When Everyone Calls You Stupid…

My therapist is faith-based and offers marriage counselling in addition to his behavioral health services. In one of my sessions with him, he remarked how his marriage clients often ask him if he knew of a good Christian school they could send their children to. He told me that before he gives them an answer, he asks them whether or not their child has special needs. If they say yes, then he gives them a flat, firm response: don’t send them to a Chrisitan school.  

Given that he is a faith-based Christian counselor, this might seem surprising. However, there was a reason him and I were discussing this during my session: I have ADHD and I had attended a Christian school from Fifth Grade all the way through High School. Having that experience to draw from, my therapist’s answer needed little explanation.  

When most non-religious people think of Christian schools, they likely think of the Catholic School System – a large, highly-developed and interconnected education network. However, Christian schools on the Protestant side are often small, independent and funded by an affiliated church. Because of this, their budget is tight and their options for staffing are limited. Most of the school’s faculty are hired for their availability rather than their qualifications. In my school’s case, for example, they hired a Spanish teacher who had zero training or experience in teaching simply because she was a friend of the faculty and happened to be bilingual. Her class was known among students for being one of the most difficult in the entire school simply because of the teacher’s incompetence. 

This lack of resources and quality staffing also means that these small Christian schools are ill-equipped to handle children with special needs, including those with neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD. I experienced this firsthand at my school. No one there had even heard of ADHD, let alone knew how to spot a child who had it. Worse, some of the faculty held the belief that mental illnesses weren’t real and that claiming to have one was merely attention-seeking behavior.  

What this meant for me was that I was that my ADHD symptoms were seen as mere stupidity by both students and teachers. Some of the students would bully me for it and when I went to the teachers for help none of them took me seriously. Also, since it was a small school, rumors spread quickly and my reputation was ruined even before it could even begin. I was seen by all as a dumb, weird kid who wasn’t good for anything besides a laugh.  I struggled with my classes, I struggled to make friends, and dating was completely impossible. 

Worse, when everyone around you calls you stupid, you tend to believe them. I didn’t fare much better after I graduated. I was convinced I was a moron and thus steered clear of any major in college that I feared would be too challenging, severely limiting my career prospects. I also made very few acquaintances because I viewed myself as being far inferior to other students. I was an adult, but I felt like a small child in a land of giants.  

Once I entered the actual working world, the combination of my low self-esteem and unchecked ADHD symptoms resulted in constant struggling with my career. Being unable to pay attention meant I would miss critical instructions and overlook very obvious mistakes, some of which lead to terminations. Each time I got fired I would quickly find another job, but that never offered any kind of relief because I knew I would soon lose that one too. Failure felt inevitable.  

It was only with my current counselor many, many years later that I have finally begun to understand my condition and make the proper changes to accommodate it. It’s a wonderful relief to finally have some guidance. However, it’s also infuriating when I think of how unnecessarily long it took to get here, all thanks to a school that saw me as a joke instead of a scared child who needed help.  

Parents who send their young ones to any of these small protestant Christian schools would do well to research the symptoms of ADHD, autism, and other neurodivergent conditions to see if they match the behaviors any of their children, because it’s very possible that the teachers are missing it.