154: Little Jolt of Joy – If You Give an ADHD Brain Some Inspiration…

The Spiral Staircase of “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”

I reference “if you give a mouse a cookie” all the time, as if it’s universal shorthand everyone shares. It turns out every world has its own jargon it assumes is common knowledge, my husband’s business world has its own references I’ve never heard of, and as a former teacher, I apparently do the same thing without realizing it. So today I want to dig into this particular reference, because I think it’s one of the best illustrations of the ADHD brain I know of.

The power of a great read aloud

Teaching fourth grade, read aloud was one of my favorite tools, an attention grabber, a reward for great behavior, filler for those in-between moments of waiting. I got through twelve to fourteen chapter books a year that had nothing to do with curriculum, just for the joy of it, rotating lead characters and cultures my students might never have encountered otherwise. My favorite read aloud of all time is Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, and there’s real power in snapping the book shut at just the right moment. Picture books hold their own kind of magic too, since the best of them need their illustrations to make full sense, feeding visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning all at once. Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens, which opens vertically, and Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann are two of my favorites for exactly that reason.

The plot every “give a mouse” book shares

Laura Numeroff, with illustrator Felicia Bond, built an entire series on the same structure: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a Moose a Muffin, a Pig a Pancake, a Cat a Cupcake, and more. A character is given something, an idea, an item, an invitation, and that one thing spins them into a new idea, which spins them into another, and another, bouncing seemingly at random from task to task. By the end, the last activity loops all the way back around to wanting the exact thing that started the story in the first place.

Two very different ways to read that ending

From a monkey brain, type-A, neurotypical perspective, that circular chaos looks like it accomplished nothing. Zero forward progress, just a mess made on the way back to square one, exactly the kind of evidence that fuels the “see, this is why you need a list and a plan” argument. But from the fish brain’s perspective, comfortable with free-flowing from idea to idea, that same loop looks different. Picture a spiral staircase instead of a flat circle. From directly above, it looks like you’ve gone in a circle and ended up right where you started. Shift the angle, and you can see you were actually climbing the whole time.

What actually got accomplished along the way

Take If You Take a Mouse to School: by the time the mouse circles back to needing to return to school because he forgot something, he’s done math, spelling, science, a building project, an art project, written a new book, and gotten some exercise. He is not the same mouse who left that morning. The day looked like chaotic nothing on the surface, but underneath it was full of new knowledge and experience.

A reflection worth borrowing for your own days

If you’ve got an ADHD kid, or just want to read these for yourself, they’re lighthearted on the surface but carry a real lesson underneath. If there’s a type-A spouse in your house rolling their eyes at the chaos, it might be worth pointing that lesson out. And if your kid, or you, needs a little encouragement after one of those days that felt like a whole lot of nothing, ask what actually got accomplished. The book makes it look like nothing happened, but it was actually a whole lot of something.

So the next time you have a give-a-mouse-a-cookie kind of day, one that felt like chaotic bouncing with nothing to show for it, take a moment before bed to notice what you actually gained: new knowledge, new attempts, new failures, new lessons you didn’t have when you woke up. That’s not a flat circle. That’s a spiral, and you’re further up it than it feels.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.