No abstract

Diagnosis and pharmacological treatment of ADHD are more common among the youngest children in a classroom, born in the months immediately preceding the school entry cutoff date. The mechanisms behind this phenomenon, called the relative age effect (RAE), are not yet well understood. Nearly all hypotheses involve the school system, various teachers’ actions, and concern children’s immaturity. However, most previous studies have been based on reports of health professionals’ diagnoses and prescriptions found in official databases rather than on reports of teachers’ behavior identification or suspicion of ADHD, despite their being at the first stages of the medicalization process. Our study overcomes this limitation by using reports of parents’ and teachers’ behavior identification or suspicion of ADHD within a three-level multilevel survey design, comprising 1294 children, 130 teachers, and 17 elementary public schools. The goal of our study was to investigate whether RAE stems (1) from adults’ judgement of the child’s expression of immaturity or (2) from the consequences associated with the child’s double burden of being immature and exhibiting ADHD behaviors. Our multilevel analyses put forward the first hypothesis only, supporting the medicalization of immaturity. RAE in ADHD seems mostly initiated by teachers’ pre-diagnostic actions toward younger children.

Immediately after graduating in July 2016, she applied for the job of teaching assistant and PhD researcher at the Department of Sociology, research team CuDOS (Cultural Diversity: Opportunities and Socialization). With Mieke Van Houtte as her supervisor and in the tradition of school effects research, she investigates the educational problems of student turnover and selective labeling of student behavior as disruptive in primary and secondary schools (for full biography, see https://biblio.ugent.be/person/802002376233).

No abstract

Depuis l'entrée en vigueur de la scolarisation obligatoire, l'école et la santé publique ont tissé des liens étroits sur le plan de la valorisation de la santé des populations, notamment dans le partage des bonnes pratiques sanitaires, des saines habitudes de vie et de toute une panoplie d'autres comportements de santé. L'école est également mobilisée dans la prévention des difficultés et des vulnérabilités des enfants, qu'elles soient développementales, comportementales, anti sociales, etc. Devenant davantage précoce et prédictive, cette prévention véhicule une vision déterministe des problèmes des enfants et repose presque exclusivement sur l'identification des facteurs de risque et de protection (Parazelli et al., 2021). Elle s'inscrit alors dans une rationalité biomédicale et c'est ici, à notre avis, que réside le danger pour l'école, qui accueille cette responsabilité, de tendre vers une dérive médicalisante.