Not all heroes have super powers.

If you ask me ADHD is not a super power. I get why some parents would choose to explain their child’s diagnosis as such but in our experience it’s been more like kyrptonite.

Is it right to tell your child that something which can challenge every aspect of their life is a super power? I guess it would depend on your child’s idea of what super powers actually are. Leni believes that super powers allow you to walk through walls, fight evil, break rocks with your bare hands, climb walls without help, fly and my personal favourite,become invisible.

It is only my opinion but I don’t see ADHD as a super power at all. A super power is something that makes you confident and strong. It is something that makes you fearless and powerful.

Often Leni is anxious and worried about what others will think. He shys away from crowds and has only a few friends. He cannot regulate his emotions well, although we are working on this and he struggles to express how he feels. Correct me if I’m wrong but the last time I watched an avengers film the hero pretty much had their shit together.

It could be argued that the traits many ADHDers have such as energy, enthusiasm and creativity are in fact super powers but even still I struggle with that description. To me they are just traits that someone with ADHD can have but not a super power that can be used to destroy evil and certainly not traits that everyone has.

I remember a day when Leni came home from school and tried to do some homework just as his meds were wearing off. He was struggling because he was tired and couldn’t concentrate although he wanted to. He turned to me and in frustration said I’m stupid.

I looked him dead in the eye in that moment and said, no your not, it’s the ADHD that makes it hard for you to concentrate and that’s ok, we can stop and try again in the morning. I continued to say that there were things he could do that other kids couldn’t such as think outside the box, not tire easily and draw exceptionally well, which he does. I made reference to ADHD being a super power that other kids don’t have and he told me that if this was a super power and pointed at his brain then he didn’t want it.

It was at that moment that I realised he was smart enough to know that I was trying to make him feel better about something that he knew made him different to others. It’s not a super power that makes him cool and popular it’s something that often in his experience has made him stand out from the crowd, which he isn’t always comfortable with.

Leni knows that ADHD is challenging, sometimes it’s ok and sometimes it sucks. He also knows he isn’t Spider Man who in his opinion does indeed have super powers.

Please don’t think that I don’t encourage strength and resilience because I do and we work on that every damn day that we wake and breathe. I will not however tell Leni who is often lonely, who can sometimes explode because he doesn’t know how to express his feelings or cries because he is so frustrated that he can’t control himself, who needs to take medication routinely to get through the day and who hates crowds and noise that all of this is a super power that other kids don’t have.

I think I’d rather him believe that he is a hero. Not because he has super powers that others don’t have but because he gets up despite all the challenges and does the day all over again knowing that it could go either way. The quote below from the man who played a fictional super man with super powers sums it all up for me beautifully.

Christopher Reeve once wrote; “a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles”.

You don’t need super powers to be amazing!