By Keith Raynor
My son, Miles, is five years old, and despite many warnings of the dangers of screen time, putting on one of his favorite videos is one of the best ways to get him to sit in one place for an extended period of time. He’s currently fascinated by historical battles, so our rotation of programming includes Civil War reenactments and stage performances of Les Miserables, alongside Phineas & Ferb, My Neighbor Totoro, and of course, Bluey.
One afternoon, I was watching an episode of Bluey with him, this one about some of the side characters that inhabit the titular blue heeler’s colorful world. While Miles crunched his way through a handful of veggie straws, curled up in his grandfather’s lounge chair, Jack (a young Jack Russell Terrier) struggled to keep it together in the back seat of his family’s car as they drove to school.
“Jack, why can’t you just do what you’re told?” asked the pup’s younger sibling. Jack paused, scanning his innermost thoughts for some core reason as to why he forgot instructions in the middle of things and couldn’t control the movements of his body. Finally, with frustration, he replied, “I don’t know.”
And that’s when my eyes started watering.
For the uninitiated, Bluey is a global phenomenon, a show following the six-year-old Bluey and her family through the ups and downs of being kids and parents. The Australian public television product is the type of wholesome, emotionally intelligent, well written children’s program that appeals to both parents and kids. It takes children seriously. It takes parents seriously. It takes everyone’s time seriously. Episodes are only seven minutes long, but they somehow manage to hold more emotional weight than most hour-long dramas. Adults cry at it routinely and are not embarrassed to admit this.
The episode “Army” is about Jack, a new student at Bluey’s school who struggles to maintain focus or control his growing body and mind. He’s paired up with Rusty to help acclimate him, and Rusty teaches Jack to play as soldiers, guiding him through basic training before their first mission. While the show never mentions a specific disorder, or burdens Jack with a dreaded series of letters, it is clear what particular set of challenges Jack faces.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school. I’ve gone through medications and therapy to try to help me cope with my condition, and yet it wasn’t until 30 years later, sitting in my living room, tucked a few feet away from my own son, that I realized just how much those four letters had squeezed me into a box I struggled to escape for the entirety of my developmental life.
Being a small child and being different, but in a way I lacked the tools to express, was not only difficult but deeply lonely. My elementary school had a disciplinary system built on “check marks”: students earned checks for misbehavior, with more egregious offenses garnering more warped “V”-shapes and greater accumulations of checks earning more severe punishments. Speaking in class without raising your hand and being called upon was a minor, one-check transgression. I was a repeat offender. My checks piled up until I was serving in-school suspension (ISS), along with the kids who were fighting or cursing at teachers. Eventually, in 3rd and 4th grade, I was sent to the scowling Ms. McNair, the most feared teacher in my school. I spent so much time sitting silently and shamefully in the corner of her 6th grade math class that her students began to wave to me in the hallways.
Ironically, when I became a 6th grader, Ms. McNair was my favorite 6th grade teacher — but as a 4th grader, the thought of her class room filled me with dread. One time, I was so ashamed to go into the custody of her room that I ducked behind a mid-hallway pair of double doors, tucking myself between one of the heavy wooden sheets and the tile wall. I tried to hide any sobs that might give away my hiding spot. But the staff found me anyway and gave me two extra days of ISS.
Everyone would say I was “so bright.” My mind worked quickly, whether it was over imaginary stories, video games, or math problems. That often meant I knew the answer before the teacher finished the question. Tests were easy, so I’d challenge myself to be the first one to turn mine in, leaving me sitting disruptively unoccupied while the rest of the class finished their exams. During my school days, I fidgeted, looked away from people when they were talking, climbed and explored, asked too many questions (and didn’t listen fully to the answers), and was told often that I talk too much. To this day, I still bristle at the phrase “shut up” or anything that implies my speech has overstepped its allotted space.
What I didn’t realize, until seeing Jack the cartoon dog express it, was how those initial problems fed other ones.
Near the end of the episode, after Rusty has taught Jack how to play army, the two kids sit in a treehouse, overlooking grass waving in the wind. Rusty asks Jack if he had left his old school because something was wrong with it. Occasionally, international TV shows like Bluey will go through changes before coming to the U.S., and this episode was one such case. In the U.S. version, Jack replies, “There’s something going on with me.” But in the original version, Jack balls up his fists and says, “There’s something wrong with me.”
Believing I was broken, perhaps even irreparable, when I was too underdeveloped to recognize it and unarmed with the ways to tackle it, proved destructive. Over time, I stopped seeing my own self-worth, becoming dependent on the praise of others to show that I was ok. I vacillated between shrinking towards invisibility and desperately trying to impress, lest someone discover that I was built incorrectly. My self-loathing grew as I did, a parasite latched onto my developing personage, metastasizing into depression. When you think you are what is wrong with your world, it is easy to create a story where the world is better without you there to disrupt it.
When Jack and Rusty are sitting in the treehouse, after Jack confesses his own inadequacy, Rusty sighs and looks out over the grass. He doesn’t ask Jack what’s wrong, or belittle him, or tell him it will all be ok. “Well, you’re really good at playing army,” he says simply.
Fortunately, with therapy and the support of my family and friends, I was able to find a way back from the darkness that overshadowed much of my early 20s. While I consider it a part of me, in the same way someone might say they are always a recovering addict, I know how to coexist with that part of myself. I’ve even grown to love the ways my mind, atypical and disorganized as it might be, can work.
Recently, my son’s Pre-K teacher noted a few behaviors she felt warranted attention. Miles was having trouble following directions. He couldn’t sit still. He interrupted other people mid-sentence. We asked his pediatrician about whether we should seek a professional evaluation as he gets ready for the structures and rigors of the American public education system. She told us not to worry yet… and that he was “so bright.”
As a parent, you hope your children inherit all of your good traits and none of your flaws. It scares me, seeing him step in some of the same footprints that led me through such a perilous landscape; the idea of him feeling about himself the way that I did about myself is devastating.
However, the situation is not the same. We live in a different world than the one I came up in, where attention disorders were a rapidly skyrocketing diagnosis pharmaceutical companies were racing to market prescriptions for. My wife, who’s a family therapist, and I have a wealth of tools to help prepare Miles, and ourselves, for what may come — should those dreaded letters attempt to shove him into a cage he didn’t construct. It doesn’t have to be for him what it was for me.
Because of his current fixation, toy soldiers, bows and arrows, and swords and shields litter our living spaces. Our pre-school mornings and post-school afternoons are a symphony of war chants, battle cries, and combat grunts. He can’t always sit still or follow directions. But he’s really good at playing army.
Keith Raynor is a dad from Atlanta who migrated north to Connecticut, where he discovered New Haven pizza is a real thing. He is also a Senior Editor at Ultiworld.
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