Children who are proactively and skillfully directed toward feeling successful make good decisions and do not participate in any levels of verbal or physical aggression. Challenging children can easily become casualties of the system. Teachers and administrators, although having the best of intentions, are largely taught conventional skills for working with the average child. Most of these techniques backfire when applied to the difficult child. Often, the harder they try traditional strategies, the worse the situation gets.
Many children feel virtually invisible unless they are acting-out or failing to do their work.
Children love animation and energy. Energy is the reward and when it comes into a child's life only through negativity, the child's experience deepens that continuing to have problems is the way to go. Lectures, reprimands and raised voices are not consequences as most adults believe, they are rewards. What appears to be ADHD most often is simply a habitual response by the child to his environment. Medications obviously are not the answers.