A new study shows that children with ADHD are almost four times as likely as others to be bullies. But in a weird twist, the children with ADHD symptoms were also almost 10 times as likely as others to have been regular TARGETS of bullies prior to the onset of those symptoms, according to a report in the February issue of the journal of Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology.
Now, before you start worrying about your child being a bully because he’s dealing with ADHD, the study did offer some interesting insights.
The study followed 577 children — the entire population of fourth graders from a municipality near Stockholm, Sweden — for a year. During this time the researchers met with parents, teachers and children to determine which kids were likely to have ADHD. Children showing signs of the disorder were then seen by a child neurologist for diagnosis. The researchers also asked the kids about bullying.
“The results underscore the importance of observing how kids with ADHD symptoms interact with their peers,” says study co-author Dr. Anders Hjern, a professor in pediatric epidemiology at the University of Uppsala in Stockholm. “These kids might be making life miserable for their fellow students. Or it might turn out that the attention problems they’re exhibiting could be related to the stress of being bullied.”
Agreeing with Dr Hjern, William Pollack, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School said: ”You can’t learn if you’re being bullied, if every day you’re frightened of how you’re going to be treated. As for the bullies, they often need help with other issues. It’s not uncommon, for instance, to find that the aggressor is acting out because he’s depressed. And often, the kids who are doing the bullying have been bullied themselves”, he adds.
Unfortunately, whilst treating the inability to focus in school, the drugs won’t necessary curb the bullying behavior as the ADHD drugs do not necessarily treat aggressive behaviors. But the upside is that this new study could help parents and teachers identify children at risk for becoming bullies, or being bullied themselves. And the best solution for bullying,experts say, is for schools to develop programs that help both the bullies and the bullied.
On another note, about ADHD, another study has found that ADHD kids’ brains mature more slowly than kids without. You can read about that here.
April 28, 2008 at 4:40 pm |
These days I feel that the reasons my children eat the way they do (high quality raw diet), spend LOTS of time in nature and do not attend school hardly need explaining. What are they doing trying to make these innocent children sit at desks all day and be abstracted from real life? Then drugging them because they can’ t sit still. Plus of course processed/ cooked food is agitating on top of all this and compounds the problem.