ADHD Poor is Not The Same as ADHD Rich
Sometimes I need to take a step back and consider where I'd be if I was still poor
I have two uncles on my mom’s side. One died driving his car into a pole while high on pain killers. The other is technically alive, but after decades of meth use and being in and out of prison is barely there. I haven’t seen him in years, but the last time I ‘talked’ to him, he couldn’t string together a complete sentence.
My mom has diagnosed ADHD.1 She’s also an incredible badass. She lifted herself out of poverty by joining the military at a time when that was definitely not something women did. She rose to an officer rank and became a drill sergeant even though not all men would follow her instructions, because she was a woman and they weren’t raised to respect women in those roles. She raised us a single mom after my dad’s mental illness and hoarding problems got really bad. I suppose it’s not fair to say we were poor exactly, but the shadow of poverty - and the feeling of shame because of the poverty of everyone in our extended family - was always there. But she is absolutely the reason I consider myself middle class today.
I see a lot of how having ADHD helped her in life - she was able to pivot constantly to survive and navigate a society that didn’t necessarily want her to succeed in the ways that she did. She was interested in lots of things and was able to turn that into a successful career, and ultimately get a doctorate (which she was able to complete once she was on ADHD medication).
However, I look at my uncles, raised in the same class level she was, and know their (likely, given our family trends) ADHD was a liability for them. The ADHD didn’t necessarily destroy their lives, but being poor with ADHD did.
ADHD and Middle Class Values
These days you are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD if you are poor, particularly if you have an inherited family history.2
When my uncles were children, ADHD barely existed as a diagnosis and certainly there weren’t any treatments for it. There was simply ‘bad apples’ and troublemakers.
Of course, poor kids are just more likely to get in trouble in school (and everywhere), not necessarily because they are poor or more badly behaved but because rich kids often get a pass on the same behaviors. But if you have a disability that means you’re more obvious about things that get you into trouble - you’re impulsive, disruptive in class, etc. - and you are poor, and maybe your family life isn’t so great, well, get used to being sent to the principal’s office, buddy.
Here’s what ChatGPT says are middle-class values:
Hard work and self-reliance
Education
Homeownership and Financial Stability
Respect for Law and Order
Delayed Gratification
Nuclear Family and Traditional Roles
Civic Responsibility
Moral Responsibility and Integrity
Hoo boy, it’s as if those values were explicitly crafted to make it harder for ADHD folks to live ‘middle class values’ in a highly visible way. The central theme for many of these is stability, restraint, and long-term thinking, planning, and investing, all of which require a fairly high degree of executive function. Not that any of these things are bad, or that people with ADHD cannot live by these values (I now live the most educated cookie-cutter suburban picket-fence life you can imagine, to my unending surprise). But simply that if you are poor, and your family is not already perceived as having these values, and you’re a child with ADHD, the adults around you may be unlikely to present opportunities to you for social mobility and to easily move into middle-class opportunities. And, if you’re a boy in this situation, your behavior might be seen as dangerous or criminal, even when you’re just a kid with a different kind of brain.
Now, having ADHD can make you very rich and successful. ADHD folks are often creative and relentless. Many founders/CEOs of major companies and professional athletes have ADHD. However, generally speaking, most of those folks came from middle class families. They may have gotten in trouble a lot, but their existing middle class safety net meant that they were likely given second chances, instead of hopping on the pipeline from detention to juvenile hall to prison.3 And maybe in prison, someone gives you something that calms your brain down for the first time in your life. And maybe that something is meth.4
Is all of this inevitable? Of course not. But sometimes when I’m writing about the stuff that helps me as a middle-class mom who is really just trying to keep up with middle-class expectations, I think about how ridiculous it is. The reason I need my kitchen clean, is, to a certain extent, fueled by nightmare memories about roach-infested apartment buildings. But optimizing my cooking, cleaning, laundry, and organization in life sometimes feels so very dumb and unimportant when considering that these concerns only matter to me because I’m not worried about being evicted tomorrow. Or the rule I often see in minimalist / decluttering guides that say something like, “If you can buy it for less than $20 in less than 20 mins get rid of it”.
If you have 100 things that you could replace for less than $20, but don’t have 20 spare dollars let alone $2000 to replace all of those 100 things if it turns out you actually need them, minimalism isn’t a strategy you might feel you can implement lightly.
Tiny Step: More Play in School
OK so what is my point? I am honestly not sure.
I guess what it boils down to is that yes, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to optimize my messy ADHD life in accordance with middle-class values that are very hard to live up to (for everyone, not just ADHD folks, and I think that’s by design).
However, I am also aware that there are larger structures and expectations that need to change. I myself have told my daughter about the impressive examples of entrepreneurs and athletes who have ADHD and found a way to be wildly successful in a world that isn’t always easy on them, with the subtext being that if they achieved their dreams.
But what about if you are having trouble finding that path? What if you aren’t being given a second chance, because you’re poor with ADHD and all the messages you are getting are that you should really just go away because you’re bothering everyone?
I recently had an epiphany that sometimes my daughter acts out in annoying or frustrating ways because it hasn’t occurred to her to tell us in words what is she is feeling. For example, she’ll drag her way to some event and complain she has no energy and act like walking is causing her deep physical and emotional distress. Once we get there, she’s fine. I finally was like, hey, when you act that way, what are you trying to tell us? It turns out she knew there was a group of girls at the event that has been mean to her in the past. What she was feeling was anxiety and dread. But it never even occurred to her to express her fears verbally. Some unconscious part of her was like, “just stumble and complain the entire way there, and maybe we’ll be safe and not have to interact with mean girls.” She is 9 and this is definitely a skill she should already have learned.
While ADHD is something you have your whole life, in my non-expert observation, most issues are skill deficits. Deficits with self-awareness and self-regulation. Deficits in communication skills. These deficits aren’t destiny. They can be taught. All it took was asking, hey, what are you trying to tell us? to start down the path of learning a skill to communicate your feelings through words instead of annoying behaviors. Has she learned that skill perfectly? No. But can she? Absolutely yes! It will take patience and time. For an overwhelmed neurodivergent kid “I hate you/this/everything and I’m going to fight you anyway I can” is sometimes a much more accessible response than clear communication of their specific needs. But it can be worked on.
My fear here though is that poor kids like my mom’s brothers never get these opportunities to learn these skills. Because why bother? They are just troublemakers from a whole family of troublemakers. They have ADHD and oh man you should just see the parents (a real comment overheard other adults say when I was a kid, describing a kid from a poor family with presumably unkempt or otherwise non-middle-class looking parents).
I hesitate to end this here. I’m not sure what the solution is (other than obviously having a much more robust safety net for everyone, which is not a super popular argument in the US at the moment, for some reason).
But here’s one possibly low-cost intervention that most of us could advocate for with our local school board: more free time for kids to play in school, less sitting still/formal instruction time. I realize teachers are so constrained by rules around teaching time and learning outcomes and testing, and I’m hoping the tides are turning away from all of those constraints. Perhaps one way to encourage this is to follow the evidence that shows that more free time, play, outdoor time and exercise puts your brain into a learning mode and results in fewer disciplinary issues5. This could be a small step toward interrupting the school discipline > prison and/or addiction pipeline for neurodivergent (as well as neurotypical) kids in the next generation.
Are there other obvious things like this that we could be doing to interrupt this cycle? If so please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!
Diagnosed in her 40s after my older brother was diagnosed and she was working on her Ph.D.
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.12775
Neurodivergent people are more likely to be imprisoned. There is evidence that at least 25% of prison inmates have ADHD, and at least 50% have dyslexia. https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/default/files/PSJ%20272%2C%20Neurodivergence.pdf
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ijamh-2015-5007/html
https://nces.ed.gov/learn/blog/prioritizing-play-importance-play-based-learning-early-education