I completely agree, as someone who was diagnosed at about the same time in my life. It was one of the best and worst days in my life the first time I took medication: best because a mental fog had lifted for the first time ever, worst because how different would my life be if I'd been diagnosed sooner?

Fifteen years later, I am still stably medicated, and life is what I had always wanted it to be: productive and fulfilling. I hope anyone reading this does not let a stigma of medication bar them from talking to somebody about it if they've faced years of frustration over not being able to do what others seem to do easily: just getting shit done.

My “mindset” (if you can call it that) is that most people don’t get much experience tackling hard problems, at least up through school. In light of that, what I would “advocate” is that people should try to get practice working on problems at their current level of stamina/ability (which might be very low), and slowly work their way up, instead of beating themselves up when a problem much more difficult than what they were used to seemed like an impossible challenge.

Maybe you can elaborate about what “mindset” you were thinking of, and why it came close to breaking you? I suspect you were misunderstanding my intended message, and that the “mindset” you are imagining is pretty far from my own set of beliefs.

Note that before I was not advocating anything; only stating an observation that most people don’t get much practice tackling hard problems, and that people with or without ADHD can have difficulty tackling hard problems. Do you think that is inaccurate? It seems pretty uncontroversial to me. I know a lot of people who have difficulty with hard problems, and some of them definitely don’t have ADHD.

* * *

I am taking care of a 3.5 year old full time, so I’ll give you some relevant examples from that context:

If I try to read a book aloud which is much too hard for him (say a novel pitched at teenagers), he gets bored and wanders away. But his attention span, vocabulary, grammar, etc. are gradually improving, so the books he understands now (e.g. Pippi Longstocking, The Cricket in Times Square) are much more sophisticated than the books he could understand a year ago (e.g. Henry and Mudge, Frog and Toad), which are in turn much more sophisticated than the books he was interested in a year before that (e.g. Go Dog Go, The Very Hungry Caterpillar).

If we try to work on some 1-player logic puzzle games, the ones that say “age 7+” on the box are currently too difficult for him and he gets bored/frustrated and wants to do something else. The ones that say “age 5+” are pretty good, and he can do them with some external help. The ones that say “age 3+” are getting to be easy by now, and he can do them independently.

If we go out to practice balancing on a vehicle, a 2-wheeled scooter is now getting to be okay if we go carefully, but 6 months ago it was too difficult and therefore very frustrating. A year ago, he was just starting to figure out the (pedal-free) balance bike, and now he can zoom around on it. If I tried to get him to ride a skateboard I predict he would fall off and not want to try (heck, that’s probably what I would do if I tried to ride a skateboard).

One of my son’s friends has no experience with a balance bike, and is embarrassed to try in front of anyone, because my son (who has more than a year of practice) can zoom all around, whereas any kid just starting finds it to be a great challenge. But the same kid can swing across the monkey bars, something my son cannot, because that’s something that boy has practiced for a few months.

* * *

Activities like writing computer programs, playing music, writing essays, playing sports, cooking, etc. are similar: they require many challenging skills which must be slowly built up over the course of years of practice, and are very daunting for someone who is unprepared. The way to get better at these is to start at your current level and practice, in a playful and low-pressure environment, slowly improving until you can handle high-level challenges.

And the same is true of meta skills which apply to many domains like searching and reading academic literature in a field you are unfamiliar with, coming up with a few choices of high-level problem solving strategies and then picking one to apply, breaking the problem solving process down into smaller manageable chunks until you get down to a chunk small enough to just dive in, taking organized notes, trying many small examples when you don’t yet have a solid conceptual understanding, finding and tackling a simpler related problem instead, stopping occasionally while working to check if you’re making progress and if the current strategy still seems promising, recognizing that you are badly stuck and finding the right person to ask for help ...

I usually just lurk here but something in your comment made it impossible for me to ignore. I do not want to be rude but think you are behaving exactly like a pushy parent who would cause the sort of trauma OP is facing right now.

This constant push for a 3.5 year old to read books that clearly require more mental effort than is okay for his/her age, play 'logic' games that he/she can get no joy from are a huge red parenting flag. You might have good intentions but your relentless need for him to raise up to these arbitrary standards of yours that have been created without any regards for his/her happiness are going to put so much unsustainable pressure on the kid.

By forcing your kid to play with the games he can not understand or reading the books he doesn't like, you are just stealing his/her childhood. I can only hope that you realize this sooner than later.

I missed this before, as it was posted long after the original comment.

> pushy parent

This is funny. Other parents at the playground (back when playgrounds were open) are constantly telling me how unusually non-pushy I am (sometimes critically, sometimes admiringly). Example: “I’m glad to have you as a reference for how laid back a parent can be with kids still doing okay, so I won’t feel so bad when my immigrant inlaws give me trouble for being too lax with my kids.”

I admit I have been pushier than I would like recently when it comes to the kid running down the hallway at 1 AM (which causes complaints from the neighbors downstairs), shoving or hitting his 1-year-old brother (which makes me more anxious than it probably should), or wanting to dump yet another bunch of toys on a floor already covered by the previous two bunches of toys.

> books that clearly require more mental effort than is okay for his/her age

What are you talking about? We read those stories which the kid enjoys (sometimes over and over, at his insistence), and stop reading those which he does not.

If he finds the content of a book to be too over his head, too boring, too scary, ... then we set the book aside. (For example, recently William Steig’s Dominic was too scary, and St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince was too abstract.) We might try to return to those in a year when his tastes and abilities have changed, but at that point might decide to leave them aside for another year.

He is the one who most wants to spend a lot of time reading together. I just indulge that desire because I enjoy it too.

Why do you think listening to chapter books as a 3-year-old requires a “more than okay” level of mental effort?

> play 'logic' games that he/she can get no joy from

Huh? I bought a bunch of logic games because I personally enjoyed the first two I tried, for myself. Some of them are targeted at age 3+; others say age 8+ (and are enjoyable for adults). But those numbers are at least somewhat arbitrary, based on the age at which it would be appropriate to hand a not-otherwise-prepared child the puzzle with minimal additional direction/support, and leave them to figure it out for themselves.

The 3.5 year old really likes playing the puzzle games! They are fun and interesting. Some he likes to do mostly by himself. Some he likes to help me with. If the challenges get frustrating, we set those aside and do something else instead.

I promise you that we are not doing any puzzles which “he can not understand” or which he “can get no joy from”.

> relentless need for him to raise up to these arbitrary standards

There is no relentless need for anything, and no standard, arbitrary or otherwise. We just introduce a wide variety of tools, materials, and activities, and let him engage with them at his own pace.

> stealing his/her childhood

What do you consider to be a “not stolen” childhood? Parents leaving their kids entirely to their own devices and not engaging when the kids want to do things together? Parents leaving their kids in front of animated TV or iPad games for hours per day? Parents leaving kids with only a few toys/materials because they don’t want them to gain experience with a broad variety too fast? Whatever happens to be on offer from the nearest preschool?

Recently the 3.5 year old spends at least half of his time playing independently with whatever toys he feels like – his younger brother takes a lot of adult attention too – and unfortunately (due to Covid-19 shelter in place) we are stuck inside away from other people instead of visiting the playground for a few hours or walking around the neighborhood chatting with all of the nearby retail/restaurant staff, as we used to do before lockdown times.

It’s frustrating that we can’t get together with other kids of the same age too much right now. (I’m sure things are even harder for older kids; 3-year-olds are just starting to make friends and learning to play together with other kids, but for a 7- or 10-year-old being stuck away from friends must be really tough.)

* * *

With repeated practice and a little bit of help/guidance kids can learn all sorts of skills to a quite high level.

Witness the enjoyment and rapid improvement of Shinichi Suzuki’s young violin students or Mona Brookes’s young drawing students. These are ordinary children, given a little bit of structure and guidance, put in an environment where practicing a little bit every day or a few times a week is enjoyable, and then allowed to flourish for themselves.

It doesn’t take any draconian pressure, just enough adult time and attention to make a space for it.

Taking your example of your 3.5 year old's book reading attention and interest ...

What would you say if they were bored / distracted by everything you read to them, not just the difficult things?

That is a description of my 3.5 year old when he hasn’t had enough exercise for a day or two and is tired and/or hungry.

I haven’t spent an appreciable amount of time with a kid who is always completely uninterested in stories of any kind. But I can speculatively imagine a variety of possible causes for that: other distracting stimuli, malnutrition, exposure to toxins, disease, congenital brain abnormality, emotional abuse, ...

Do you have some particular kid in mind?

Or if this is an analogy to problem solving: if someone literally can’t manage to attempt any kind of problem no matter how trivial, then “easily give up when I face a hard problem” would not be an accurate description of the situation.