Interesting story about Michael Phelps who won 8 Golds at the Beijing Olympics. Wonder how many little boys/girls have been passed up ? And how many really do not have the ability of little Phelps...
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The little boy who couldn’t
TODAY Weekend • August 23, 2008, Sat
news@newstoday.com.sg
DEBORAH Phelps’ third baby and only son was larger than life from Day 1 — 9 pounds, 6 ounces and 23 inches long. That’s a shade over 4kg and 58cm.
As a little boy, said his mother, he asked 25 zillion questions, always wanting to be the centre of attention. If he wasn’t zooming by on his big-wheel tricycle, he was swinging past on the monkey bars. Starting with preschool, teachers complained: Michael couldn’t stay quiet at quiet time, Michael wouldn’t sit at circle time, Michael didn’t keep his hands to himself, Michael was giggling and laughing and nudging children for attention. As he entered public school, he displayed “immature” behaviour, as his teachers called it.
“In kindergarten, I was told by his teacher, ‘Michael can’t sit still, Michael can’t be quiet, Michael can’t focus,’” recalled Mrs Phelps, who was herself a teacher for 22 years. The family had recently moved and she felt Michael might be frustrated because the kindergarten curriculum he was getting in the new district was similar to the pre-kindergartencurriculum in their old district. “I said, maybe he’s bored,”Mrs Phelps recalled saying to his teacher. “Her comment to me — ‘Oh, he’s not gifted.’ I told her I didn’t say that, and she didn’t like that much. I was a teacher myself so I didn’t challenge her. I just said: ‘What are you going to do to help him?’”
In the elementary grades at their suburban Baltimore school, Mrs Phelps said, Michael excelled at things he loved — gym and hands-on lessons, such as science experiments. “He read on time, but didn’t like to read,’’ she said. “So I gave him the Baltimore Sun sports pages, even if he just looked at the pictures and read the captions.” She will never forget one teacher’s comment: “This woman said to me: ‘Your son will never be able to focus on anything.’” His grades were Bs and Cs and a few Ds.
It was a tough period. Mrs Phelps and her husband, a state trooper, were in the process of getting divorced. She had just gone back to school to get a master’s degree to become an administrator, she said, and at the same time she had to be a parent 24/7.
Michael grew like crazy, but not evenly — his ears looked huge, and when he ran, his arms swung below his knees. (He was on his way to being 1.93 metres tall with an arm span of 2.01 metres.) Children bullied him, and when he hit one on the school bus, he was suspended from the bus for several days. When he was in fifth grade, during his annual check-up,Mrs Phelps and the family physician, Dr Charles Wax, discussed whether Michael might have ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
By then, the Phelpses were a swimming family. (Michael’s older sister Whitney, at 15, was ranked first in the country in the 200-metrebutterfly, though her career would be cut short by a back injury.) Dr Wax’s children also swam, and he’d noticed Michael at the Phelps sisters’ swim meets. Said Mrs Phelps: “Michael used to run around like a little crazy person mooching food off people.” The doctor suggested sending assessment forms to his teachers. Their consensus: Can’t sit still, can’t keep quiet, can’t focus. At nine, Michael was put on Ritalin, a stimulant used to treat hyperactivity. His mother thinks it helped a little. “He seemed to be able to focus longer,” she said. “He could get through homework without moving around as much.” She said he was still a middling student, although “it might have raised some Cs to Bs”, she said. But, if a homework assignment asked for at least four sentences, “He’d just do four sentences,” she said. After two years, Michael asked to get off the medicine. He had to go to the school nurse’s office to take a pill at lunch, she said, and felt stigmatised. “Out of the blue, he said to me: ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, Mum. My buddies don’t do it. I can do this on my own.’ “I was always stern as a parent,” she said, “but from Day 1, I included my children as part of the decision process. So I listened.” After consulting Dr Wax, Michael stopped the medication.
In the meantime, Michael the swimmer had appeared. By age 10, he was ranked nationally in his age group. Mrs Phelps watched the boy who couldn’t sit still at school sit for four hours at a meet waiting to swim his five minutes’ worth of races. When Michael was 11, his swimming coach at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, Bob Bowman — still his coach — took the Phelpses aside and talked about Michael’s gift. “Bob said: ‘By 2000, I will be looking for him in the Olympic trials,’” recalled Mrs Phelps. “‘By 2004, he makes the Olympics. By 2008, he’ll set world records. By 2012, the Olympics will be in New York and’ — I said ‘Bob, stop. He’s 11, he’s in middle school.’”
As it turned out, the boy would move four years faster than his coach’s prediction (and New York would lose its Olympic bid). At 12, Michael needed an algebra tutor, and was so antsy in school that his mother suggested the teacher sit him at a table in the back. And yet he willingly got up at 6.30am daily for 90-minute morning practices and swam two to three hours every afternoon. By 15, in 2000, he was at the Olympics; at 16 he had his first world record; and by 19, at the 2004 Olympics, he had won eight medals, six of them gold. And this year, he created a sensation by winning eight gold medals.
Of all his mental gifts, the one that amazes his mother the most is this: “Michael’s mind is like a clock. He can go into the 200m butterfly knowing he needs to do the first 50m in 24.6s to break the record and can put that time in his head and make his body do 24.6s exactly.” He always did his swimming homework. “In high school, they’d send tapes from his international races,” Mrs Phelps said. “He’d say: ‘Mum, I want to have dinner in front of the TV and watch tapes.’ We’d sit and he’d critique his races. He’d study the turns — ‘See, that’s where I lifted my head.’ I couldn’t even see what he was talking about. I was like, ‘whoa’.”
These days, Mrs Phelps, 57, is principal of Windsor Mill, a middle school in Baltimore County. Her ADHD son is so renowned, she was hired this summer by a pharmaceutical firm, Ortho-McNeil-Janssen, as a “celebrity mum” who will answer questions about her experiences with ADHD on a company-sponsored website. While the company makes an ADHD medication, Concerta, and had also arranged my interview with Mrs Phelps, during our three hours together, she never mentioned the drug. Nor did her son ever take it. Like so many parents, she seemed conflicted about having given her son any medication. “There were so many things going on at the time — the divorce, Michael’s maturity, we changed school districts,” she said. “Were meds the right thing? I could be on the fence either way. That was the decision that was made.”
More to the point, I think, is the moral of her story, which offers hope for parents of any child with a challenge like ADHD. Too many adults looked at Mrs Phelps’ boy and saw what he couldn’t do.
In Beijing, the world saw what he could do.
— The New YORK TIMES
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