A colleague of mine at work has a grandson diagnosed with child attention deficit disorder. When I talked to her about it, I wondered how you could tell whether it was ADD or ‘just difficult or slow’. It is particularly difficult to tell with boys up to the age of about 16. Where do you draw the line? My own grandmother was a primary school Head teacher for many years and she used to say that boys did not develop intellectually as quickly as girls.
My interest raised, I decided to investigate further. It appears that there are three stages in normal development. The first stage can be seen in babies when they become focused on one thing for a period of time and ignore everything else. A child whose development stops at this stage might have a tendency towards autism.
The second stage is when a toddler is constantly finding different things of interest but never able to concentrate on one thing for very long. A child who is stuck at this stage of development might be diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder.
It seems that at the third stage, a child develops the ability to focus their interest for longer periods and to shift their...