Over the last few months, one of the great joys in each day has been seeing my son morph into an avid reader. He used to be the loudest, most demanding of constant stimulation and attention-seeking child, but seemingly overnight, he prefers to be head down in a book. He’s rapidly progressed to more challenging children’s novels, and is devouring them at a pace that neither I nor the school library have been able to anticipate! As a means of addressing this, I’ve started to let him use my ereader during each day, and we’ve connected it to our local library, which lets him borrow ebooks directly, so he’s more in control of what he’s reading. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t be comfortable with him reading the Percy Jackson series, because at face value it seems more suited to older readers, but we’re tired and it’s the start of the school holidays here (Aus), and he continues to reassure us that there’s nothing in them that is troubling him.
Yesterday morning, my son was talking with his mum about what activities he might want to do during the day, given that is early in the holidays, and he has six weeks or more stretching ahead of him. My wife mentioned that he might like to find a creative task that he could do quietly in the moments when she needs to attend to his younger brothers. To this, my son replied: “but I’ll also need to do something physically active and outdoors, too, because I have ADHD”.
To give some context: we are certain he *does* have ADHD, but it is not something that we’ve ever discussed with him, or around him, let alone gotten to the point of actually defining the specific challenges that living with ADHD can present. My wife, not wanting to appear concerned, asked him where he’d heard of that term, and why he thought it applied to him. He said that Percy Jackson has ADHD in the books that he is reading, as do many of the other characters, and that he has a lot of the same qualities and difficulties as those characters.
On hearing this, I wanted to interrogate this further, because I was going to be hugely impressed with his ability to relate to the qualities of a character and see those traits in himself, but this was not what happened. Rather, and I’m equally impressed by this, because he was reading the series on my ereader, he encountered the term early on, figured out that you can highlight the word to see the dictionary definition, and then was able to further research ADHD on wikipedia, which is what he did.
Having read through all of that, he realised that everything resonated in him so strongly, that he surely must have ADHD. The incredible thing is – he’s so completely comfortable with the label, and having arrived at this diagnosis on his own in the context of it being a quality possessed by a demi-god, feels that it’s almost like a super power.
So, this is a very long-winded way of saying that it’s moments like these that just demonstrate the remarkable power of books to help frame one’s understanding, and make sense of complex and potentially confronting subjects. Also, it’s a story about my son, whom I love dearly, maturing into a delightful human being.
by jzbar