The ADHD Rooster
Stories are a wonderful means of explaining lessons, ideas, and giving perspective to a situation.
Perspective helps us see things from a new point of view, we need that when we are too close to the problem. Below is a story I tell all my client’s, their parents, spouses and teachers alike.
Enjoy!
You’re on beautiful farm, full of all kinds of animals, all of whom are doing their jobs. The cows are being milked, the pigs are getting fat, the chickens are laying eggs. Life is good!
One morning you wake up and realize you’ve yet to hear a rooster crow in the morning. You ask the farmer if he has a rooster and he tells you it is in a blacked out box. Reminding you he does this with all his animals when they’re born. It sounds silly, but he gives you good reasons as to why his animals are treated this way. “When they’re born they can not see sunlight, but after a few weeks they are ready to do their jobs on the farm!”
He tells you how frustrated he is with the rooster for never crowing and how he’s always late getting his morning started.
Months go by and it’s still not crowing! You realize the farmer has given up on the rooster telling you it’s “stupid and dumb”, because it can’t do it’s job like the rest. And so he takes it out of the box, in a last effort, hoping it learns to crow by itself. When you ask him why he doesn’t teach the rooster he tells you he doesn’t have time to help it learn with all the other animals he has to attend to who ARE doing their jobs.
Months go by and still the rooster never crows.
Years and years go by and the rooster is sad, knowing it is a failure; now sickly, weak. He eventually leaves the farm, alone. Defeated.
I tell this story for a few reasons:
One of which is to draw parallels of the box and the farmer with our education system. The other reason is to remind the client every person has a gift, something unique they alone can do best. However, if they are forced into a position where they are not allowed to showcase this gift it is not their fault.