Reddit reviews Back to Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior Is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder

OP, thank you for making an optimistic post, it always pisses me off that whenever this happens someone comes and tries to tank it as if all the work we have to do for not tanking ourselves wasn’t hard enough, as if good days and good perspectives aren’t allowed. Scientific approaches in the psychiatric field are always changing, no one is doing studies to see if our disorder has a cure like with schizophrenia or ADHD or EDs, but I think that if they can make relevant changes, we also can... I’d recommend you to read Back to Normal and Dante’s Cure

I can't cite exact page numbers right now, but the book Back To Normal: Why Ordinary Childhood Behavior Is Mistaken for ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Autism Spectrum Disorder has some good information in the earlier chapters on the raised amounts of time committed to "academic" work in early school grades, and lowered opportunities for "play." Mostly kindergarten and first grade.

Please note that I am not using "self-discipline" and "behavior" interchangeably - I'm not saying that we have higher expectations for how kids will behave these days, at all. I think that we somewhat paradoxically have lower expectations for "behavior" (or at least higher tolerance for bad behavior) and higher expectations for "discipline" (by this I mean: ability to make oneself sit and listen for a given period of time as opposed to, say, more play-based learning; ability to get through something like full-day kindergarten with only one - relatively short - recess break, which is what my 5-year old stepson has and which was unheard of when I was a kid; ability to transition easily and quickly from one activity to another when told to; etc). It is possible to have a child be well-behaved but still have problems with the kind of discipline I am talking about in a strict school setting. And please note I'm not saying that all kids have trouble with the discipline required in our current school settings - but just that there is, say, a certain percentage of fidgety, distractable kids who struggle more than others who "drop off" the edge of what is considered normal or acceptable who would not have in the past.

As far as anecdotes from teachers, this isn't really the same, but I found my old elementary school music teacher on FB and asked her if I was just nostalgic for the past or if I was correct in remembering that we didn't generally get homework in kindergarten. She said that in our school we absolutely did not get homework in kindergarten and that she cannot imagine a kindergarten teacher being able to evaluate anything about her students from homework assignments except whose parents were willing to get on their cases how often. Which is how it is for my 5-year old stepson, who does get kindergarten homework. I mean, come on - he's 5. He isn't going to remember that there IS such a thing as homework unless we go and check and then do it with him. lol.