Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article
draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural
context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best
understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In
this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally
enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative
structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand
the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to
his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to
structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how
he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at
stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral
and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD
is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations
where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered.
Keywords Families - Narrative - Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder - Volition - United States - Illness experience - Moral experience - Everyday life - Children