Riverdale Kenshikai Karate is a branch school of the Kenshikai Karate organization, with classes given by Kyoshi Paul Sookdar, 5th degree Black Belt. The goal of Kenshikai Karate is the physical, mental and spiritual growth of its students.
The karate class that Daniel Povzhitkov attends begins in meditative silence, then explodes into the kata, a choreographed sequence of blocking, kicking and punching. The 10 children then glide into a series of jumping front kicks and back elbow strikes in their little white gis, all solemn-faced and graceful. The only noise is an occasional grunt, or a command muttered in Japanese.
What is on display here, for most of the children in the small, bare room, is just another day of after-school martial arts fun a showing of the class’s coordination, strength and precision. But for 12-year-old Daniel, it is something more. His mother, Natalia Povzhitkov, believes that for Daniel, who has attention deficit disorder, karate is therapy, too.
At the school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where Daniel studies, and at other martial arts centers in New York and across the country, some parents say they have discovered a therapeutic element to the martial arts that helps children with attention deficit disorder cope.
Many doctors support that idea, as do several national nonprofit resource groups for people with the disorder, including the National Attention Deficit Disorder Association and Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. They say that such courses help ease the symptoms of the disorder: impulsiveness, inability to concentrate and, in some cases, hyperactivity.
“I talk about this all the time because I think it’s a huge intervention,” said Dr. John J. Ratey, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Harvard Medical School. “It’s becoming very popular as a means of treatment.”
This theory, however, is dismissed by other experts who say that it is nothing more than wishful thinking. They point to the dearth of medical studies to back up the theory, which has become a matter of intense debate among professionals.
“I think much of this is driven by the wish that children did not need medicine,” said Dr. Theodore Shapiro, who is the director of child and adolescent psychology at the Payne Whitney Clinic and a professor of psychology at Weill-Cornell Medical College. “If you’re around for a long time, you see these new waves come and go, and you become cautious.”
But such doubts have not diminished support for the idea from parents who say they have seen results.
“It’s sort of a known fact in communities with people who have these issues,” said Lynne-Ann Walsh, whose son Christopher, 8, has an attention disorder. He studies kung fu at Nabi Su martial arts school in SoHo to help him focus on coordination, concentration and to overcome fidgeting. “It has been a very positive experience,” she said.
Of course, the martial arts are no panacea, and parents involved say they know that. None interviewed for this article said they had abandoned medication in favor of karate or kung fu. But they also said that the benefits of martial arts study were manifold, augmenting medical treatment by specifically focusing on the aspects of personality that A.D.D. affects most importantly, the ability to concentrate.
But if the children are already medicated, some experts ask, who is to know whether the benefits come from the medicine or from karate?
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