Kathy’s experience with ADHD medication started when she was diagnosed, but she stopped taking Adderall when she wasn’t doing academic work. Kathy too, expressed conflict about medication; on the one hand, she found that medication provided her with a way to “access the kind of thinking she wanted to have,” but she also felt that the pills were unhealthy because they were addictive—they “dehydrate the system much like cocaine or ‘speed.’” Getting off them would take a “rough week of being tired and cranky.” Kathy also remarked that if she were to have a child with ADHD she would not choose the medication route. Kathy is currently a preschool teacher and knowledge of ADHD has a clear impact on how she interacts with kids who might have ADHD. However, that journey was not easy. When she started teaching pre-school, she remembers being quick to identify kids with ADHD and remembers them always being boys; she reminisces that when she saw girls who might have had ADHD she thought of them as “bossy” or “weird” and as a teacher she ended up trying to manage and control their behavior. 

Now, Kathy’s outlook is very different. She says that she does not look for the disorder but tries to connect with kids holistically, by trying to understand the situation in their homes, or talking to them, using principles of socio-emotional development theories--that according to the Center for Disease Control stress on “the ability to identify and understand one’s own feelings, to accurately read and comprehend emotional states in others, to manage strong emotions and their expression in a constructive manner,” self-regulation, empathy and “establish and maintain relationships,” about how they are feeling and responding to those feelings. She noticed that boys would express their anger and have a harder time controlling it, she was also self-reflective and said that she used to be more sympathetic to boys expressing outwardly, as she would try and talk to them and try and understand what was going on, but when girls displayed similar behaviors of oppositional defiance (explain) she found herself getting angry and frustrated. In boys “acting out” was more naturalized to her than girls. Kathy now ensures that she reacts to the needs of female students accordingly. Kathy’s insights on why girls might get left behind had echoes of women as “pathologically self-denying” when she wondered if they “don’t allow themselves to think that they might have it” (Garland-Thomson, 19). Kathy does not mention how she defines boys versus girls but she did seem to define aggressive, outward behavior from girls as “weird” or “bossy” and had less tolerance for it, whereas she expected the same of boys and reacted with a lot more patience. 

Kathy’s account raised several questions about gendered expectations, on the nexus of deviance and medicalization—how did she view herself as she was growing up? Were her expectations of girls behaviors a reflection of how she had learnt to behave? I turn to Susan Bordo for some thoughts on “the body and the reproduction of femininity.”(165). Bordo states, “the body—what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend the body—is a medium of culture” (165). Further she cites anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher Michel Foucault, naming the body as “a practical, direct locus of social control.” Bordo asserts, “banally, through table manners and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules, and practices, culture is “made body”” (165). What expectations of femininity or ‘suitable female behavior’ guided Kathy’s thinking? Her father and brother were “brilliant” and her mom was an artist; growing up, she said she wanted to be a singer, a nurse, a casting director. Kathy said she felt limited by her academic success, and her insecurity filtered into her career, and relationships. Throughout the interaction Kathy did not mention her gender as a source of limitation but her interaction with her students and tolerance for boys externalization behaviors versus impatience when girls exhibited the same behaviors, bring to mind Foucault’s “primacy of practice over belief” (Bordo, 165). Bordo explains, “not chiefly through ideology, but through the organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity” (165,166). How do girls, as a parent said, “learn how to sit?” Why are they not walking about, raising their arms, taking up physical space? Bordo has an answer to that as well: "through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity…female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, “improvement“” (166). Clearly, girls who despite AD(H)D can learn “girl” modes of behavior would slip through the cracks while tom girls may be perceived as “bossy” but not raise any red flags. And, as has become evident, the sites that need to be examined the most is, schools and public education.