• 5/19/2007 6:00:00 PMAll Day Parenting ClassToday we attended our all day parenting class with Catholic Family Charities.  They had 2 speakers lined up for us to hear.  The first speaker was a local child therapist who gave us a high level overview of human development theory as outlined by Eric Ericson.  I had heard some of this before in college but had forgotten most of it.  After having been a parent for 18 years, I could definitely relate to some of the stages of life she described.  Her technical and in-depth explanation of each stage was very interesting.

    One thing in particular that stood out was when she was talking about children with ADHD.  She said something like the following:
    "Our brains have really evoloved over a long period of time but things like ADD and ADHD have been with us since the beginning.  Back in the day when we were hunter/gatherers, having ADHD would have been to your advantage.  You would have been a great hunter because all of your senses would operate at a heightened level."

    For the most part, I was with her mentally until she said that.  The more I think about it, the more it seems that this does not jive with what I currently understand about Evolutionary Theory.  If it would have been to your advantage to have ADD or ADHD, then we would be seeing much more of this in our current population.  I don't thing we are seeing this... but on the other hand, it does seem that more people are being diagnosed with this more frequently these days.  But on the other hand, they say that the medication for ADHD is being over prescribed for a condition that doesn't exist... but on the other hand  -  Whoops!  I'm out of hands.

    The second speaker was also interesting if not a little depressing.  Her topic was "Behaviors of Abused Children".  She had a long list of things you might see  that included the following:

    - Limited mood regulation
    - Exaggerated startle response
    - Emotional numbness
    - Hyper-vigilance
    - Hyper-arousal
    - Helplessness in problem solving
    - Difficulty in organizing information
    - Oversensitive to stressful stimulation
    - High levels of shame
    - Decreased auditory processing when exposed to reminders of trauma

    There were 2 key things that stood out to me:
    1. Children who come from stable homes will play house
       Children who come from (sexually) abusive homes will play sexual games

    2. Children who don't emotionally attach to their parents will attempt to control them.

    Another topic she covered was the occurrence of disorders based on heredity verses environmental factors.  For example:
    - 15% of the population has some kind of anxiety disorder
       - of this 15%, between 8-30% get it from their parents, the rest from the environment.

    - For depression
      - 10% to 25% of women experience depression while only 5% to 12% of men do
      - 60% of people who have depression acquired it via their parents

    - For schizophrenia
      - 80-85% of cases are genetic
      - there is only a 9% to 16% risk of passing this on to your children

    - For autism
      - occurrences are much higher when either the father is over 40 or the mother is over 35