likely than the average child to break laws and take drugs by early adolescence. But the ones who get into trouble tended to be children with other mental disorders, not just ADHD.
A behavioral pediatrician Lawrence Diller, author of The Last Normal Child, summed up the good news when he said, "It looks like the Tom Sawyers we see out in the community have a much better prognosis."
